Your Creatine Will Absorb 30% Better if You Do This

We've seen that five grams can build muscle. Now we're seeing that it can actually help us drop fat, cut inflammation, and do some crazy things when it comes to hydration. And I'm talking about deep hydration that can affect us metabolically. Not just a I've had enough water and I feel good kind of thing. The thing is, if you're taking creatine right now and you're not taking it alongside certain things, you could actually be wasting up to 30% of the benefit. I'm not talking about some like fancy form of creatine. I'm talking about something so fundamental that almost everyone overlooks it. Creatine helps us hydrate, but hydration helps us absorb more creatine. So before you kind of think, Thomas, I drink enough water. That's not what I mean. The reality is that water alone isn't enough. There's a specific mechanism inside your cells. It's a transporter and it literally requires sodium to pull creatine in. And if that gradient is off, your creatine is just kind of floating around in your blood, not really getting into the muscle. That's kind of like the equivalent of just like ordering something on Amazon and then just leaving it on the porch in the rain. So, today we're doing a deep dive into the science of how creatine and hydration are a two-way street. At the very end, I'm also going to share an interesting compound that almost nobody is pairing with creatine. Okay? But the mechanism suggests that it could really amplify everything we're talking about. So, here's what we're going to cover. Number one, we're going to talk about why creatine literally cannot work without the proper hydration, not just hydration. We're going to talk about the specific transporter that it needs. Secondly, we're going to talk about the insulin connection. And this is why eating creatine on an empty stomach with plain water is fine, but you're not getting everything you could out of. And then number three is the flip side. How creatine actually improves your hydration and increases your muscle glycogen through a pretty remarkable glute for mechanism. And then finally, number four, which I consider sort of a secret weapon. This is a compound that when you pair it with creatine and electrolytes can be the ultimate like cellular hydration stack, which amplifies the effects of creatine. So the first thing is we have to look at what people don't always understand

about creatine. Creatine is not just like a powder that makes your muscles bigger and creates energy. It's what scientists call a cellular osmolyte. Okay? And that means that the primary mechanism of action like the way it actually works inside the cell is by pulling water in. That water uptake, that cellular swelling isn't actually just a side effect. It's one of the main reasons that creatine exists. Okay, there was an article that was published in the Journal of Applied Physiology way back in 2001 and it laid it out really well. They confirmed that creatine increases cellular hydration, but where it gets interesting is that they also noted that this hydration effect and its impact on protein turnover may not be mutually exclusive events. The reason that creatine helps you build and retain muscle might actually be because of the hydration. The part that surprised me when I was diving into this that the more recent data from that same review, both in vitro and vivo, suggested that the hydration effect from creatine is more closely tied to reducing muscle protein breakdown rather than increasing muscle protein synthesis. So, the hydration effect we get from creatine protects our muscle from breaking down. So, creatine isn't always so much building new muscle as it's protecting the muscle you already have by keeping the cells properly hydrated and swollen, which is a very big distinction. I mean, it still creates ATP, which allows you to train hard. But if creatine needs water to work, then creatine needs you to be hydrated to work. And this is where a lot of people might fall short. So, if we talk about creatine uptake first, creatine cannot just float through your cell membrane. It relies on a specific transporter. And this transporter is called SLC688. sodium dependent. So, it literally couples creatine uptake to the inward movement of sodium ions. So, if your sodium levels are off and like if you're dehydrated and sodium gradient is weak, like it's just out of balance, the transporter doesn't do its job. So, your creatine gets locked out and you may not even realize it's happening until you're like, "Oh, this didn't work today. " When you're dehydrated, your body increases something that's called AM to ADP ratio. Okay? This activates AMPK, which can be great for fat loss. It's like your body's energy triage system. So, it basically says if we're in survival mode, shut down anything that's not essential. And guess what gets deprioritized? energyintensive transport processes including creatine uptake. So your body is essentially saying creatine can wait. We have bigger things to deal with. Again, we'll talk about how you kind of combat this because there's a whole other side we have to look at too which is like the delivery side which is more straightforward but it's just as important because if you're dehydrated your plasma volume drops that means less blood flow and less nutrients delivered to the muscle and less creatine actually reaches the transporter in the first place. So adequate hydration is going to drive up the blood flow and that's going to bump up that nutrient transport and it increases intramuscular volume expansion. So you're literally creating more ways for creatine to travel into the right place. So one thing that can actually help creatine surprisingly is actually taking it with a small amount of carbohydrate because every gram of glycogen holds 3 to 4 g of water. So if your glycogen is low, your body is holding less water and that creatine osmotic effect that we talked about gets kind of weakened. You almost need to utilize electrolytes and possibly a small amount of carbs around the time you take creatine. That's why you do see a lot of people taking carbs with creatine and like old school brands used to do that. It's less about having a bunch of carbs and it's more about taking it with sodium. More importantly, taking it with a balance of your electrolytes. Creatine plus electrolytes is a really good combination. If you happen to also be taking it around some food, it would be advantageous to take it with a small amount of carbohydrates cuz that could increase the uptake as well. Sodium is just the beginning of the story. There's an insulin connection that can kind of change how we utilize creatine as well. I popped the link down

below for the creatine that I recommend. It's a company called Create. They have a variety of different creatine products. They have their creatine gummies which are sweetened with alulose as well as the right amount of glucose to help creatine uptake. But the alulose helps offset the glucose from a metabolic perspective. So, it's a cool combination with their gummies. They also have their stick packs and they have a couple other products that they're rolling out that sort of satisfy some of the things that we're talking about today. So, again, if you're taking creatine, take it with electrolytes and take it with some food. You could absolutely take it fasted, but you want to make sure that you're occasionally getting enough carbs in when you're taking it in multiple doses throughout the day. So anyway, I put that link down below to check out create creatine. But after I talk about the this carbohydrate

insulin part in just a second, there is a mistake that people make with creatine and sodium and I want to make sure that I address that. So after we get through the carbohydrate part, I'll talk on that. So if we look at the creatine transporter, SLC 68A, it is a sodium and chloride dependent transporter. So it couples creatine uptake to the inward movement of sodium and that sodium gradient is maintained by the sodium potassium pump. Now this pump constantly pushes sodium out of the cell. So that there's more sodium outside than inside. That concentration difference is what creates the pulling force for creatine. So a stronger gradient equals a stronger pull. Like more creatine getting into the actual muscle. Now while there's no RCT directly comparing high sodium versus low sodium for creatine loading. And that's an important caveat. We can still piece things together from the human data. There was a classic 1996 study in Actphysiologica. And it's really interesting here because they took four groups of 22 healthy males and they had them ingest different combinations. So group A got 5 g of creatine in a solution. Groups B and C got 5 g of creatine plus 93 g of simple carbs. And then group D got a placebo with no creatine and no carbs. What they found is that carbohydrate ingestion significantly augmented creatine retention during the creatine feeding. Now why this matters for the sodium discussion is that the reason that carbs help is because of insulin. Okay, insulin signaling itself is supported by adequate plasma volume and sodium potassium pumps both of which are sodium dependent processes. So it's not just the carbs, it's the entire downstream cascade with carbs and sodium and creatine. Now I'm not saying you consume 93 g of carbs with your creatine. I'm saying it might work well with meals, right? So it brings us to the three insulin mechanisms that make this really powerful. Okay, so mechanism number one, we look at a study in experimental and therapeutic medicine. This showed that insulin significantly increases the sodium potassium ATPA's activity within the muscle. So when insulin goes up, the pump works harder, the sodium gradient gets stronger and creatine gets pulled in more aggressively. It's a direct amplification of the really the transporter's driving force. Then when we look at mechanism 2, okay, we found that insulin stimulates vasoddilation in skeletal muscle. They identified that nitric oxide is the main thing here. So more blood flow means more creatine delivered to the muscle membrane and more transporter exposure to creatine. So think of it like widening a highway and increasing the speed limit at the same time. And then the third mechanism is one that kind of brings it all together cuz we know that creatine enters the cell and pulls water in. It causes the cell to swell. And we know that cell swelling triggers anabolic signaling. Insulin enhances this entire process. So insulin has been like implicated as a key player in increasing muscle protein synthesis. Like we've seen that before. And it reduces the breakdown of muscle. But it does this by ramping up mTor and driving up muscle protein synthesis. Basically dropping muscle protein breakdown when we increase muscle protein synthesis. So insulin is not just helping creatine get into the cell. It's amplifying what creatine does once it's there. Just so it's clear. Basically small amount of carbohydrates with creatine don't just let creatine get in, they amplify it more. So when the cell swells and we get that anabolic signaling, the cell retains osmolytes including creatine. So when insulin helps the cell swell, the cell then holds on to more creatine. So it's called a positive feedback loop. More insulin, more swelling. More creatine, more retention, better result. And you don't need much. I'm talking small amounts of carbohydrates. So it's like creatine with electrolytes with real food is the best absorption. Not to say you can't have it on an empty stomach. The thing is, you just don't want to take it dehydrated or in a sodium depleted state. Okay? The worst case scenario is that you've been like sweating through a workout or through a sauna. you're depleted and you just throw back creatine with plain water. That's the recipe for digestive issues. You're not absorbing it. No wonder you get bloated and then you end up having diarrhea. Instead, you want to rehydrate first with water and electrolytes. Take your creatine either along with that or shortly thereafter. And if possible, try to have it with your mixed meal. So, one a meal that has some carbohydrates. You don't need much. Again, we're talking like 10 15 g of carbs. The meal could do the job. But the most important thing is going to be the electrolytes. That way, you're hitting all the bases. better insulin response, you're getting stronger sodium gradient, and you're getting good blood volume. So again, all you need is maybe 10 to 30 grams of carbs, pinch of salt, uh some potassium to help that overall pump, but just like a general electrolyte will work. And there is a glycogen mechanism here

that's really fascinating. If we flip the script, creatine is not just dependent on hydration. Itself enhances hydration, right? And it gets kind of cool because we've already established that creatine transport into cells is coupled with that inward movement of sodium, the sodium coming. So this increases the osmotic load inside the cell. So this more like dissolved particles inside than outside. So more that's not puffiness that's the cell that's actually holding water. So you're like bowl of muscle. So to maintain that balance, water gets drawn in and that's the cell swelling that we talked about, right? So this is really important for not just getting creatine in, but it holds the intracellular electrolytes. So your cells are literally self-regulating their hydration status. And creatine is like one of the main, if not the main driver. Remember that study I mentioned a little earlier where I was talking about creatine basically stopping muscle protein breakdown. Part of the anti catabolic response from this includes decreased proteolysis and reducing amino acid e-lux also. So part of this whole anti catabolic response is actually the increased water conservation. So your cells are essentially saying we are swollen. We're in an anabolic state. Let's hold on to everything including water, creatine, and nutrients. It's just in a progrowth mode. It gets really interesting when we start factoring in glycogen. Okay? Because there was a study in journal diabetes that took 22 people, okay, to put them through a pretty gnarly protocol. They immobilized one leg in a cast for 2 weeks. And you can imagine that would cause the muscle to atrophy. After that, the subjects did a 10-week resistance training rehab program and half of them got creatine and the other half got a placebo. So during the immobilization phase, they saw glute 4 content drop by like 20%, they weren't able to get glucose into the cell very well. And that 20% drop is big. But in the actual creatine group, they saw a 9% increase in glute 4, meaning creatine essentially protected the transporter during disuse. But then when it came to rehab, after 3 weeks of training, the creatine group had glute 4 levels that were about 40% higher than baseline along with like way higher muscle glycogen. So it was changing the entire dynamics of the muscle. The placebo group normalized and didn't even see that super compensation effect, whereas the creatine group did everything else the same, but they recovered and rebuilt muscle. And this matters for hydration because glycogen's water binding effect. So every single gram of glycogen stored in your muscle holds 3 to four grams of water with it. So if creatine is increasing glute 4 and therefore increasing carb storage, it is also indirectly increasing the total amount of water in your muscle tissue. So you're not just hydrating the cell through the osmotic creatine effect. You're hydrating it through increased glycogen storage plus the creatine sort of compounding in a double hydration effect. So, it's another reason why you want to pair creatine with food when you can. Again, we already established this because the carbs help creatine get into the cell, but this also helps the creatine do a better job upreguls glucose get into the cell better. So, it might literally even help you metabolize carbs better. Now, I promised you kind

of an interesting compound in the beginning of the video. This is something that I've talked about before, but nobody's really talking about it in the context of creatine, but the science is for somebody that's just not popular yet. So, I'm talking about torine. And most people associate torine with like the old energy drinks because they have torine in So they just kind of dismiss it. But torine is one of the most abundant, most powerful aminos in your body. We can find it in massive concentrations in the brain, in the heart, and in the muscle. But when you understand it, you can see what it does in like an acute setting, at a cellular level. It's a very powerful compound because it's also an osmolyte just like creatine. So it's regulating fluid balance within the cells. That's a lot of people take torine for cramping. It's something that I used to do. But what makes it different and potentially synergistic? Creatine pulls water into the cell through the like osmotic effect I talked about. Whereas torine helps regulate and stabilize that hydration. So think of creatine as like a force that brings water in and torine as a system that manages it once it's there. Without proper regulation, the cells just end up becoming either oversw and they can actually lose that electrochemical kind of ionic balance. So torine prevents that. So they work synergistically. So torine plays a role in the calcium handling within the muscle cells too. So you have calcium cells that are like what regulate muscle contraction, the actual like actin meosin interaction that makes your muscles work. porine is improving the calcium sensitivity. So it means that you have a more efficient contraction and like basically a better contraction relaxation cycle. So you're getting the ATP for the energy from the creatine and torine is making sure that it's doing the right thing. So you're not cramping. You've got the fuel and sort of the motor actually working right. And then we have torine affecting the mitochondria. So when you have like significant oxidative stress load like during intense exercise, you accumulate these reactive oxygen species which are metabolic byproducts that impair your ATP synthesis. So torine is buffering against that oxidative stress and it's protecting the environment in which creatine is doing its work. So creatine makes more energy. Torine neutralizes the exhaust, right? And torine has its own transporter which is SLC 6A6 which is separate from the SLC 6A8. So they're actually not competing for the same doorway into the cell. So you can take them together and they're not going to interfere, but they're going to work together once they're in the cell. So when you combine creatine plus torine plus electrolytes, you're building like a really cool hydration trifecta. So the sodium powers the creatine transporter. The creatine pulls the water in and provides the actual energy. Then the torine stabilizes the hydration and it optimizes like the contraction of the muscles. Then you've got the electrolytes to kind of maintain the gradients and it becomes a really simple basic thing. So just to kind of recap

take three to 10 to 15 grams of creatine. Take it with electrolytes. Take it with a carbohydrate meal. If you are trying to load prior to a longer event or really hyper hydrate, take it with a little bit of torine. You can take it with anywhere from 500 milligrams, probably up to six grams of torine. Quite frankly, whatever you don't use, you're just going to urinate out. So, I would say lean on taking a little bit more torine cuz has a lot of powerful effects in cardiac tissue and regular muscle. So, if you've been taking creatine and you're just getting bloated or you're getting puffy, you may want to consider how you're taking it and why you're taking it. Try these tips. And then I also did a video here

that breaks down the newer evidence on creatine and inflammation and how to use it for that specific use case. So, I linked out to that video here. I highly recommend you check it out.