When is the Best Time to Take Creatine for Muscle Growth?

The concept of creatine supplementation was completely foreign to you just a short time ago, but now you’ve completed your initial loading phase, and you’re well into your first week of maintenance doses. That’s when you commit what you believe to be the cardinal sin of forgetting to take your creatine monohydrate prior to your workout, as had been your custom.

“Don’t worry about it!” insists your workout partner. “Creatine doesn’t even work if you take it before your resistance training. Taking creatine is just to help your muscles recover. That’s why you take it when you’re done with your workout.”

“Wrong!” interjects the resident personal trainer who just happens to have been walking past you at that very moment. “Taking creatine can help your exercise performance pretty much on the spot. It’s not only for recovery; it boosts your muscle strength while you exercise!”

“So it doesn’t matter when I take creatine at all?” you ask.

“It does, but it’s mostly a matter of how you want the creatine to help you,” says the trainer, who exits the conversation.

“I don’t care what that guy says!” laughs your workout partner. “I study sports nutrition, and I know how creatine works; you take it after you train!”

So which one is it? Does creatine only work when taken at certain times relative to when you exercise? Is there really a best time to take creatine for muscle gain? That last thing you’d ever want to do is to take a supplement incorrectly, so you decide that now would be a great time to learn exactly how creatine works once it enters your body, and when would be the best time to take it.

How Does Creatine Work?

In the late 1990s, creatine supplements seemed to appear out of nowhere and rapidly became all the rage in the world of nutritional supplements. Much was stated — and even more was exaggerated — about the ability of creatine monohydrate to boost sports performance. 

In fact, there was a moment in time when creatine was being given much of the credit and blame for the shattering of baseball’s home run records, and the drastic rise of home runs being hit by seemingly every player in the big leagues. It took quite a while to distinguish between the capabilities of creatine, and the sorts of feats that required other types of supplemental intervention.

Now that the effects of creatine have been studied in all corners of the sports nutrition field, it is much easier to separate the truth from the fiction with respect to creatine’s capabilities and limitations. However, in order to get to the heart of when the best time might be to take creatine, it’s best to begin with a thorough understanding of exactly what creatine is, including where it comes from, and what it does.

What is Creatine?

While creatine supplements are usually the first thing you think of when creatine is brought up, creatine is actually a naturally occurring compound composed of three amino acids that are common in everyday food items like meat, fish, milk, pumpkin seeds, cheese, spinach, almonds, and quinoa. 

In its natural form, creatine is entirely imperceptible to the naked eye, which is why it isn’t something that leaps to your attention when you consume it on your dinner plate. It requires a chemical synthesis process to produce the powdered, crystalized forms of creatine that are common in supplemental forms.

When creatine enters your body, it works its way through your digestive system, and then finds its way into your bloodstream, tissues, and muscle cells via the natural creatine uptake process. From there, it rests within your skeletal muscles waiting to be put to use during periods of physical exertion.

For what it’s worth, combining creatine intake with protein consumption or carbohydrate consumption has been proven to improve the uptake of creatine into the bloodstream and improve its retention. This makes natural sense, as creatine is naturally found in both protein and carbohydrate sources.

Unfortunately, this also means that simply dropping your creatine supplement into plain water and drinking it without any other nutrients present may not be the most efficient way to absorb it. This is one of the reasons why dropping creatine into a juice or shake with other ingredients is often recommended during supplementation.

The Actions of Creatine

In practice, your body uses creatine as both an energy source, and a buffer between energy sources, and its effects are most frequently noticed in situations involving high intensity exercise and other periods when your muscles are challenged, including strength training workouts.

When you begin intense exercise, the first form of energy your body uses is its stored adenosine triphosphate, also known as ATP. Once your adenosine triphosphate stores are depleted, your body then rapidly transitions to its phosphocreatine system. 

It is within your phosphocreatine system that the creatine stored in your muscle cells is put to use, and quickly backs up your continued efforts by producing supplemental ATP. The creatine in your skeletal muscle can therefore lengthen your periods of high intensity exercise by a few seconds and softening the transition from your ATP-CP energy system over to your aerobic energy system.

In a nutshell, this is one of the simplest ways to explain one of the most important functions of creatine in your body. During an all-out sprint, your body burns through its energy rapidly, and is soon hindered by discomfort as it is quickly forced to search for additional sources of energy that require increased effort to produce. In a sprinting setting, creatine can add a few full seconds to an all out sprinting effort that would otherwise have been fraught with discomfort.

While this may seem like a small payoff in upgraded exercise performance on its surface, the ability to consistently lift heavier weights or push your body’s physical limits for longer periods of time can lead to greater muscle gains, and steady increases in physical performance.

Aside from its direct benefits to lengthening intense training sessions, creatine supplementation is also known to accelerate muscle recovery, which prepares your skeletal muscle for even more efficient rounds of resistance training or high intensity exercise.

The Necessity of Creatine Supplementation

As effective as creatine is at improving your physical potential, it is essentially impossible to consume enough dietary creatine over the course of an ordinary balanced diet in order to provide enough creatine for even a  maintenance dose. Most people would have to structure their entire eating schedule solely around eating nutrition sources with high-creatine content.

When you consider the quantity of creatine monohydrate that is required to saturate your muscle creatine stores and prepare you for full-blown creatine supplementation, it becomes plain to see why taking creatine monohydrate in a supplemental form is required if you’re taking it to boost athletic performance in a measurable way.

At the beginning of creatine supplementation, you can’t just start dumping doses of creatine in your shaker bottle arbitrarily without monitoring its quantity very closely. In all instances of effective creatine supplementation, you’ll need to start with a loading phase, during which you consume between 20-25 grams of creatine monohydrate each day for five to seven days. 

This loading phase is necessary to saturate your skeletal muscle tissue with sufficient creatine monohydrate that you can then begin taking creatine at maintenance levels during each subsequent day. At that point, your daily creatine intake can dip to a level around three to five grams of creatine monohydrate. 

To put these creatine quantities into perspective, red meat is one of the richest sources of natural creatine. Yet, in order to acquire the five grams of creatine needed to replenish your muscle stores with a maintenance dose, you would need to eat two pounds of steak each day. 

That’s a lot of steak! However, before you can even get to that point, you would need to eat at least eight pounds of steak daily for an entire week to get your skeletal muscles to the point where you could begin creatine supplementation using smaller quantities. 

Therefore, taking creatine powder or some other creatine supplement is the only viable way for most creatine benefits to be unlocked. This fact also reveals why dietary supplements are so essential, and why creatine monohydrate is such a popular supplement; without creatine supplementation, the full benefits of creatine would be inaccessible to virtually everyone.

Best Times to Take Creatine Supplements

Dozens of studies within the field of sports nutrition have unveiled the hidden benefits of creatine, and  creatine monohydrate in particular. However, since creatine has multiple benefits that are prioritized differently by different people, there has been much debate with respect to the best time to take creatine powder and its adjacent supplements over the course of a day. 

This is especially the case when you’re taking creatine alongside one or more additional supplements, and are attempting to fine tune the timing of each supplement for maximum benefit. 

These are honestly serious considerations, since research suggests that creatine timing can determine which creatine benefits you receive, and to what extent, and combining the effects of creatine with a supplement like caffeine can offer concurrent benefits to your workout. These are some of the factors that influence why the process of creatine supplementation can become somewhat complex.

Pre-Workout Creatine Supplementation

There is evidence that taking creatine prior to a workout — or even during a workout — is a reliable way to ensure that creatine muscle stores are adequately filled when you most need them to boost exercise performance. 

The basic concept is that taking creatine before or during your workout can overlap with the processes of exercise hyperaemia, and Na+/K+ pump activity — both of which maximize the flow of blood to skeletal muscle and active muscle tissue during exercise, and therefore boost the amount of available creatine during a period where it is most capable of being put to use.

Therefore, by taking creatine between 30 to 60 minutes prior to your resistance training sessions, you are ensuring that you’ll be able to put forth your best effort during your high intensity activities. 

Post-Workout Creatine Supplementation

One of the most common methods of creatine supplementation is to take it post-workout. For many people, the immediate aftermath of resistance training is the most logical time to take creatine, since this is when your muscle creatine stores are most likely to be depleted and in need of replenishing. 

Creatine has been shown to increase new lean muscle mass growth while also helping to alleviate feelings of soreness during the post-workout recovery phase.

Morning vs. Evening

There’s a school of thought that believes that creatine timing isn’t critical, and that creatine supplementation can occur at any point while still being beneficial. While this is a broadly true statement, there is evidence that the time of the day you choose to take creatine does matter, and specifically with respect to when you perform your resistance training.

For example, a 10-week research study involving physically active young adults required half of its participants to take creatine supplements alongside other dietary supplements both before and after resistance training, and the other half to take those same supplements right before bed, and first thing in the morning on an empty stomach.

The group that was taking creatine and other supplements both before and after completing high intensity exercises experienced the greatest improvements to body composition, the largest increase in lean muscle mass, and the more significant increase in muscle strength. (1)

In short, while taking creatine at any point of the day was shown to be beneficial in areas like physical performance and body composition, the most beneficial times to take creatine were both before and after resistance training — both pre-workout and post-workout.

Daily Consistency

Regardless of what you believe to be the best time to take creatine, it’s very important for you to maintain a consistent routine of creatine supplementation. Foregoing creatine doses can deplete your muscle creatine stores, and force you to go through yet another loading phase if you wish to once again tap into the creatine benefits you’ve grown accustomed to.

This is why timing isn’t everything, because you’ll need to remember to take creatine even on your rest days, and also to remember how much creatine is needed to preserve your progress — whether it’s a loading-phase dose or a maintenance dose.

How to Incorporate Creatine Supplementation into Your Routine

The easiest way to maintain consistent, effective creatine supplementation is to always have access to a few vital tools and implements. The first step is to ensure that you always have a viable creatine supplement handy whenever it’s the right time to take creatine, whether that’s before, during, or after your workout.

Second, whether you consume creatine as a pre-workout, post-workout, or intra-workout supplement, you’ll need to make sure you have something to mix your creatine into if you prefer to take creatine in a form that requires mixing. 

This is why it’s always important to have consistent access to a shaker bottle — or some other container that you can drink out of — along with a source of liquid. Whether it’s water, juice, or something else that won’t degrade the creatine’s quality, you’ll need to have these resources on hand so that you’re prepared to take creatine whenever the right moment arrives.

FAQs About Creatine Supplementation

The International Society on Sports Nutrition position stand on creatine is that it is the most effective ergogenic nutritional supplement currently available to athletes. As impressive as that sounds, that doesn’t mean there aren’t questions about creatine that could use answers that are a little more precise. 

The responses to a few of those questions are available here.

Will Taking Creatine Enhance My Muscle Growth?

Creatine supplementation is one of the most reliable ways to increase lean muscle mass using a sports nutrition solution. In addition to upgrading energy production, healthy adults and athletes consistently report faster lean mass increases after they take creatine for extended periods of time. 

Moreover, it is virtually impossible to find a competitive bodybuilder whose success is dependent on the growth of new muscle who does not consistently include creatine amongst their daily supplements.

Will Taking Creatine Improve My Muscle Recovery?

You are likely to experience noticeable improvements to your muscle recovery if you take creatine. Creatine has been demonstrated to mitigate post-exercise muscle damage, while reducing post-exercise inflammation and soreness. 

Does Creatine Supplementation Increase Muscle Strength and Athletic Performance?

One of the keys is recognizing that the optimal time to take creatine is before or during a tough workout. However, regardless of your supplementation time, creatine supplementation is clearly associated with increases in strength. 

Not only did a group of trained female athletes experience strength increases of 20-25 percent of a 10-week period of strength training and creatine supplementation, but physically active research subjects who took supplemental creatine were able to make strength gains in 30 days even without participating in a structured regimen of targeted strength improvement.  (2) (3)

Is It Beneficial To Take More Creatine Than Recommended?

Excessive doses of creatine are not helpful to further enhance muscle mass or increase muscle contraction, as creatine does not function the way a stimulant like caffeine does, where an increased dose can result in a more pronounced effect.

Once the capacity of your system to produce adenosine triphosphate has been maximized, there are no further potential benefits to be unlocked by the oversaturation of your skeletal muscles with even more creatine. Additional creatine is unhelpful beyond what is required to maintain your optimal creatine levels through maintenance doses.

Can Creatine Improve the Health of My Heart?

While more research is required related specifically to creatine’s effects on the human heart, evidence has been found within the field of sports nutrition that your body’s creatine level has a direct effect on blood flow.

At the conclusion of one study in particular, it was shown that study participants who used creatine were found to have increased peripheral blood flow and improved blood cholesterol in comparison with subjects who were not given creatine. (4)

In a separate study exploring the effects of creatine supplementation on arterial stiffness, test subjects who took creatine recorded better test results in relation to blood flow and blood pressure in comparison to study participants who did not take creatine. (5)

Can I Improve My Brain Health By Taking Creatine?

If you're interested in what creatine can do for you cognitive function, there is growing evidence that you can improve your brain health as well as your muscle health if you opt to take creatine. The results of several studies suggest that creatine can improve cognitive function, including short-term memory and reasoning ability. 

Despite these findings, the potential benefits of creatine as applied to brain health require more research into creatine’s effects on the brains of non-healthy individuals, with more research also needed into whether or not there is a right time to take creatine to achieve the maximum mental benefit. 

Is There a Wrong Time to Take Creatine?

Fortunately, there is no such thing as an incorrect time to take creatine. Provided that you take creatine in the right quantities on a daily basis, including on rest days, you can achieve all of the benefits that are cherished by fitness enthusiasts. 

However, if you’re hoping to experience the fullest range of creatine’s benefits, and to the utmost degree, the optimal time to take creatine is either shortly before or shortly after a training session. Using this approach will either optimize energy production and strength promotion, or expedite the recuperative process of your muscles. Either way, you will be producing a set of outcomes that will result in improved strength and physical performance, and result in the growth of lean muscle tissue.

Side Effects of Taking Creatine

The International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand on creatine includes the statement that creatine has no detrimental effects on otherwise healthy individuals. Obviously this sounds great, but that doesn’t mean that presumably healthy individuals can’t wander into trouble when they start supplementing with creatine.

Not every outcome associated with creatine is equally positive for everyone who takes it. While there are many fitness enthusiasts who rave about it, there are certain situations where it would be in your best interest to avoid creatine altogether, or at least use it with caution.

Unwanted Weight Gain

Resulting from the tendency of creatine to carry sodium into muscle tissues when it is taken in, it has also been known to prompt swelling in muscle tissue. While this can be perceived by some people as a positive side effect of taking creatine, it not only leads to an increase in size due to bloating, but it also has the unintended accompanying consequence of undesired weight gain.

Understandably, this may be perceived as a minor side effect to some people. Yet, if you are in a sport like wrestling that requires qualification on the basis of weight, taking creatine can disrupt an athlete’s process of qualifying for their desired weight class.

Digestive Upset

An occasional side effect of creatine consumption is digestive upset caused by the presence of additional water being drawn into body tissues and retained. This can lead to bloating and diarrhea, although this particular sensitivity to creatine varies from one person to the next, and is a relatively rare occurrence. When you start using creatine, you should be on the alert for the onset of any new digestive discomfort.

Kidney Trouble

If you already have perfectly healthy kidneys, creatine supplements are unlikely to pose any threat to their functionality. On the other hand, if you have kidney disease or other disorders linked to your kidneys, the fact that creatine may increase the amount of creatinine in your blood may be additionally disruptive and compromise the smooth operation of your kidneys. 

Because there is an additional risk associated with creatine supplementation amongst people with disorders related to the kidneys, you should probably consult a medical professional before taking creatine if you have been diagnosed with troublesome kidneys.

There’s Never a Bad Time

If all of the research into creatine from experts in sports medicine has revealed anything, it’s that there is never a bad time to take creatine. As potentially the most thoroughly tested supplement in all of sports medicine, creatine is proven to improve a wide range of physical functions related to muscle function and brain function. If you’re looking for a surefire and generally safe way to enhance your body, creatine is one of the safest bets there is.

Now, if you’re hoping to get the most out of your creatine supplementation, the general consensus in sports medicine is that you should take it before, during, or shortly after your workouts. However, if you don’t intend to be a stickler for timing your creatine usage, it isn’t worth fretting over. As long as you’re taking it every day — including on your rest days — your body will still be able to take advantage of creatine’s welcome presence. 

References

1. Cribb PJ, Hayes A. Effects of supplement timing and resistance exercise on skeletal muscle hypertrophy. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2006 Nov;38(11):1918-25. doi: 10.1249/01.mss.0000233790.08788.3e. PMID: 17095924.

2. Vandenberghe K, Goris M, Van Hecke P, Van Leemputte M, Vangerven L, Hespel P. Long-term creatine intake is beneficial to muscle performance during resistance training. J Appl Physiol (1985). 1997 Dec;83(6):2055-63. doi: 10.1152/jappl.1997.83.6.2055. PMID: 9390981.

3. Herda TJ, Beck TW, Ryan ED, Smith AE, Walter AA, Hartman MJ, Stout JR, Cramer JT. Effects of creatine monohydrate and polyethylene glycosylated creatine supplementation on muscular strength, endurance, and power output. J Strength Cond Res. 2009 May;23(3):818-26. doi: 10.1519/JSC.0b013e3181a2ed11. PMID: 19387397.

4. Arciero PJ, Hannibal NS 3rd, Nindl BC, Gentile CL, Hamed J, Vukovich MD. Comparison of creatine ingestion and resistance training on energy expenditure and limb blood flow. Metabolism. 2001 Dec;50(12):1429-34. doi: 10.1053/meta.2001.28159. PMID: 11735088.

5. Sanchez-Gonzalez MA, Wieder R, Kim JS, Vicil F, Figueroa A. Creatine supplementation attenuates hemodynamic and arterial stiffness responses following an acute bout of isokinetic exercise. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2011 Sep;111(9):1965-71. doi: 10.1007/s00421-011-1832-4. Epub 2011 Jan 20. PMID: 21249385.