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Creatine Loading, by Jason Norcross

To understand creatine, you have to understand energy metabolism.

The currency that is used to create energy in the body is ATP. In general, there is only enough stored ATP to generate energy for about 1 sec. After that it must be resynthesized.

The compounds used to resynthesize ATP are listed in order of how the would be used and for how long during a maximal effort. (understand that there is a lot of overlap between these and you don't move stepwise from 1 through 3)

1. Phosphocreatine: 0-45 secs

2. Anaerobic Glycolysis: 15 secs-2 min

3. Aerobic metabolism of fat and glycogen: 2 min +

Usually, when it comes to weightlifting, we primarily tap into the first two energy sources.

The problem with the second one (anaerobic glycolysis) is that one of the byproducts of this metabolism is lactic acid (LA). When LA accumulates in the muscle, performance suffers.

The advantage of staying in the phosphocreatine window is that LA is not produced when relying on phosphocreatine to resynthesize ATP. This prolongs the onset of LA accumulation and the onset of fatigue.

So additional supplementation of creatine will help increase your stored amount of phosphocreatine and will allow you to have greater muscular endurance while training. So now, if you can lift a weight 9-10 times and you used to only be able to lift it 8 times, you can actually train harder and grow faster.

Creatine does not significantly affect maximal strength over the short term, but by allowing you to train harder it will improve it over the long term.

There are also some advantages when it comes to creatine regarding volumnizing (stretching and loading) of the cell, but these are not well understood. Suffice it to say though, that these effects are important and will benefit you in the long run regarding an increase in muscle mass.

My suggestion for creatine intake is to take 5g every morning with breakfast dissolved in warm green tea. Then take an additional 5g in your post-workout shake. This keep levels constantly high and adds extra creatine in an optimal window of muscle metabolism. Read my post on phosphogain mixing for my post-workout suggestion or check out this article at T-mag for a more detailed analysis of the issue: www.t-mag.com/articles/186nutri.html

Jason Norcross