Using HMB With Creatine | Does it Offer Any Benefit?

You completed the recommended loading phase that precedes creatine monohydrate supplementation months ago, and you’ve been predictably dropping maintenance doses of creatine into your post-workout muscle recovery shake ever since.

In the three months that have followed, you’ve noticed some serious strength gains throughout your body, along with more lean mass adorning your arms, chest, and shoulders. You’ve even noticed improvements in both your anaerobic performance and your aerobic conditioning when participating in your weekend sports leagues. 

Feeling like you’ve tapped into the most helpful source of rapid muscle growth available anywhere on the legal sports medicine market, you reach into your gym bag and withdraw your container of creatine monohydrate, only to notice that the most musclebound physical specimen in your gym has just plopped a jar of something called “creatine HMB” next to the sink in the locker room.

You peer closely at the container and make out the words “hydroxy beta methylbutyrate,” which is presumably what the HMB stands for, but you have no idea what it means, or what it does.

If there’s one thing you’ve learned, it’s that the most well-developed folks at the gym are usually the first to gravitate toward whatever supplements will help them build the most body mass. At the same time, you don’t want to take any dietary supplements that are going to have harmful side effects, or derail what has already been a very successful supplementation regimen for you.

In this case, your question is a simple one: What exactly is hydroxy beta methylbutyrate, and would a mixture of HMB and creatine be as helpful to your workouts as creatine has been, and maybe even more so?

What is Creatine Monohydrate?

If you have any goals connected to improving your athletic performance, building lean muscle mass, or improving your body composition, you will undoubtedly benefit from some form of supplementation with creatine monohydrate — the most tested nutritional supplement in history.

The benefits of creatine monohydrate have been so conclusively proven that creatine monohydrate supplementation is practically universal amongst the world’s most elite athletes, and particularly those whose livelihood is in some way tied to the optimization of physical performance.

Creatine monohydrate is an isolated form of three amino acids — arginine, glycine, and methionine — that saturate your skeletal muscle. From this saturation of your skeletal muscle comes a whole host of benefits to your physical performance, the most immediate of which are improvements in athletic strength and muscle endurance caused by creatine easing the transitions between your body’s energy system, and its rapid regeneration of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP.

What is Creatine Hydroxy β Methylbutyrate (HMB)?

When you see creatine HMB written on the side of a nutritional supplement container, the “HMB” stands for beta hydroxy beta methylbutyrate, which is a metabolite of the amino acid leucine. This means that your body can produce baseline levels of beta hydroxy beta methylbutyrate from your food that are sufficient to tend to your most basic needs.

However, in order to achieve the enhanced benefits linked with consuming higher levels of beta hydroxy beta methylbutyrate, HMB supplementation is required. This is similar to the case with creatine monohydrate, which is practically impossible to be consumed at the levels required to effectuate the results that highly trained athletes rely upon.

Taken on its own, beta hydroxy beta methylbutyrate is offered as a supplement to stimulate muscle protein synthesis, prevent muscle breakdown, and reduce muscle damage associated with both physical strain and tissue-damaging illnesses.

Even in medical settings, beta hydroxy beta methylbutyrate is prescribed to patients to assist them with wound healing, and to prevent muscle wasting. When viewed through that lens, creatine HMB essentially reinforces the muscle recovery function of creatine monohydrate with a medical-grade intervention that inhibits muscle protein breakdown, and that’s before any of the other benefits of the two supplements are taken into consideration.

By engaging in combined supplementation with creatine monohydrate and beta hydroxy beta methylbutyrate, creatine HMB supplementation should be expected to accelerate your recovery from exercise-induced muscle damage, resulting in accelerated muscle recovery, the accumulation of more muscle mass, and ultimately an improved body composition.

Key Differences Between Creatine Hydroxy β Methylbutyrate (HMB) and Creatine Monohydrate

Creatine monohydrate and HMB clearly have a lot in common, but there are also some differences between the two supplements. So, aside from their similarities as forms of creatine-based nutritional supplementation, what are the key differences between creatine monohydrate and HMB, and how does each help you to improve your athletic performance across several  measures?

Mechanism of Action

Collectively, combining creatine supplementation and HMB supplementation has a synergistic effect with respect to helping you increase muscle mass while also granting you a commensurate increase in muscle strength. So what is it about each of these supplements that makes them so effective?

Creatine Monohydrate

Creatine monohydrate is a combination of the amino acids glycine, arginine, and S-Adenosylmethionine. After being stored within your body’s skeletal muscle as phosphocreatine, creatine’s presence factors into several processes related to physical performance. 

During times of increased energy consumption and muscle contraction, creatine is converted into adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. In that form, it serves as an energy buffer, aiding muscle contraction during resistance training, and easing energy production processes during anaerobic performance or sports performance.

Following resistance training, creatine is also released into the blood in the form of the enzyme creatine kinase, which is a mark of muscle damage or tissue damage. Creatine kinase levels decrease naturally as muscle cells repair themselves, which usually takes up to 36 hours after intense exercise.

By supplementing with creatine monohydrate, the creatine level in your skeletal muscle is boosted, which accelerates the rate at which muscle damage is repaired, and rapidly decreases the level of creatine kinase present in your blood.

Creatine Hydroxy Beta Methylbutyrate (HMB)

Beta hydroxy beta methylbutyrate acts upon your muscles by limiting the activity of the ubiquitin-proteasome system, which is responsible for muscle breakdown. 

On the other end of the spectrum, HMB also stimulates muscle protein synthesis by stimulating the mammalian target of rapamycin, which regulates the growth of cells, including muscle cells. This triggers the release of insulin-like growth-factor 1, also simply known as growth hormone, and helps you increase muscle mass on the back end of resistance training.

With this two-pronged approach, HMB can reduce protein breakdown while simultaneously enhancing protein synthesis. This combination results in your muscle tissue losing less ground while you simultaneously build more muscle mass.

Effectiveness in Muscle Building and Performance

Individually, HMB and creatine have both been shown to be effective at increasing muscle protein synthesis, increasing muscle mass, and upgrading body composition. As a consequence of these physical changes, HMB and creatine are both highly effective nutritional supplements when it comes to improving sports performance, either in power sports, sports that lean heavily on anaerobic performance, and also endurance sports requiring upticks in aerobic performance.

Usage and Ideal Scenarios

Given the thorough nature of the overlap in the positive outcomes from including HMB and creatine monohydrate in your dietary intake — like a noteworthy acceleration in the growth of muscle mass and a more rapid improvement in body composition — there are very few reasons why someone would not prefer to keep both supplements in their regular rotation.

With that being said, there are a couple of scenarios in which you may not choose to prioritize combining the benefits of HMB and creatine.

You’re In No Particular Hurry

Many trainees have an understandable desire to acquire their results as quickly as possible — especially if they’re competitive athletes who need to optimize their sports performance as quickly as possible. 

All the same, you may be perfectly content with the rate at which you’re accumulating muscle mass and improving your body composition without essentially doubling up on your supplements. In that case, you may feel that you’re experiencing effective muscle recovery without the addition of HMB to your creatine regimen.

You Have a Tight Supplement Budget

The combination of HMB and creatine is a surefire way to minimize muscle breakdown while you build muscle mass and expedite your body recomposition plan. However, money is sometimes a factor, and combinations of the two supplements can be more expensive than taking just one of them.

While this expense is worth it for many people, there are also plenty of people training with limited budgets. In this case, there’s absolutely no shame in relying on the best supplement option that fits within your present budget.

Benefits of Using Creatine Monohydrate

There are several benefits associated with creatine monohydrate supplementation, and they are well documented. Quite frankly, it’s amazing that the field of sports nutrition has unlocked what amounts to a strength and conditioning hack that stems from saturating your skeletal muscle with three simple amino acids. 

No matter how many supplements have come and gone, creatine monohydrate remains the king of the sports nutrition world due to how many ways it can grant your body a physical advantage.

Faster Muscle Growth

Creatine monohydrate is known to be the most effective legal, food-based supplement for inducing muscle growth. The increase in lean body mass promoted by creatine supplementation leads to commensurate increases in athletic performance measures like muscle strength, speed, and endurance. 

Accelerated Muscle Recovery

In addition to helping your muscles recover from resistance training more thoroughly, creatine supplementation also helps you to bounce back from intense exercise more rapidly. As a result, you’ll be able to put your strength gains to immediate use in the very next training session due to your rapid recovery from muscle damage.

Improved Body Composition

One of creatine monohydrate’s most appealing benefits is its contribution to the elimination of fat mass alongside the generation of fat-free mass. In the process of helping you create more lean mass and shed fatty tissue, creatine supplementation improves your body composition by filling out more of your frame with metabolically active muscle mass.

Improved Athletic Performance

It’s no wonder why nearly all of the most highly trained athletes in the world engage in some form of creatine supplementation. Creatine monohydrate’s combined effects of accelerated muscle growth, optimized body composition, and enhanced energy production make it a near necessity for trained athletes looking to enhance their sports performance.

Studies show that creatine monohydrate even boosted the lactic acid thresholds and aerobic endurance levels of athletes who supplemented with it, thereby resulting in athletes who could sustain short bursts of energy for longer durations, while also enduring workouts of long durations.

Benefits of Using Creatine Hydroxy β Methylbutyrate (HMB)

Broadly speaking, the core difference between creatine monohydrate and creatine blended with HMB is that the additional HMB supplementation further decreases muscle damage, limiting the extent to which the creatine needs to make up lost ground. This results in positive effects that are hastened, and that accumulate more rapidly over time. 

Faster Muscle Growth

Both HMB and creatine initiate muscle protein synthesis, leading to an increase in the rate at which you grow muscle mass. However, that’s only part of the equation, as the mixture of HMB and creatine also enhances your body on a hormonal level.

A double-blind, placebo controlled crossover study comparing levels of anabolic-catabolic hormones in test subjects who supplemented with either creatine or HMB, test subjects who supplemented with a combination of creatine and HMB, and test subjects who took no supplements, showed that the combination of creatine and HMB resulted in a synergistic effect with respect to ratios of anabolic-catabolic hormones. (1)

Specifically, after 10 weeks of supplementation, test subjects who took both creatine and HMB had higher levels of testosterone and lower levels of cortisol than those who didn’t. As a result, the combination of HMB and creatine offers a unique boost to muscle-building testosterone while reducing muscle-depleting cortisol.  

Accelerated Muscle Recovery

Due to HMB ability to attenuate muscle damage and inhibit muscle breakdown, less activity of the creatine monohydrate needs to be dedicated to repairing damaged muscle tissue. This synergistic effect of the two nutritional supplements working in tandem leads to highly efficient and effective muscle recovery, with greater activity devoted to the growth of fat free mass.

Improved Body Composition

While creatine does not directly act on fat mass, HMB has been shown to decrease fat mass in both trained and untrained populations. In a 12-week, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover study involving trained combat sports athletes, test subjects who supplemented with the combination of HMB experienced the highest rates of increased fat-free mass coupled with the steepest reductions in fat mass. (2)

As you can see, both HMB and creatine are able to increase fat free mass in response to resistance exercise. Therefore, combining HMB with creatine is a highly effective solution in your efforts to increase fat free mass, eliminate fat mass, and maintain body composition in conjunction with resistance exercise. 

Improved Athletic Performance

Studies indicate that the addition of HMB plays a role in boosting both aerobic and anaerobic capacity in athletes, which seems to work separately from its ability to reduce muscle breakdown and attenuate muscle damage. 

The combination of HMB and creatine is therefore able to boost athletic performance on multiple fronts, in addition to the benefits that accompany increases in muscle mass and strength, since both HMB and creatine have demonstrated the ability to independently boost markers of aerobic and anaerobic ability. A study of rowers showed that test subjects who took supplemental creatine and HMB collectively enjoyed unique increases in aerobic power that were not present when HMB and creatine were supplemented individually. (3)

Who Should Choose Which?

When it comes to HMB and creatine, and whether or not you should choose to take only creatine monohydrate as opposed to a special blend that combines HMB and creatine, all of the physiological advantages rest with the combination of HMB and creatine, as does the speed with which adaptations are made.

If you’re chasing rapid results, the only major reason for separating HMB and creatine would be if you had a specific sensitivity to one supplement or the other, and could isolate which supplement was causing you the difficulties. 

Aside from that, ingesting the combination of HMB and creatine practically ensures that the reduction of your muscle breakdown and the efficiency of your muscle recovery, muscle growth, and athletic performance are all going to be amplified to the utmost. 

Dosage and Usage Tips

Regardless of whether or not you engage in creatine monohydrate supplementation or creatine HMB supplementation, it is usually advised that you engage in a loading phase to maximize the results of your supplementation regimen across all performance measures. Evidence now exists that this is not an absolute requirement, but it is still recommended if you want to err on the side of caution. 

Participating in a traditional loading phase with creatine means taking 20 to 25 grams of creatine monohydrate or creatine with HMB for a period of five to seven days to make sure that your skeletal muscle becomes saturated. From there, your creatine supplementation regimen will consist of five grams of creatine daily in order to maintain your internal creatine at saturation levels, which is the point at which their effect is the greatest.

The only catch here has to do with combined supplementation during the loading phase; while creatine monohydrate is considered safe to take in elevated levels, HMB supplementation is considered safe when it peaks at 3 mg per day. 

Because the pairing of HMB and creatine usually consists of 5 mg of creatine and 1.5 mg of HMB per scoop, undergoing a full loading phase with HMB will raise the level of your daily HMB level to more than double the approved amount on a daily basis for the entirety of the loading phase.

To be clear, this is not inherently dangerous; HMB is generally safe for most people even at higher than tested levels. However, if you wish to exercise caution, you can mix creatine HMB with ordinary creatine monohydrate during the loading phase, and then switch exclusively to creatine HMB after the loading phase.

Potential Side Effects and Safety Considerations

Most people experience few side effects from supplementing with creatine monohydrate, if any. The most common side effects stem from creatine’s tendency to draw water into your muscle cells, which occasionally results in cramping, bloating, and diarrhea. 

HMB side effects are also rare, and generally fall into the territory of digestion related issues like stomach discomfort and constipation. Therefore, combining HMB with creatine monohydrate may prove to be particularly uncomfortable to people who have a sensitivity to both, or for people who have temperamental digestive systems.

Transparent Labs’ Creatine Hydroxy Beta Methylbutyrate (HMB) and Creatine Monohydrate Options

If you’re searching for the ideal source of creatine supplementation, Transparent Labs has you covered with high quality creatine monohydrate blended with hydroxy beta methylbutyrate (HMB). As one of the core supplements in the Transparent Labs Strength Series, the Transparent Labs Creatine HMB blend includes vitamin D3 and BioPerine for improved absorption and enhanced muscle and nerve function. 

The Ultimate Performance Hack

It goes without saying that creatine supplementation is beneficial to you, whether you prefer ordinary creatine monohydrate, or you prefer your creatine with a dash of hydroxy β methylbutyrate (HMB). Both of these solutions can repair your exercise induced muscle damage, boost your production of lean muscle mass, and maximize your muscle strength.

The question is how aggressively you desire to reduce muscle protein breakdown. If you find yourself needing extra help when it comes to recovering from muscle damage, combining HMB and creatine is a proven recipe to help you get the most out of your workouts, whether it involves heavy resistance training, cardiovascular training, or everything in between.

References

1. Fernández-Landa J, Fernández-Lázaro D, Calleja-González J, Caballero-García A, Córdova A, León-Guereño P, Mielgo-Ayuso J. Long-Term Effect of Combination of Creatine Monohydrate Plus β-Hydroxy β-Methylbutyrate (HMB) on Exercise-Induced Muscle Damage and Anabolic/Catabolic Hormones in Elite Male Endurance Athletes. Biomolecules. 2020 Jan 15;10(1):140. doi: 10.3390/biom10010140. PMID: 31952174; PMCID: PMC7022312.

2. Durkalec-Michalski K, Jeszka J, Podgórski T. The Effect of a 12-Week Beta-hydroxy-beta-methylbutyrate (HMB) Supplementation on Highly-Trained Combat Sports Athletes: A Randomised, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Crossover Study. Nutrients. 2017 Jul 14;9(7):753. doi: 10.3390/nu9070753. PMID: 28708126; PMCID: PMC5537867.

3. Fernández-Landa J, Fernández-Lázaro D, Calleja-González J, Caballero-García A, Córdova Martínez A, León-Guereño P, Mielgo-Ayuso J. Effect of Ten Weeks of Creatine Monohydrate Plus HMB Supplementation on Athletic Performance Tests in Elite Male Endurance Athletes. Nutrients. 2020 Jan 10;12(1):193. doi: 10.3390/nu12010193. PMID: 31936727; PMCID: PMC7019716.