Creatine for Women: Strength, Recovery, and Fitness Benefits

In a lot of ways, it’s highly refreshing to be able to have a conversation about the benefits of creatine for women. One or two generations ago — at least with respect to weight lifting and the focus on increasing muscular strength — the idea of large numbers of women focusing on these specific benefits of creatine supplementation would have been unfathomable. At its essence, taking creatine supplements has long been considered the exclusive territory of men, as were popular creatine benefits like increased lean muscle mass, strategic weight gain, and enhanced exercise performance. Now that women are more likely than ever to be taking creatine supplements — like creatine monohydrate, creatine ethyl ester, and others — there has never been a better time to explore how creatine supplementation can improve the lives of women, and if there are any other gender-specific considerations that need to be explored.

What is Creatine?

On a foundational level, creatine is nothing more than a naturally occurring compound composed of three amino acids — glycine, arginine, and S-adenosyl methionine. When it enters your body, 95 percent of the creatine ends up stored in your skeletal muscle as creatine phosphate, while the remaining five percent is distributed in your blood and other tissues.

Why is Creatine Supplementation so Popular?

The broad popularity of creatine supplements — and creatine monohydrate in particular — is owed to the unmistakable benefits that creatine supplements contribute to overall health, and especially performance in athletics. Creatine supplementation has been proven to accelerate muscle growth, expedite muscle repair, ease recovery following intense exercise, and generally improve exercise performance regardless as to the type of exercise being performed. Even if you don’t engage in creatine supplementation and rely solely on natural creatine sources, a certain minimum amount of creatine ingestion is advisable to maintain your muscles’ overall health. If you are unable to consume natural or compound creatine sources that contain all of the necessary amino acids in their compound form, you can consume food sources that contain each amino acid separately, and your body can synthesize creatine on its own. Otherwise, the functionality of your muscles may be significantly compromised if you do not take care to consume creatine directly, or to ensure your body’s natural synthesis fo creatine.

Common Myths About Creatine Supplementation and Women

When it comes to creatine supplementation and women, there are several myths that need to be addressed. These myths run the gamut from the supposed ineffectiveness of creatine supplements to the alleged harm that creatine supposedly does to women in particular.

Myth: Creatine Supplements Can’t Increase Muscle Mass in Women

In some circles, there has been a belief that creatine supplements will not prompt muscle growth in women, and that there is therefore no reason for women to take creatine. The reality is that taking creatine for women is just as beneficial as it is for men. Yes, it is true that the comparative lack of testosterone in most women can make it a challenge when it comes to generating muscle growth with equivalent speed to that of many men.  However, taking creatine monohydrate has been proven to increase strength and build lean muscle mass in the women who use it.

Myth: Creatine Supplementation Can Reduce Female Hormones

On the other end of the coin, there is the fear that the use of a creatine supplement to accelerate muscle growth and boost muscle mass can actually increase testosterone production too much. In essence, the reasoning is that women’s bodies will become increasingly masculine when they take creatine, and this will result in a reduction in the levels of estrogen and other female hormones. The truth is that taking creatine supplements does not boost testosterone levels, so women can feel confident that they can take creatine monohydrate or any other form of creatine without doing harm to their bodies on a hormonal level.

Myth: Create Supplementation Is Harmful to Women’s Reproductive Health

Part and parcel to the misconception that taking creatine supplements can disrupt the functionality of hormones in women is the belief that creatine supplementation can compromise a woman’s ability to conceive. Not only is there no reproductive downside to taking creatine for women, but creatine supplements have been proven to be beneficial to the reproductive outcomes of women.

Myth: Creatine Supplementation Results in Weight Gain That Does Not Help Women’s Performance in Sports

Accompanying the belief that the use of creatine would not help women build muscle mass is the idea that creatine would not benefit women from the standpoint of sports nutrition. Early on, there was a belief that the tendency of creatine to increase water retention would cause women to gain weight in an unhelpful sense, but that the creatine would increase muscle growth or be beneficial in any way. While many people gain weight when taking creatine — including women — the sports nutrition stance on creatine applies to women as well as men. Therefore, creatine can improve exercise capacity, reduce lactic acid buildup and fatigue, and increase muscle mass in women the same way it does with men. Moreover, most of the body weight gained through creatine use will be in the form of functional muscle tissue.

Myth: Women Athletes Are Banned From Using Creatine Supplements

For the record, the National Collegiate Athletic Association — or NCAA — has specifically prohibited its member institutions from supplying its athletes with creatine supplements.  This prohibition means that no long term creatine supplementation of athletes who participate in events sanctioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association may be administered by coaches or trainers who operate under NCAA guidelines. However, there are NCAA rules prohibiting male or female NCAA athletes from supplementing with creatine on their own. This means that if any athletes specifically desire to take creatine to maximize creatine stores, build muscle mass, and boost exercise capacity, they are free to do so without fear of reprisal.

Benefits of Creatine Supplementation in General

Across a whole host of trials conducted for the purpose of testing the benefits of creatine, the bodies of both men and women supplementing with creatine responded favorably in ways that were both predictable and unpredictable. In nearly all areas related to tissue activity, recovery, and growth, creatine has shown that it is able to assist.

How Creatine Supplementation Affects Muscle Function

When you take creatine supplements, they are stored in your muscle cells in the form of creatine phosphate, and it is directly connected to the creation of your adenosine triphosphate — or ATP — your body’s primary energy source for muscle activity, including muscle contraction and protein synthesis. During periods of intense exercise, your body burns through adenosine triphosphate very rapidly, and once its primary energy source is depleted, your body starts to search for other sources of energy to convert into ATP. The first place your body turns in the phosphocreatine system, which is where it utilizes the creatine stored in your muscle cells to rapidly manufacture more energy. In this way, creatine acts as a buffer that eases the transition between your energy systems, and allows you to sustain intense exercise for longer durations.

How Creatine Supplementation Helps Strength Training

One of the ways creatine supplements help during exercise is in the contraction of muscles, and one of the times this is most evident is during strength training sessions. Studies indicate that creatine’s ability to deliver steady energy during muscle contractions enables people to lift greater amounts of weight for longer durations of time over the course of resistance training workouts. In addition, taking creatine supplements helps muscles to recover in the aftermath of workouts, enabling rapid recovery that prepares muscles for additional intense workouts more quickly.

How Creatine Supplementation Helps Cardiovascular Performance

In instances where the quality of an athletic performance is in any way determined by cardiovascular health, creatine is able to extend the length of time in which the exertion feels effortless by delaying the transition from stored ATP and the phosphocreatine system to the aerobic system. Creatine has also proven to be helpful in replenishing glycogen stores when taken along with carbohydrates, and accelerates the process of glycogen resynthesis. This helps to increase the time to exhaustion achieved by athletes during both high intensity exercise and endurance exercises. Due to creatine’s ability to reduce the discomfort imposed on your body during cardiovascular activity — including aerobic activity that can last for hours at a time — this makes creatine an equally popular supplement for everyone from endurance athletes to exercisers who focus on high intensity interval training.

How Creatine Supplementation Helps Brain Health

Creatine doesn’t only help with energy production in ways that can be physically observed. Studies indicate that creatine can improve cognitive function as well. In multiple studies, creatine proved to be capable of improving the short-term memory and reasoning abilities of those who supplemented with it as opposed to those who didn’t. It has also been shown to reduce the incidence of sleep deprivation through the improvement of cognitive function. This indicates that sustaining adequate creatine intake can also play a major role in sustaining and improving your brain health.

How Creatine Supplementation Helps Bone Health

There was once a widely held belief that creatine played a direct role in improving bone health much like it improves the health and productivity of muscle tissue; multiple studies have disproven this. However, due to creatine’s ability to improve muscle output and recovery in relation to the intensity and volume of resistance training, it can improve the health of your bones indirectly given the relationship between strength training and the growth and preservation of bone mass. 

Specific Benefits of Creatine for Women

There are a fair number of benefits of creatine supplements that are specific to women. Ultimately, this means that even if women take creatine supplements for the popular benefits — like muscle growth, muscle performance, and brain health — there are some additional effects of creatine that may materialize in the aftermath of starting to use creatine as a dietary supplement.

Creatine Supplementation for Reproductive Health

Aside from all of the standard creatine benefits, creatine has proven to be very helpful in maintaining or improving the reproductive health of women during studies. In one study, it was found that consuming a creatine-rich diet was linked with a lower incidence of women experiencing reproductive issues. Study participants who consumed at least 13 milligrams of creatine per kilogram of body mass each day experienced fewer irregular menstrual periods, obstetric conditions, and pelvic pathology. (1)

Creatine Supplementation for Depression

Dietary creatine is already developing a reputation as a dietary supplement that can be used to improve cognitive operations. In addition to that, creatine has demonstrated significant benefits in the area of alleviating depression symptoms in women. In a study consisting exclusively of female participants, it was shown that a participant’s odds of depression decreased by 18 percent for each gram of creatine they consumed over and above the population average. (2) Despite this additional benefit to your brain health, you are not encouraged to take creatine if you have been diagnosed with a major depressive disorder, and are encouraged to seek guidance from a medical provider.

Creatine Supplementation for Post-Menopausal Women

During menopause, many women experience bone mineral density loss. However, creatine has demonstrated the ability to increase levels of osteoprotegerin, thereby increasing bone formation. In studies, it was shown that taking high doses of creatine enabled postmenopausal women to reduce their rate of bone mineral loss relative to those who trained without the benefit of supplemental creatine. (3)

How to Use Creatine Supplementation for Optimal Results

If you make the decision to take creatine supplements indiscriminately, you will still be virtually guaranteed to maintain your body’s creatine levels within a healthy range. However, if you wish to unlock the wide range of health benefits that accompanies supplemental dietary creatine intake, you will need to pay careful attention to how much creatine you take, and when you choose to take it.

The Creatine Supplement Loading Phase

When you begin to take creatine supplements for the sake of considerably boosting exercise performance, promoting new muscle growth, and improving brain function, you are required to begin with a loading phase lasting five to seven days. During the creatine loading phase, you will consume 20 grams of creatine monohydrate powder, liquid creatine, or another creatine supplement on a daily basis in order to saturate your skeletal muscles and fill your muscle stores. If you aren’t precise about how much creatine you are taking, you may fail to saturate your skeletal muscles with sufficient creatine to fill your muscle stores, which would then enable your muscle stores to remain filled without continuing to take creatine in large doses.

The Creatine Supplement Maintenance Phase

Once you’ve completed the creatine loading phase, you can then take creatine in significantly smaller maintenance doses of five grams of creatine per day. This quantity of creatine is sufficient to maintain your body’s creatine stores, so there is no need to continue to take creatine in large doses in order to continue to receive consistent creatine benefits. During this phase, you can acquire your creatine in whatever form you like in order to reach the five-gram quota. To accomplish this, you can take creatine supplements like creatine monohydrate or creatine ethyl ester, or you can get a portion of your creatine through food intake. Protein rich foods like beef, salmon, pork and chicken have relatively high levels of creatine content.

However, if you can’t consume any of these particular protein rich foods for whatever reason, your body can essentially create more creatine from other food sources that contain any portion of the necessary amino acid mixture. Despite the ability to acquire natural creatine from a variety of food sources, it is still very difficult to acquire supplemental levels of creatine exclusively through natural sources due to the high volume of creatine required to maintain the creatine saturation of skeletal muscles. For this reason, it is still advisable to consistently take a creatine supplement during the maintenance phase so that nothing is left to chance.

How to Take Creatine Supplements

The most common form of creatine taken in supplement form is creatine monohydrate, and there are a few ways to take creatine monohydrate that are extremely popular. The most common way to take creatine monohydrate is in the form of a creatine powder. This powdered form of creatine monohydrate is often scooped into water or juice, or is dumped into a post-workout protein shake to effectuate post-workout muscle recovery using a blended approach. Another way to take creatine monohydrate is immediately before or during resistance training, high intensity exercise, or aerobic exercise performance. The strategy behind this method suggests that more creatine is delivered to the muscles throughout exercise when you take creatine monohydrate prior to training, thereby increasing creatine’s direct influence on exercise performance. Generally speaking, study results show that the effects of creatine monohydrate on your body are most beneficial when you take creatine closer to a workout than further from it. However, the results also show that if you are involved in a resistance training program, you are more likely to achieve the greatest improvements to body composition and muscle performance if you take creatine monohydrate immediately after a workout.

FAQs About Creatine Supplementation for Women

Is taking creatine supplements safe for women?

Taking creatine supplements is generally safe for women. While there has been a study that suggests that using creatine supplements alongside certain oral contraceptives may amplify the creatine kinase reaction to exercise, there was no increase to any of the markers of muscle damage. (4)

Can taking creatine help women with weight loss?

While taking creatine supplements can result in beneficial weight gain in the form of lean body mass, it is also linked to the loss of body fat. In this way, taking creatine supplements can contribute to an overall improvement in body composition through the addition of more muscle mass, and the elimination of body fat, potentially resulting in net weight loss.

How long does it take to see results from taking creatine supplements?

If you’ve been taking creatine supplements, you should start to see the effects of creatine relatively quickly. Athletes taking creatine supplements correctly have been seen to noticeably increase muscle growth in less than one month. However, these benefits are tied to regular training at sufficient intensity to produce the desired changes. 

Are there any negative consequences for people who use a creatine supplement?

While there are no specific negative consequences for women who take creatine, there are some effects of creatine that can be negative if the person taking them has certain preexisting health conditions, especially as it relates to kidney function or liver function. In particular, if you take creatine after a diagnosis of kidney disease or liver disease, you are likely to cause problems for these organs. Creatine is produced naturally in the liver and kidneys, but creatine supplementation can prevent the liver and kidneys from creating their own natural creatine stores. Because of this, it is not recommended that you take creatine if you suffer from liver disease or kidney disease.

Here are some of the lesser side effects to taking creatine that some people occasionally experience:

• Muscle cramping

• Weight gain from bloating

• Diarrhea

Summary of Benefits Women Can Achieve When They Take Creatine

• Increased lean body mass

• Enhanced muscle recovery

• Upgraded exercise performance

• Improved body composition

• Greater peak exercise capacity

• Elevated cognitive function

• Amelioration of sleep deprivation symptoms

• Improved reproductive health

• Slower decline of post-menopausal bone mass

A Supplement for Everyone

There is no need for women to fear creatine supplementation. By taking creatine, women can boost their stores of creatine phosphate, upgrade their production of adenosine triphosphate, increase muscle growth, improve mental functionality, and even improve their chances of reproductive success.

In other words, if creatine is good for men, then it may be even better for women.

References:

1. Ostojic SM, Stea TH, Ellery SJ, Smith-Ryan AE. Association between dietary intake of creatine and female reproductive health: Evidence from NHANES 2017-2020. Food Sci Nutr. 2024 Apr 30;12(7):4893-4898. doi: 10.1002/fsn3.4135. PMID: 39055234; PMCID: PMC11266896.

2. Bakian, A.V., Huber, R.S., Scholl, L. et al. Dietary creatine intake and depression risk among U.S. adults. Transl Psychiatry 10, 52 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-020-0741-x

3. Smith-Ryan AE, Cabre HE, Eckerson JM, Candow DG. Creatine Supplementation in Women's Health: A Lifespan Perspective. Nutrients. 2021 Mar 8;13(3):877. doi: 10.3390/nu13030877. PMID: 33800439; PMCID: PMC7998865.

4. Hicks KM, Onambélé-Pearson G, Winwood K, Morse CI. Oral contraceptive pill use and the susceptibility to markers of exercise-induced muscle damage. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2017 Jul;117(7):1393-1402. doi: 10.1007/s00421-017-3629-6. Epub 2017 May 11. PMID: 28497386; PMCID: PMC5486557.