-->
Does creatine make you smarter?
-->
Does creatine make you smarter?
dynomight ·<br>Jul 2026
science
health
Is creatine a weird steroid-like hormone or drug?
No. Creatine is a nutrient. Most omnivores eat a gram or two per day from meat. Your body also synthesizes a gram or two per day. You need creatine to deliver energy inside of cells. It is normal and non-weird.
Does creatine increase testosterone?
Unlikely. This concern comes from one study in 2009 on 16 male rugby players.1 But that study is considered extremely suspect. There have been at least twelve other studies that all found no change or physiologically irrelevant changes. Beyond that, it’s implausible that creatine would increase testosterone, because we know what creatine does and it has nothing to do with hormones.
Does creatine make you go bald?
No. Or, rather:
No study ever reported that.
One study reported the opposite.
There is no mechanistic reason to think that would happen.
There are good mechanistic reasons to think that would not happen.
These rumors all trace back to speculation built on top of that same single 2009 study. But that study is contradicted by later research, and anyway didn’t measure hair. Anything is possible, but as far as I can tell, it’s equally plausible that creatine would increase hair growth. And if you’re really worried about this: Are you going to stop eating meat?
Is creatine safe?
Probably. The International Society of Sports Nutrition says:
Available short and long-term studies in healthy and diseased populations, from infants to the elderly, at dosages ranging from 0.3 to 0.8 g/kg/day for up to 5 years have consistently shown that creatine supplementation poses no adverse health risks and may provide a number of health and performance benefits.
It’s been studied extensively, and no risks have been found. The way it works doesn’t suggest any risks. And supplementing a few grams per day doesn’t put you far outside the range that people get from normal food.
Does creatine make you stronger?
Yes. It’s very rare for a supplement to have such strong and consistent evidence. A widely-cited review says that short-term supplementation increases maximal power/strength by 5-15%. This in turn may increase the long-term gainz from strength-training exercise. Creatine also increases sprint performance by 1-5%. Though, there seems to be little if any benefit for endurance exercise like long-distance running.
But how does creatine make you stronger?
Before answering that, can I go on a rant about how muscles work?
…OK?
Great! Here’s how muscles work:
All cells have a molecule called ATP floating around inside, which they use for energy.
Muscle cells have proteins in them called myosin.
When ATP bumps into myosin, the myosin breaks the ATP down into ADP. This releases energy which is physically captured by the myosin as elastic strain.
When triggered by neurons, myosin releases that mechanical energy.
When you decide to move your arm, your brain triggers many muscle cells, carefully orchestrating the myosin twitches into large-scale movement.
Now, here’s something that’s crucial for our story: Very little energy is stored as ATP. Your body contains ~100 grams of ATP, representing ~10,000 joules of energy.2 But your body at rest burns ~100 watts. So you only store enough ATP to keep yourself alive for ~100 seconds. If you sprint, you could easily burn ~3000 watts, which would use all your stored ATP in ~3 seconds.
Through the magic of eating, you’re always making more ATP. Typically, your mitochondria recycle ~1 gram of ADP back into ATP per second, the same amount you need to stay alive.3 If you start running, your body can ramp that up to ~10 grams per second, though tricks like breathing faster and speeding up your heart.4 But it takes a minute or two for your mitochondria to really get cranking.5
So then why am I able to sprint for longer than three seconds?
Because creatine acts as an additional energy reservoir, coupled to the ATP reservoir. After you eat or synthesize creatine, 60% is converted into phosphocreatine. This is done by an enzyme that grabs a creatine molecule and an ATP molecule and moves a phosphate group between them. This “charges” the creatine into phosphocreatine and “discharges” the ATP into ADP.6
But if your ATP levels drop—e.g. because you’re running away from a tiger—those enzymes will run in reverse, meaning they “discharge” phosphocreatine into creatine and “charge” ADP back into ATP. This happens almost instantly, so that ATP and phosphocreatine deplete at the same rate.7
At rest, your muscles contain around 3-4 times as much phosphocreatine as ATP. So the “extra” energy storage in phosphocreatine is much larger than the “base” storage in ATP itself. That’s why you can sprint for ten seconds rather than just three seconds.
Does supplementing creatine increase creatine levels in muscle cells?
Yes. Typical levels are:
Vegetarian: 100 mmol /...