Creatine Loading

The manipulation of the creatine pool in the muscle has become very popular among professional and amateur athletes, with many of them now using oral creatine monohydrate supplementation to help boost the creatine supply to the working muscles.

There are many advantages and disadvantages to creatine loading, for example, the cost, effectiveness and increased body mass/fat free weight. Depending on your end goal for taking creatine these may or may not be desirable. To boost your phosphate levels you will need an intake of between 4g and 6g of sodium phosphate per day for 3 to 4 days. Creatine loading in this manner will maintain high phosphate levels for about 2 weeks, which is about how long it takes to work out of your system. After this time period you will need to re-load.

Creatine Loading
Using a creatine loading dosage will bring the creatine pools in the muscles to their optimum levels. Studies have been performed that have utilised a loading dose of 20g per day for 5 days and have found that this can increase the total creatine pool in the muscles by 20 to 25%. This enhancement has led to an increase in the physical performance of high-intensity, repetitive exercise. The reason for the increase in performance was being linked to the increase in muscular creatine and thus an increase in muscular levels of creatine phosphate.