Should I cycle creatine ?

Hi James,

Ten or twelve years ago, many people, including me, believed this to be a potential risk of taking creatine long term. Fortunately, one of the world's finest sports nutrition researchers did a meticulous study looking at this very question.

Creatine uptake into the muscle cell is facilitated by the "Creatine Transporter", also known as CRT or CreaT, which includes membrane transporters and mitochondrial transporters.

Without getting too technical, Dr Tarnopolsky and his research team measured the levels of this transporter after both 2 months and 4 months in younger and older exercising subjects respectively. They also measured the levels of CRT mRNA (this measures the rate of production of CRT) after a creatine loading cycle (20 grams daily for 5 days followed by 5 to 10 grams per day).

None of these variables changed either at 8 days, 2 months or 4 months.

So there is no reason to believe that creatine production or transport in the body is negatively effected by creatine supplementation.

This actually makes sense because creatine is consumed routinely by humans and the daily diet may contain over a gram per day - and even more if you eat lots of fish (especially herring) and meat. So humans have been eating creatine in their diets since our knuckles were dragging on the ground!

Here's a reference to the study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12701826