The Creatine You’re Taking to Get Big Might Be Useless

If you’ve been taking creatine to get big at the gym, a study from the University of New South Wales found that you have probably been wasting your money. There’s a good chance that creatine is no more effective than a placebo.

Creatine has long been touted for its muscle and brain-boosting powers. It often comes in the form of a powder advertised by a ripped muscle monster sprinkling it into a thick post-workout shake. If you’re not chugging tons of water while stuffing your body with it, you can suffer some painful and even debilitating muscle cramps since creatine makes your muscles draw in more water, causing swelling and pressure, which eventually leads to cramps if you’re not well-hydrated.

Over the years, creatine has been studied by a variety of research teams from all over the world, but the team from the University of New South Wales says those studies might all share the same fatal flaw: the participants started working out on the same day they started taking creatine, making it difficult to isolate the effects of the supplement.

To get around this problem, the UNSW team had participants take part in a “wash-in” period, “where half of the participants started taking the supplement, without changing anything else in their daily life, to give their body a chance to stabilize in terms of its response to the supplement.”

The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Nutrients, ultimately saw no significant difference in the gains accumulated by people who took creatine and those who didn’t while undergoing resistance training.

People who took creatine initially saw some additional muscle mass in the first week, but by the time all participants got to the end of the 12-week training program, everybody involved had similar gains, equaling an average of about two kilograms of muscle mass, which equals about 4.4 pounds of gained muscle.

Between this and recent research that says protein powders are probably a gigantic waste of your time and money unless you plan on becoming a gigantic muscle monster, it’s probably best that you just focus on the workout and less on the supplements.