A friend of mine asked me if I was natural or if I took creatine

@jerryy324 Is this a joke or are you being serious? Doesn't your body cap out at like 5g on average? I was pretty sure your body could only handle about 5g on average before it started treating any excess as waste/unusable?

edit: I searched it up, I could've sworn I read that 5g (with a margin of error for personal differences between people) was some sort of biological cap, but now I'm reading stuff that says the amount of creatine your body can utilize goes up with your muscle mass...

Thanks for making me look back into it, I might've stayed taking 5g's for a while if you hadn't. I only just started taking creatine but I didn't look into it that well apparently
 
@thisdogdonegone Glad you found some info. Can’t remember exactly what spurred the change but it was seeing a bunch of articles plus some anecdotal evidence that convinced me. As you say the dose is mass dependent.
 
@thisdogdonegone Yeah I used to take 3-5g (basically one scoop) but I read a few articles/resources suggesting that over 200lb in body weight you should be on about 8g/day so that's what I do now
 
@joluvu That's the dose that I'm at right now, 5g, probably only need 3g currently but I take the full scoop in case for some reason my body just sucks at digesting and utilizing creatine. I'm a pretty lean 125lb so I still have quite some time before I gotta go up lmao.
 
@thisdogdonegone Yeah I'm a big lump over 200lb so apparently I need more for the gainz.

I'm not convinced it makes a difference but creatine is pretty cheap and readily available so I don't feel the need to conserve it. Worst case it just isn't absorbed.
 
@joluvu Did you take note of how many reps you were doing and at what weight like a week after you upped your dose? I say a week because as I understand it it takes about a week or longer for your body to actually get fully loaded up on it only taking the maintenance dose (a study I read had participants/subjects actually take 25g a day or something like that for the first 5 days before dropping down to their maintenance doses).

I just wonder because I feel like when I started taking it it was such a gradual increase in energy and ability that it was kind of hard to tell just how much it was doing, and then whatever energy you now have taking creatine everyday just feels normal so it seems kind of hard to gauge when you're not taking notes of what you're doing and for how many reps during that acclimation period.
 
@thisdogdonegone Sort of. I didn't do it in any sort of scientific way, but I did do a 1 week loading protocol of around 15g/day (pussied out of doing the full 20+ as recommended) and then down to 8g/day, and after that first week I didn't so much notice an increase in how much I was doing per session, but I definitely noticed a significant increase in how often I could train.

Like, if I did a push workout on Monday then pre creatine I wouldn't be able to train it again until the next week, but after I could do it a day or two later. I'm not sure I noticed any boost in my 1rm or volume capacity beyond what I got from training more frequently, but it definitely boosted my recovery significantly.

As I say I didn't do it scientifically so I can't say what the impact of going from ~4g (one scoop) to ~8g was versus going from 0g to 4g if you know what I mean? But I'm pretty confident it made some fairly significant difference
 
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