Creatine Monohydrate is an amazing supplement. When it comes to building muscle and strength creatine is in a league of its own. Though there are close to a thousand studies on creatine and increasing performance, as you’ll see here, there is still a lot to be learned.
How Creatine Monohydrate Works
We know supplementing with creatine monohydrate increases creatine phosphate which serves to regenerate adenosine triphosphate (ATP). ATP is utilized during muscle contractions – even something as simple as blinking your eye requires ATP. As you deplete ATP when training, muscle contraction force drops significantly. When supplementing with creatine, you provide a hyper-natural reserve of ATP to fuel muscle contraction at a greater level for a longer period of time. Simply put, you can lift heavier weights for more reps resulting in greater strength and more muscle mass.
Creatine also draws fluid into the muscle cell thereby increasing cell volume. This osmotic effect not only increases muscle cell size, but it also increases protein synthesis within the cell – muscle growth.
These are two well-known and fundamental effects of supplementing with creatine monohydrate. Now more research is revealing some newly discovered and very exciting effects from creatine.
Important Creatine Research
Published in Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology, a very interesting study discovered that supplementing with creatine monohydrate while weight training significantly lowered circulating levels of myostatin. Myostatin is a catabolic regulator of skeletal muscle mass. It inhibits myogenesis – muscle cell growth and differentiation. What this means is that myostatin limits the amount of muscle you can actually build. Reducing myostatin’s influence will allow you to build more muscle faster.
In this study, scientists discovered that resistance training alone decreased serum myostatin levels. But the real kicker gleaned from this study was that creatine supplementation in combination with resistance training led to even greater decreases in serum myostatin. Creatine lowers myostatin!
It’s believed that the reason some people can pack on more muscle than others is because of naturally lower myostatin levels. Everyone produces myostatin, but as with all individual biological complexities, some produce less myostatin than others. Less myostatin equals more lean muscle.
This study shows that supplementing with creatine monohydrate is a no-brainer if you are looking to build more muscle. In fact, it’s a must-use supplement even for the most casual lifter. And from the perspective of reducing serum myostatin, creatine is a game changer. The myostatin lowering properties of creatine monohydrate may very well be creatine’s primary driver of muscle growth.
Watch Out for the Scams
Now don’t be taken in by the supplement scammers out there and believe there are many. The most effective form of creatine is creatine monohydrate. The research proves this unequivocally. No other form of creatine has been shown to be as effective as creatine monohydrate, and certainly, no other form has been shown to be better. In fact, creatine monohydrate has repeatedly been shown in scientific studies to be the far superior form of creatine. If any company tries to tell you otherwise, they are lying to you. They cannot be trusted. This can’t be stressed enough.
