Name: Creatine: Dose, Benefits & Safety | Dr. Rhonda Patrick & Dr. Andrew Huberman
Uploaded: 2026-03-26T21:33:49.000Z
Duration: 17 min 8 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I started taking weight training and running when I was like 16, maybe.

And I started taking creatine 'cause back then I was skinny, I wanted to put on muscle.

I think creatine was sort of first discussed or released back then when I was maybe 18 or something like that, something like that, 18, 19.

Um, so I've been taking it a long, long time.

But the original protocol, which nobody does anymore, but

I confess I still do it 'cause I enjoy it, was to take five grams three to five times per day.

and you would mix it with a little bit of grape juice 'cause the idea was you were supposed to spike your insulin and then you get more into the muscles.

And then you had a maintenance dose, which was five grams per day.

the idea back then was that you needed to do a washout every 20 weeks or so where you just stop taking it, you urinate out a bunch of water,

And I confess I've continued to do this minus the grape juice,

but occasionally I'll do the grape juice thing.

I don't think there's any real merit to the loading phase, maintenance phase idea.

But back then and still now, I feel like creatine has made me feel great, um, stronger.

Um, I did, I wasn't aware of the cognitive benefits.

But what are your thoughts on why creatine suddenly has become this like banner supplement?

We should start a supplement of the year thing, right?

For a while, I think vitamin D and melatonin came first.

Um, we'll have to figure out what years those were.

Then, uh, I feel like creatine got supplement of the year for 2026 unless something else comes along.

So creatine, supplement of the year, 2026, even though it's been around for a long, long time.

Well, so first I wanna talk about your loading phase.

And I, like, that was really for the studies that were being done, right?

Because if you're taking five grams a day of creatine, it takes about three to four weeks for your crea, for your muscle creatine stores to become saturated.

And researchers aren't gonna do a study where they wait that long.

It was, it's in this isolated bubble of in the experimental protocol,

but like in the real world, you have three weeks.

Or if you're like an athlete and you hadn't, you know, taken the creatine, you don't have your creatine stores up and you have to quickly, rapidly.

Like, I was just amazed at how quickly it worked.

but I legitimately put on, I realized some of it was water or most of it was water, but

somewhere between probably four and eight pounds of.

I don't wanna call it lean mass because it's, you know, it's water in the muscle.

Um, but I, I just was, I was like, "Oh my goodness, this is crazy," you know?

And, um, and then people thought maybe it was a steroid.

Turns out it's safe for your kidneys and most everyone.

I mean, obviously creatine is stored as creatine phosphate in our, in our cells.

We make to some degree, you know, between one to three grams of creatine a day.

And so your muscles, if you're working out, you're really consuming a lot of energy, right?

So having the creatine stores higher in your muscle is beneficial because, one, you're gonna be able to increase your training volume, right?

So it's not like creatine is anabolic in the sense that protein or amino acids are, right?

It's not like directly affecting muscle protein synthesis.

It's just helping you train more, getting more reps in, you know, whatever it is, training, train, your training volume's going up.

And because your training volume's going up, then you're obviously putting more stress on your muscles, which is gonna lead to increased muscle protein synthesis.

And, you know, obviously there's water probably as well.

That said, you know, you asked me, you know, what happened.

So I got interested in creatine back in 20, when I started basically weight training.

And I've obviously had heard about it forever, never took it.

And, um, as I started to get into resistance training, I was like, "I better start taking this.

This is, I'm like in this, in this world now," and started doing some research and taking it.

So I was taking the five grams a day 'cause that's really what most of the studies show, creatine monohydrate.

That's the most well-researched form of creatine.

And I was taking five grams a day because I was interested in improving my, my training volume and,

and getting the, the, the benefits of it, right?

Um, and then I had Darren Cando on the podcast.

And, um, once I had started getting into the creatine research, I, the brain stuff started, has been coming out over the past, you know, few years.

And that's for me become very interesting.

I remember the first time I heard about it years ago, it was like, "Oh, it's, it's helping improve cognitive function in older, older, you know, people." Yeah.

The phosphorocreatine system seems to be somewhat, um, biased towards forebrain structures, you know?

I mean, obviously it's in lots of brain areas,

but that there might be a heavier reliance on it for brain areas that are associated with strategic planning and, you know, working memory.

If you, if you were to sort of just map the, the, the sort of density of usage of the phosphocreatine system, you'd, you'd see a frontal bias for sure.

Um, well anyways, that's kind of where my interest in, in, you know, kind of diving deeper.

Anything that's helping the brain is interesting to me as I know it's to you as well.

And, um, and so I learned a lot from this podcast I did with Darren Cando.

He, you know, researches creatine and collaborates with a lot of different researchers that are doing, you know, research on the brain and muscle and, you know, lots of the bone.

Turns out it's beneficial for the bone as well.

But the brain, it's interesting that we also make creatine in the brain, but, um, it's not like, so it's kind of like the muscle, right?

You're not just gonna, if you take creatine and you don't work out, you're not gonna, you're not gonna get any increase in lean mass, right?

It's not gonna do much of anything because you're not putting in the work.