Almost everything written about creatine was written for young men lifting heavy. This is the same information, written for you, in plain words. About five minutes.
Every claim below has the study behind it, numbered, at the bottom. Some of what follows will save you money. A fair bit of it argues against things other brands are telling you right now.
5 grams a day.
That is the amount used in most of the research. More than that does not do more for your muscles. It is a small spoonful.
No.
Loading means taking a big dose for the first week to fill up faster. You can skip it. Taking 3 to 5 grams a day gets you to exactly the same place in about three to four weeks. It was shown decades ago and it still holds.1
Loading is a shortcut, not a rule, and big single doses are the main reason people get an upset stomach.2
Whenever you will actually remember.
Morning, night, with food, without. Timing barely matters. Taking it most days is what matters. That is why we put it in coffee. You already make coffee.
Creatine monohydrate. The plain one.
It is the form used in nearly all the research, and it is the cheapest — about half the price per gram of the fancier versions.3
Nothing has beaten it head to head. One popular form, creatine ethyl ester, did measurably worse than plain monohydrate in a seven-week trial.4 Another, creatine HCl, was tested against monohydrate in athletes for eight weeks at the same dose and showed no advantage at all — only the monohydrate group improved on lean mass.5
When someone reviewed 175 products across 16 alternative forms, about 88% had little or no evidence behind them.3 You are usually paying for the label.
It helps your muscles — but only if you train.
Seven trials, 608 women past menopause, pooled together: creatine plus resistance training added about a third of a kilo of lean muscle — under a pound — over roughly nine months, and about 16 more pounds on a leg press, compared to training alone.6
That is real, and it is smaller than the ads suggest. We would rather you hear it from us.
Without training, it does nothing. One study followed 200 women for two full years on creatine with no exercise programme. No change in muscle, no change in strength, no change in bone.7 Another followed 109 women for a year at a low dose. Same result: nothing.8
The honest summary is that creatine is a small multiplier on training. It is not a substitute for it.
Months, not weeks. Early weight gain on creatine is mostly water moving into your muscle, not muscle itself — one trial saw the "gain" appear in seven days, before any training started, and then found no difference at all after twelve weeks of lifting.9 Strength benefits in women show up reliably only in trials running six months or longer.10
This is the part other brands leave out. Each of these is something creatine is currently being sold for, and each one falls apart when you look.
It does not build bone. Two separate two-year trials, one with 237 women and one with 200, both measured bone density and both found nothing.7,11 A pooled review rates the no-benefit finding as high certainty.6 The 200-woman study found no difference in falls or fractures either. Anyone selling you creatine for your bones is ahead of the evidence.
It is not proven for your memory or focus. In 2024, food regulators in both Europe and the UK read all the research and refused to let anyone claim creatine helps your memory or your thinking.12,13 Both requests came from a creatine maker, using the best studies it had. The UK looked at everyday doses and found the one trial that qualified showed no difference on any measure, at any point.13
There is a real reason for this. Creatine reaches muscle easily and the brain only barely. One study measured both in the same people on the same day at four times a normal dose: muscle went up 10 to 28 percent, and the brain did not move at all.14
There is no evidence at all for ADHD. Not weak evidence — none. No trial has ever tested creatine in ADHD, and none is registered anywhere.15 If you have seen this claimed confidently online, it was assembled by people selling something.
It is not a fat loss product. Trial after trial finds no change in body fat.7,11
You will read everywhere that women have 70 to 80 percent less creatine stored than men, and that this is why we need to supplement.
We tried to find the study behind that. There isn't one.
It comes from a review paper, which points to another review paper, which does not appear to contain the measurement.16 Meanwhile, researchers who actually took muscle samples from women and men found women had more creatine per unit of muscle, not less.17 A separate paper states plainly that creatine stores are not obviously affected by sex at all.18
At best that number describes a whole-body total in a smaller body. It is not a deficiency. We are not going to build a brand on it.
Because nobody did the work on you.
One review of creatine and strength collected 23 studies. They included 447 men and 40 women.19 When researchers do split results by sex, the effects in women come out smaller, and often not significant at all.20
That is the real story. Not that your body is short of something. That the research was done on somebody else, and the results were sold to you anyway.
There is one clear exception, and it is worth knowing. When 40 women were followed for six months and had muscle samples taken, switching to a vegetarian diet measurably dropped the creatine in their muscle — and about 1 gram a day was enough to prevent it.21 If you eat little or no meat, that one is about you.
This is the strongest part of the whole file.
An international review of the research concluded there is no good evidence that creatine causes harm in healthy people, at doses up to 30 grams a day, taken for as long as five years.22 A group of 71 women footballers took it through a full 32-week season with no problems in their bloodwork.23
Creatine raises a blood marker called creatinine. That is the same marker labs use to estimate how your kidneys are doing. So creatine can make a lab result look alarming while your kidneys are completely fine. When researchers measured actual kidney function directly, it was unchanged.24
Tell whoever draws your blood that you take creatine. It saves a frightening phone call.
A little, inside the muscle. That is part of how it works. When researchers measured where the water goes, the balance between inside and outside your cells did not change.25 It is not the puffy, under-the-skin kind people worry about.
No.
Look at the numbers above. Under a pound of lean muscle over nine months, and only if you are lifting. Visible size takes years of heavy training and a lot of food, on purpose.
This scare comes from one small study in 2009 that found a shift in a hormone ratio — and never looked at anyone's hair.26 It was not repeated for fifteen years. In 2025 researchers finally ran the proper test: twelve weeks, 5 grams a day, hair measured directly by count, density and thickness. They found no effect on the hormone or on any measure of hair.27
That trial was twelve weeks and in men, so it is not the last word. But the frightening version of this story has less behind it than the reassuring one.
Anyone with kidney trouble, anyone pregnant or breastfeeding, and anyone on medication that affects the kidneys. This guide is information, not medical advice.
Buy plain monohydrate. Half the price, more evidence, nothing beats it.
Skip anything pre-mixed in liquid. Dry powder is remarkably stable — it sits in the tub for years without breaking down.28 What ruins creatine is water and acid. Sitting in liquid, it starts turning into something useless within days.28 Mix it and drink it.
Ask to see the testing. Ask whether each batch is tested and whether you can read the result. Most brands test. Very few will show you.
Sterling is a creatine made for women. 5 grams, stirred into the coffee you already make, with no taste of its own.
It is not for sale yet. When it is, you will hear from us once.
In the meantime this guide is true whether you ever buy anything from us or not. Most of it tells you to spend less, and a good deal of it argues against claims our own industry is making this year. That is deliberate. If we are willing to tell you what creatine does not do, you have some reason to believe us about what it does.