Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 104: The Case For Creatine + why you should take it (even NON-lifters?!)

Episode Date: June 14, 2021

In this episode, Danny outlines why he thinks everyone should consider supplementing with creatine monohydrate.  Even if they DON'T have performance or aesthetic-based goals.-*DISCLAIMER* This is not medical advice, consult your physician before you begin taking any supplement.-Thanks For Listening!---RESOURCES/COACHING: I am all about education and that is not limited to this podcast! Feel free to grab a FREE guide (Nutrition, Training, Macros, Etc!) HERE! Interested in Working With Coach Danny and His One-On-One Coaching Team? Click HERE! Want To Have YOUR Question Answered On an Upcoming Episode of DYNAMIC DIALOGUE? You Can Submit It HERE!Want to Support The Podcast AND Get in Better Shape? Grab a Program HERE!----SOCIAL LINKS: Sign up for the trainer mentorship HEREFollow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERE!Support the Show.

Welcome in everybody to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue Podcast. As always, I am your host, Coach Danny Matrenga, and today's episode is going to focus on creatine. Now, I know what you're probably thinking. I already know everything about creatine, or I know how it works, or I'm already taking it. And for most of you, you might be very familiar with it. But when I sit down to go through the questions that I feel on my Instagram for these Q&As, I would say somewhere between 5 and 10% of those questions are related to creatine supplementation, probably more so than any other questions. The only questions that get anywhere close are those that pertain to things like reverse dieting or questions about

body recomposition, particularly building muscle while simultaneously losing fat. Those are all really popular topics, but none more so than creatine. So I figured I'd sit down and record an episode outlining what creatine is, how it works, why it's worth supplementing for healthy adults who want to optimize performance, body composition, et cetera, and then also answer some of those more common creatine-related questions at the end. So for those of you who are not already taking creatine, consider this your creatine masterclass. And for those of you who already are, there's still going to be a lot to learn and we'll have a great conversation. So settle in and enjoy this episode about creatine

monohydrate. So guys, before we dive into kind of our breakdown of everything here with creatine, I want to first do a little bit of housekeeping. So currently in the middle of launching my coaching company at this point, my online coaching roster is close to being full, which is an absolute blessing, something I'm so grateful for. And I want to continue helping people, particularly with the methods that I put together over the last 10 years of coaching clients, either in person or online. And to do that, I had to grow and scale this business. So I am launching my new coaching company. It will be coming very soon. Core Coaching Method is going to be the name, borrowing from some other people in the industry who I think have done very well. But again,

the name Core is going to kind of fundamentally revolve around health-focused coaching that is still going to be very much aligned with whatever it is you want to accomplish with your performance, your aesthetics, whether you're just gen pop and you want to lose a little weight, get in shape for vacation, whatever it may be, leading with health, but putting together some very nuanced, intelligent programming and nutrition coaching that supports people all around the world. And I've just gotten to a place now with the roster of clients who I have that I love working with that I want to continue to give those people my best. And of course, I will still be working with new clients because not everybody sticks around forever. That's part of why they sign up because they want to reach their goals faster. But I will

be bringing on other coaches, people who I've either worked with directly as somebody who maybe at one point in their career was a mentor, coaches who I know very, very well, who do a very good job, whose name I would or whose product I would put my name on. So this is going to be really exciting. And this is coming to you guys very soon. I'm actually finalizing some things on the new website, which I plan on launching hopefully by July. That's why the mentorship has been on hold. I just had to put that on the back burner for now. And then I think the mentorship will launch as part of the core coaching method brand. And hopefully that will be a pathway for more coaches to come and work with us and help us with our

goal of helping as many people live life to the fullest through health and fitness as possible. And lastly, guys, if you want to support the show, if you want to support me and what I'm doing, you can just head over to www.coachedannymetrenga.com. Check out the free guides. Check out the articles. Maybe even check out the programs or online coaching that I offer there. That's the best way to directly support what I'm doing here on the podcast, maybe even check out the programs or online coaching that I offer there.

That's the best way to directly support what I'm doing here on the podcast, what I plan on continuing to do with this new venture. So without further ado, let's go ahead and get in to a kind of breakdown discussion of creatine and how it can help you with your gains. So first, let's talk about what is creatine, right? So creatine is a naturally occurring substance that you can find in muscle cells, right? It helps our muscles produce energy when we lift and we do intense activity, whether that's things like sprinting, even lifting weights, things that are of moderate intensity are going to use creatine as well. And supplemental creatine is quite popular, particularly in the performance enhancement space, particularly in the athletic space,

because it does help with, and we'll get to some of these effects down the road when we talk about the effects, but it does help with performance outcomes. You can buy it at almost any supplement store and it is non-hormonal, right? So it's not that it has steroid-like effects, but it does have performance-enhancing effects without the common performance-enhancing drug side effects or illegalities, right? So creatine is totally safe, totally legal. It is an organic amino acid derivative that our body will naturally make from glycine and arginine. I've heard methionine thrown in there as well, but it really depends on who you talk to. But our body can make a lot of it. The problem is we don't necessarily make enough when we're super active and we don't eat a ton of red meat, right? So how much creatine we store can depend on how much muscle we have, things like genetics, things like testosterone, a lot of different things play a role. But the more active you are, right, the more you might need. And about 95% of the creatine in our body is actually stored in skeletal muscle tissue, which is really, really cool. And then a

little bit is actually in our brain, which we'll talk about a little bit more in a minute, because there might be some neuroprotective benefits of creatine supplementation, but lots of cool stuff. And how it works is our body uses creatine to help recycle ATP, the body's energy currency, more quickly. And there are a lot of things that happen with regards to water retention and muscular strength. We'll talk more about that.

But you wanna think about creatine as something that helps you produce a little more juice in the gym by virtue of helping you regenerate and recycle ATP. So how does creatine improve athletic performance? Well, there's a few ways, right? The first one I mentioned, and it has to do with enhancing our ability to regenerate ATP. enhancing our ability to regenerate ATP. And this in the long run is going to help us produce or create more work per unit of time because we'll just have a little bit more juice. However, creatine has also been associated with rises

in hormones like IGF-1 or insulin-like growth factor, which is also beneficial for muscle growth. And it's been shown to increase satellite cell signaling, which can help with things like growing new muscle tissue or repairing damaged muscle tissue. It also, and this is one of the main side effects that you will hear, will increase hydration of the actual muscle cell. And that is called cell volumization. And so the cell volumization effect that creatine has on muscle tissue really helps us hold more water in our muscle. And that in and of itself might play a role in how our muscles grow. Something else that's interesting is creatine might have

a role in minimizing muscle protein breakdown or excessive protein breakdown associated with perhaps inadequate nutrition paired with intense training, right? So if you train really hard and you don't get adequate carbohydrate intake and adequate protein intake, you might have excessive muscle protein breakdown. But that's far from ideal. And one of the things that can help buffer against that are hormones like insulin or IGF-1, but creatine might also help with that as well. So there's a lot of really cool things that creatine does for the body. But the main thing is it gives us the fuel we need to train hard, gives us a little bit more fuel in our muscle tissue, and might have some positive interactions with the endocrine system. Let's say that positive

for gains. Okay. And that's all well and good. And I think that I have seen plenty of healthy men and healthy women take creatine with zero to no side effects. The most common one I've seen as a coach is digestive distress that I would sign off on it for anybody who's healthy and says, Hey, I want to improve my performance. I want to take something that's going to help me train harder, work a little bit more in the gym, get a little bit more muscular, get a little bit more leaner. And we'll talk about in a minute some of the applications or populations that it might be particularly beneficial for.

But that's really the gist of what creatine does, right? So we know it impacts your muscle gains and your strength and your performance with a variety of different types of exercises. But something else that's really cool is supplemental creatine has been shown to potentially help with cognitive health as well as just generally helping your brain. Like I mentioned, 5% of the creatine that you store in your body is not stored in your muscles. Some of it's stored in the kidneys, some of it's stored in the liver, and some of it is stored in the brain. But supplemental creatine has been shown in research to be beneficial or potentially improve the following conditions.

Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's, Huntington's, epilepsy, stroke, motor neuron disease, memory and brain function in older adults. So it can even just help with general cognitive ability by helping with memory and brain functioning in older adults. And that is a really cool side effect for, or I shouldn't say side effect, that's a really, really cool potential application for this, right? Like we know that older individuals deal with sarcopenia, which is excessive muscle protein breakdown, usually due to sedentary lifestyles and inactivity.

But we also know that as people age, it's not uncommon for them to deal with some form of, let's just call it cognitive slowing, and potentially might see some negative implications regarding memory. Those things might get harder as people age. And that's not saying that, oh, every old person's getting Alzheimer's. It's absolutely untrue. And it's not that old people just lose brain cells or become less quick. Oftentimes, just things don't fire as quickly. That being said, creatine has application for that specific population in that specific mortality, right? Like, okay, could you recommend it to a healthy older adult who wanted to enhance the qualities of their mind? They want to improve their memory and their brain function?

Quite possibly. Could you also recommend it to that same person because it would help them maintain their muscle mass? Quite possibly, right? So we think about creatine as being a supplement that is ideal for younger people in the gym looking to gain weight and get big, right? Because of that water retention effect that everybody loves to talk about when it comes to creatine. And again, we'll talk more about this in a minute. We talk about application, but we're also talking about a population of individuals who might not be resistance training at all and might still benefit from supplemental creatine in the same way that they might benefit

from taking a fish oil or a multivitamin and just exposing their body to this additional creatine, which might be quite effective at helping them age better. So creatine, of course, is a potent performance enhancing supplement and it should be looked at as such. That is, it's probably best application. And a lot of what I've talked about with regards to the cognitive stuff is still relatively novel and you could call it speculative at this point. But I would still argue that we want to begin to shift the discussion about creatine as an industry. If you're a fitness professional, right, listening, if you're an enthusiast, it doesn't matter. You're just choosing whether or not you can take creatine, like that's fine.

But if you're a trainer, we should make an effort as an industry to move the discussion about creatine away from just, you know, hey, this is how it'll help you perform well in the gym towards, hey, these are some of the potential health benefits of taking creatine for those who potentially do not even exercise that much or that rigorously. So it's not just for young dudes looking to get jacked. And that's something that we'll hear about a lot. Hey guys, just wanted to take a quick second to say thanks so much for listening to the podcast.

And if you're finding value, it would mean the world to me if you would share it on your social media. Simply screenshot whatever platform you're listening to and share the episode to your Instagram you would share it on your social media. Simply screenshot whatever platform you're listening to and share the episode to your Instagram story or share it to Facebook. But be sure to tag me so I can say thanks and we can chat it up about what you liked and how I can continue to improve. Thanks so much for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. Lastly, some of the other areas where we've seen creatine play a role or where we can see creatine interacting is with regards to blood sugar, right? I mentioned that it has an effect on IGF-1,

right? Which again, insulin-like growth factor, those are things that are not too dissimilar, but it does have an effect on lowering blood sugar levels, which is wonderful, and also can improve muscle quality in older adults, as well as treating non-fatty liver disease. And so, all pretty interesting things. When it comes to selecting creatine and creatine dosages, there are a variety of different types of creatine on the market. Crealkalin, creatine hydrochloride, creatine magnapower. There have been countless iterations of creatine over the years that supplement companies have made by taking a creatine molecule and trying to bind it to something else.

So creatine magnapower was creatine bound to a magnesium chelate, if I remember correctly. And crealkalin was alkalinized creatine. And creatine HCL was creatine bound to a hydro chelate, if I remember correctly. And cre-alkalin was alkalinized creatine. And creatine HCL was creatine bound to a hydrochloride. And so what you ended up with were these different forms of creatine. But what we know from looking at the literature is that none of those forms of creatine outperform the kind of tried and true gold standard, old school, unsexy creatine monohydrate, which one has more literature surrounding its support than any of the designer forms. And two is quite a bit

less expensive to take. Um, the price per dosage is a fraction of the price per dosage of all of the designer creatines I made or mentioned. And in the research, it's been shown to be very effective. Now, when people start taking creatine, we're going to just, again, we'll use the example of somebody who wants to improve performance. They're often recommended, and this is usually from the actual label of the product, they're often recommended to do what is called loading. And loading creatine is usually taking between 15 to 20 grams up front for about a week. Some people say three to four days, I've seen seven to 10 days. I would say

probably you're going to land somewhere around seven days and taking 20 grams of creatine split up into multiple servings, right? So you're going to drink that multiple times a day, five grams here, five grams there until you get to 20 grams for about a week. And the thought process here is that you're going to reach that maximally saturated level of creatine more quickly through loading than you would if you were just taking a maintenance dose of two to five grams a day. Now, somebody who I respect a ton in our space is Alan Aragon, one of my favorite nutrition researchers. If you guys don't follow Alan's work, I strongly recommend that you do. He knows a lot more about nutrition than I do, and he's a really intelligent human being. And I think he puts out a lot of nuanced content.

And about five years ago, I was at a seminar in San Diego with Alan Aragon, Brett Schoenfeld and Brett Contreras. And Alan was giving a discussion about the impact of loading versus not loading creatine. And what he said that he found in looking through the research is you just read saturation a little bit more slowly when you do not load, but you still read saturation nevertheless. And for me, like I mentioned earlier, the number one thing that I have noticed with my clients who have begun taking creatine, the only side effect that seems to show up with any degree of consistency is digestive distress. And I think a lot of that has to do with the loading phase and trying to, you know, leverage, you know, 20 grams of creatine in your favor when you haven't

been supplementing with it at all. And one of the known potentially negative impacts is digestive distress. 20 grams a day is a lot to start with. And so I think by just starting with a maintenance dose and giving yourself about, you know, two to four weeks for that to become fully saturated, for your body to become fully saturated might minimize the likelihood of digestive distress, or even just trying to load creatine at a lower dose. So if we know that, and this is again, very unscientific, but if we know that 20 grams a day, we can reach saturation in about a week. Maybe we could assume that at 10 grams a day, we might reach saturation by two weeks, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. And at five grams a day, it might take four weeks, maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less. So that's what I would

say. And again, very unscientific. I would recommend if you feel like you have had experience with creatine and digestive sensitivity, I would not recommend a 20 gram a day loading phase or even 10. I would just say, start with two to five grams a day and load it up slowly, build your saturation slowly. And that's what I do for my clients. I've never really had many, if any clients do a full blown 20 gram a day loading phase. I just think that in most instances, we have the time we need to allow creatine saturation to occur. Um, I have heard that, and this is, I have heard this from multiple different people who I trust And the literature seems to support it as well that if we're talking about when exactly the best time to take creatine is

It's probably going to be with a meal around Training and the reason I mentioned that is because insulin has the ability to help get creatine into cells more quickly. And you will usually get an insulin bump from a meal that's rich in carbohydrate or protein, particularly dairy protein. And so if you wanted to optimize that window, and we know that our body is slightly more sensitive around that training window, and we know that our body might absorb it better

in the presence of insulin, we can then go, okay, what if we had this around the workout, right in that workout window, but with a food that might be insulinemic or help us produce insulin. So that could be our pre-workout meal or our post-workout meal. And so what I tend to recommend clients do is take their creatine after they finish training with their post-workout meal or their post-workout shake, or just drink it when you're leaving the gym. And that way, when you go into your next meal, you have some circulating creatine, that insulin spike or insulin bump, if you will, will likely help with the absorption there. And so that's all really, really simple stuff, right? When to take creatine around your workout. If you want to really optimize it, probably with a meal,

how much to take for most people, if time is not an issue and efficacy, you know, being equated, you know, we know what's going to be as effective at the end of the day, whether we start with loading 10, 20 or five grams, we know that at some point we're going to reach saturation and there's going to be diminishing marginal returns. Taking more isn't going to be any better. I would say start with five grams a day and try to position that around your training with a meal, not rocket science, right? And again, creatine has a lot, a lot of research supporting its efficacy. I'm not a doctor. You shouldn't listen to me about

anything, right? But there are a lot of long-term studies showing that creatine is very safe to take. Now, there are also some rumors going around that creatine might cause baldness because it somehow interacts with DHT. And I just have not seen this. I have no reason to believe that there's any validity to this. I think that you might, gosh, I might be wrong, but there might've been a study done that associated rugby players or lifters who supplemented creatine with increased likelihood of male pattern baldness. But I don't even know if that study looked to parse out whether these individuals were taking anabolic steroids, which do, many of which do convert to DHT and do expedite hair loss.

The other thing is most of your, you know, like conventional male pattern baldness is going to be determined by your genetics. So if you have the genetic predisposition to lose your hair, maybe creatine would speed that along. Maybe not. But if you don't have the genetic predisposition, I wouldn't worry about it. And a lot of times I'll hear women going, Oh, if I take creatine, am I going to go bald? Like that's one of the many questions I get. And I can understand why a woman might be a little bit more concerned about that than perhaps a man would. Not that hair loss for anybody is a particularly fun thing to experience. I digress. But I just, I don't have any reason to believe that that's true. And I've seen a lot of intelligent people kind of step out

and say, Hey, not enough research here to draw a definitive line. And anecdotally speaking, we can't really say that it's particularly likely to cause baldness because we just don't seem to see people start taking creatine and their hair magically falls out. Some people just have a tendency to lose their hair. So let's talk about populations or applications for who I think would be well versus taking creatine. Number one, anybody looking to build muscle or optimize performance should be taking supplemental creatine if they're healthy. That's my honest opinion. Population two, anybody who plays a sport competitively should be taking creatine.

In my opinion, it will help you perform well. And having saturated creatine stores is not particularly expensive. It's a very affordable supplement to take, and it's been proven to improve multiple different athletic metrics. So athletes for sure, anybody looking to improve their body composition for sure. People who are trying to lose body fat, I'm often asked, well, if creatine helps you build muscle and it helps you get big, should I take it when I'm cutting? And my answer is absolutely, because remember, it has a protein sparing effect. And that's very beneficial when you're in a calorie deficit, it will help you maintain muscle. It also has those positive benefits with regards to its interaction with things like IGF-1,

its ability to get into your cells and help you lift a little bit more, help you push a little bit harder might be nice when food is at a premium. So that's another population that I absolutely recommend it for. And then that last little piece that we talked about, and again, it's more speculative, is just older adults who maybe they're fitness enthusiasts, maybe they're not, but older adults who want to stave off the potential deleterious impact of muscle loss by supplementing with creatine. And definitely, I think there's reason to be excited about the potential impact it might have as a neuroprotective agent, as something that protects the brain, helps the brain,

and interacts with the brain. So I would say that speculatively healthy older adults who lift or do not lift might also benefit from taking creatine. So that's a pretty robust list, right? We're talking about people across a variety of spectrums with a variety of different goals who could benefit from taking supplemental creatine. And the creatine that I take every day is legions recharge. It has a couple other things added to it to help with absorption and just general muscle recovery, which I like because I want to get the absolute most out of my supplement experience. And again, if you're looking for ways you can support the show, guys, you can just head over to legionathletics.com, order your creatine there, use the code DANNY, save 20% on your order and get double points.

And that helps support the show. So guys, that will do it for today's kind of creatine breakdown episode. I really appreciate you guys listening and supporting the podcast. If you have not already, do me a favor and head on over to the iTunes store and just go ahead and leave me a five-star rating or review. That's how more people find the podcast or do something even simpler, like share it to your Instagram story so that more people can see it. Because even though a lot of you probably have a very good handle on the nuances of how creatine works, and you maybe even have been taking it for quite some time,

I think that a lot of people still have a lot of questions. And then special shout out to Rudy Maurer, who wrote a wonderful article on Healthline about creatine. And that's where I got a lot of the information that I shared with you guys today. And I even looked through some of the references and I must say, my man did a wonderful job. So you guys enjoy the rest of your day. Have a wonderful week and stay tuned for the next episode.