Rhonda Patrick: Most Replayed Moment: Can Creatine Offset Sleep Deprivation? Is It Really The Best Supplement?

The segment opens with the host recalling that, before recording, the guest named creatine as one of the things they were most excited about. The host says they had long seen creatine as a gym-bro supplement for people who want to get big, which they didn't need. The guest agrees they once thought the same way. They say their view changed over roughly the last five years, as research on creatine's effects on the brain caught their interest. They also note that they began doing a lot of resistance training themselves (barbells, squats, deadlifts), which gave them a second, more traditional reason to try it.

The guest explains that the body makes its own creatine. They estimate, while saying "I don't know", that the liver produces about one to three grams a day. They name the liver and the brain as the two organs that make it. Other tissues use it, muscle most of all. Creatine is stored as phosphocreatine and serves essentially to produce energy.

According to the guest, the resistance-training studies that first drew them in found that people who took creatine while lifting gained more lean body mass and strength and could raise their training volume, for example by doing one to two extra reps on an exercise. The guest adds that creatine seems to shorten recovery between sets. Their argument is that anything which raises training volume will in turn increase adaptations such as muscle mass and strength.

And it's important for people to realize that supplementing with creatine by itself without any type of resistance training isn't going to grow your muscle, it's not going to make you stronger.

The guest presents the mechanism as indirect. Creatine helps the body regenerate energy faster, and that lets a person train harder or do more. In their words, "So it's sort of supercharging your exercise routine." The effort still has to come from the training.

The guest says they began taking creatine about a year before the conversation, at five grams a day, because that was the dose shown to benefit muscle health alongside resistance training. They report a noticeable rise in training volume, doing more reps. They already knew about the brain research at that point and thought five grams might cover those effects too.