Creatine Isn't Just for Bodybuilders. Should Everyone Be Taking It?
For decades, creatine had an image problem.
Walk into a supplement store 20 years ago and you were likely to find a giant tub of creatine sitting somewhere between the pre-workout powders and weight-gainer shakes. It was marketed primarily to young men who wanted bigger muscles, heavier bench presses, and better performance in the gym.
Today, the conversation looks very different.
Creatine is increasingly being discussed not just as a sports supplement, but as a potential tool for healthy aging, maintaining muscle, preserving physical function, and possibly even supporting brain health. Women are taking it. Older adults are taking it. Physicians and researchers are talking about it. And people who have never touched a barbell are wondering whether they should be adding a scoop to their morning routine.
So, has creatine gone from a bodybuilding supplement to something virtually everyone should take?
Not quite.
But there is considerably more to creatine than building bigger biceps.
First, What Exactly Is Creatine?
Creatine isn't a steroid, stimulant, hormone, or synthetic shortcut to muscle growth.
It's a naturally occurring compound produced by your body from amino acids. You also consume creatine through foods—particularly meat and seafood.
Most of the creatine in the body is stored in skeletal muscle, where it helps maintain the availability of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP.
ATP is essentially the body's immediate cellular energy currency.
During a hard set of squats, a sprint up the stairs, or any other brief bout of intense activity, your muscles burn through available ATP extremely quickly. Stored phosphocreatine helps regenerate ATP, allowing the muscle to continue producing high levels of force.
Taking creatine increases these stores.
That relatively simple physiological effect explains why creatine has been studied so extensively for athletic performance.
But muscle isn't the only tissue that requires energy.
Your brain does too.
And that has helped push creatine research into some fascinating new territory.
What Does Creatine Actually Do for Muscle?
This remains the area where the evidence is strongest.
When combined with resistance training, creatine supplementation can improve strength, power, exercise capacity, and gains in lean body mass beyond training alone.
There's an important distinction here, however.
Creatine doesn't simply manufacture muscle while you sit on the couch.
If your goal is to become stronger or add muscle, the primary stimulus is still progressive resistance exercise. Creatine can enhance the response to that stimulus.
Think of it as an amplifier—not a replacement.
That distinction becomes increasingly important as we age.
Creatine May Become More Relevant as You Get Older
One of the major physiological challenges of aging is the gradual loss of skeletal muscle mass and, perhaps even more importantly, muscle strength and power.
Eventually, this isn't about how someone looks in a bathing suit.
It's about whether you can climb stairs, carry groceries, get off the floor, prevent a fall, maintain independence, and continue doing the things you enjoy.
Resistance training remains one of our most effective countermeasures.
Creatine may make that training more effective.
Research in older adults has found benefits of combining creatine supplementation with resistance training for measures including lean tissue and strength. Research specifically involving postmenopausal women continues to investigate these effects as well.
That means the person who potentially benefits from creatine isn't necessarily a 22-year-old bodybuilder.
It might be his 65-year-old mother.
Then There's the Brain
This is where creatine gets especially interesting—and where we need to be careful not to get ahead of the science.
The brain has enormous energy requirements, and the creatine-phosphocreatine system participates in cerebral energy metabolism just as it does in muscle.
Researchers have therefore begun asking an obvious question:
"If supplemental creatine can increase the availability of creatine in the body, could it also affect cognition?"
The answer so far is... possibly.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized trials found evidence of improvements in some measures of memory, attention, and processing speed following creatine supplementation. Other analyses have found particularly interesting results involving memory.
More recent research has continued examining creatine and cognition in older adults. A 2026 systematic review reported that five of six included studies found a positive relationship between creatine and cognition, particularly memory and attention.
But there is an important caveat.
The cognitive evidence is nowhere near as established as the evidence for muscular performance. Studies vary considerably, some are small, and another systematic review has characterized the overall cognitive findings as equivocal.
So, I wouldn't call creatine a "brain supplement" yet.
And I certainly wouldn't claim that taking creatine prevents dementia or makes a healthy person smarter.
Those claims go beyond the evidence.
What we can say is that creatine's potential effects on the brain are scientifically plausible and sufficiently promising to warrant continued research.
That's quite different from saying they've been proven.
What About Women?
Another outdated idea is that creatine is primarily a supplement for men.
There is no physiological reason women should be excluded from the conversation.
Women have the same creatine-phosphocreatine energy system, and researchers have become increasingly interested in creatine supplementation across different stages of women's lives.
The potential relevance becomes particularly interesting during and after menopause, when changes in muscle mass, strength, and bone health become increasingly important.
A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis specifically examined creatine monohydrate in postmenopausal women, reflecting just how far the research has moved beyond the traditional young-male-athlete population.
Women should also understand one practical issue: creatine can cause the scale to increase somewhat because additional creatine stored in muscle draws water with it.
That is not the same thing as gaining body fat.
Does Creatine Cause Water Weight?
It can.
And this may actually be creatine's most misunderstood side effect.
Creatine supplementation increases water associated with muscle creatine storage, particularly when someone first begins taking it or uses a high-dose loading protocol.
Consequently, you may gain some weight.
If you're fixated on the bathroom scale, this can be disconcerting.
But increased body weight and increased body fat are not synonymous.
If your weight goes up after beginning creatine while your caloric intake hasn't substantially changed, don't automatically conclude that you've gained fat.
What About Your Kidneys?
This may be the most persistent concern surrounding creatine.
For healthy adults taking recommended doses, available evidence has not demonstrated that creatine damages healthy kidneys.
There is, however, an interesting wrinkle.
Creatine supplementation can affect creatinine, a commonly measured blood marker used in estimating kidney function. That can sometimes complicate interpretation of laboratory results.
Creatinine and creatine are related compounds, but an increase in serum creatinine does not automatically mean your kidneys have been damaged.
This is one reason your healthcare provider should know which supplements you're taking.
And the phrase "healthy adults" matters.
Someone with known kidney disease—or another medical condition that could affect the appropriateness of supplementation—should discuss creatine with a qualified healthcare professional rather than assuming that recommendations for healthy people automatically apply to them.
Do You Need to "Load" Creatine?
No.
A traditional creatine-loading protocol often involves approximately 20 grams per day, divided into several doses, for about five to seven days before transitioning to a lower maintenance dose.
That works.
It's also unnecessary for most people.
Taking approximately 3–5 grams of creatine monohydrate per day will gradually increase muscle creatine stores without a loading phase.
Loading simply gets you there faster.
For the average person, simplicity usually wins.
Does Timing Matter?
Probably much less than people think.
You don't need to sprint toward your shaker bottle within 30 seconds of finishing your workout because some mythical "anabolic window" is closing.
If you're taking creatine, consistency matters considerably more than obsessing over whether you take it at 7:00 a.m. or 4:15 p.m.
Take it at a time that makes it easy to remember.
What Type Should You Buy?
This is another area where supplement marketing makes something simple unnecessarily complicated.
You'll encounter creatine hydrochloride, buffered creatine, creatine nitrate, creatine gummies, liquid creatine, proprietary creatine blends, and products promising superior absorption.
You don't need any of them.
Creatine monohydrate remains the standard.
It's inexpensive, extensively studied, and effective.
Paying substantially more for an exotic form of creatine doesn't automatically produce a substantially better result.
So, Should Everyone Take Creatine?
No.
"Everyone should take this" is rarely a scientifically defensible statement about a dietary supplement.
If you are healthy, active, eat a good diet, exercise regularly, and don't take creatine, you're not neglecting some essential component of human health.
Creatine isn't an essential vitamin. You won't develop a creatine-deficiency disease because you don't have a tub of powder in your kitchen.
But the opposite extreme is outdated too.
Creatine should no longer be viewed simply as a bodybuilding supplement.
The strongest case remains for people performing resistance training or repeated high-intensity exercise. But creatine may also be particularly relevant for older adults trying to preserve muscle and physical function, people who consume little or no meat or seafood, and potentially individuals interested in some of the emerging cognitive applications being investigated.
For many healthy adults, 3–5 grams of creatine monohydrate daily is a relatively inexpensive, extensively researched option with a favorable safety profile.
Just keep the expectations realistic.
Creatine isn't going to compensate for poor sleep.
It won't replace resistance training.
It won't fix a bad diet.
It won't magically melt body fat.
And despite what you may see on social media, we don't yet have sufficient evidence to call it a longevity drug or a cognitive miracle.
But among the thousands of supplements marketed to consumers with grand promises and remarkably little evidence, creatine occupies an unusual position:
It actually has a substantial body of research behind it.
And the more scientists study it, the less it looks like a supplement exclusively for bodybuilders.
References
Marshall S, Kitzan A, Wright J, Bocicariu L, Nagamatsu LS. Creatine and cognition in aging: A systematic review of evidence in older adults. *Nutrition Reviews*. 2026;84(2):333–344.
Xu C, Bi S, Zhang W, Luo L. The effects of creatine supplementation on cognitive function in adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis. *Frontiers in Nutrition*. 2024.
Prokopidis K, et al. Effects of creatine supplementation on memory in healthy individuals: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. *Nutrition Reviews*. 2023;81(4):416–427.
Forbes SC, et al. Creatine monohydrate for lean mass, strength, and bone density in postmenopausal women: A systematic review and meta-analysis. *Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition*. 2026.
National Institutes of Health, Office of Dietary Supplements. Dietary Supplements for Exercise and Athletic Performance: Health Professional Fact Sheet.
Mayo Clinic. Creatine: Evidence, safety, and clinical considerations.
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