Is it worth it? Creatine

‘Having tubs of this around your house is pretty much the most embarrassing thing on the planet’

by Stuart Heritage

What is it? A dietary supplement, primarily used in weightlifting, that aids size and strength.

How much does it cost? Varies between about a tenner for a bottle of 90 capsules to £70 for a planet-sized bucket of this amino acid in powder form.

What does it promise? According to MaxiNutrition, you can “increase your strength, power, muscular effort/recovery, time to exhaustion, lifting volume and performance”.

What’s it actually like? To begin with, tedious. The first part of a creatine programme is the “loading” phase, where you basically flood your system with about 20g of the stuff four or five times a day. Which would be amazing if it tasted nice, but it absolutely does not. After that comes the easier “maintenance” phase, where you have a creatine shake once a day. And, unless this is all just a big psychosomatic con job, it really seems to work – I quickly found myself getting better at shorter explosive exercises, and recovering from them faster, after taking creatine for a few weeks.

Best and worst bit The best bit is how unstoppable you feel at the gym after the loading phase. The worst bit is the nagging sensation that you’ve somehow cheated in order to achieve that sensation. And the fact that all the gains almost instantly disappear as soon as you stop taking creatine, which you will, because having tubs of it around your house is pretty much the most embarrassing thing on the planet. Oh, and all the farting.

Is it worth it? For me? No. But if you want muscles at any cost, and you’re also a millionaire whose taste buds were burned off in an accidental explosion, then be my guest.