I’ve been max dosing creatine for 6 months but did not expect this…

creatine is very safe creatine's one of the one of the safest supplements creatine has also been shown to have an important role in brain function creatine robustly helps add a small but notable amount of muscle size to your body the best sports supplements out there it's scientifically proven to Be an Effective and safe supplement to help you build stronger and bigger muscles creatine creatine creatine creatine creatine creatine creatine out a kitchen Kermit note hey what's up folks in today's video I am going to share with you my experiences max dosing creatine so usually the standard dosage is around 5 G per day and for the past 3 months I've been taking around 15 G and I didn't expect some of the things to have happened happened so that's what I'm going to be talking about in today's video and also I'm going to be going through an overview of creatine the benefits the drawbacks side effects if there are any and if you want to skip over all that just get straight to my personal experience you can just like skip over to the rest of the video now when I first came across creatine I thought it was something that only bodybuilders took they wanted to get their muscles big and jacked and to me it kind of sounded like it was a steroid and you also heard about things about people losing here while going on Creatine and possible kidney damage from taking it but it does turn out that most of those things are myths now I am getting ahead of myself self let's go into creatine first what exactly is it so creatine is actually something that our bodies make naturally inside of our brains and our muscles it's comprised of a number of amino acids that fit together like Lego blocks in order to create creatine think of creatine as an extra energy source not only for your body to use but also for your brain now a lot of people may be wondering is creatine safe and the answer is yeah it's pretty safe scientists have done a ton of studies around this they have found that creatine does not affect kidney function they have also found that it doesn't make people bald and also it's not a steroid and it doesn't have the deleterious effects that steroids would have on the body so if you're a normal healthy individual T creatine is pretty much one of the safest supplements out there on the planet and for myself and for my clients I recommend pretty much almost everyone to take it now that being said are there any people who should avoid taking creatine now even though there is no evidence that supports that it affects the kidneys people who have pre existing kidney conditions should airor on the side of caution then talk to their doctor before taking creatine and the other groups are pregnant women and children just because we just don't have enough evidence to support whether it's beneficial or whether or not it will actually harm them now what are the benefits of taking creatine in the first place there are a few now why would I advise 99% of the people following me and also my clients and myself to take creatine on a regular basis it's because it comes with a ton of benefits number one is going to be increased athletic performance so it's been shown that supplementing with creatine can increase your performance especially for high intensity activities evidence has shown that it can increase strength and power output improve Sprint performance and even enhance Muscle Recovery between bouts of exercise and more on this later and it does this by helping us make this special fuel called ATP ATP are like tiny little batteries that power everything in our cells so creatine can give us more energy for these activities now this next benefit is going to be for the Bros which is increased muscle mass so when combined with resistance training creatine can increase the size of your muscles and also it's been shown to help older people battle age related muscle loss no no I don't think I will and the two ways that it does this is it helps your body retain more water and the other way is through helping your body absorb more protein and also that ATP thing that we were talking about earlier now this one is what I consider to be the coolest benefit which is increased cognitive function it's actually one of the reasons why I'm trying to get my mother on law to take creatine on a regular basis if there's anything you know about old Asian ladies is that they are very resistant to putting anything new inside of their bodies that did not sound right but I digress so creatine has been shown to increase memory and processing speed attention time short-term intelligence and reasoning and also it's been used to decrease mental fatigue especially when when sleep deprived now that was a really cool study that you can check out in the description below where they gave people 208 G of creatine in the sleep deprived State and they found that increased their cognitive capacity so the way that it does this is by giving your brain cells more energy while protecting it from harm and also increasing energy chemicals in the brain now this next one is for you cardi freaks out there creatine has been shown to build a stronger cardiovascular system like we said before it improves your body's ability to make energy for short burst cardio this can help you run longer and even faster it also improves heart and oxygen efficiency and because of its effect of absorbing water into your muscles it can keep you hydrated during exercise it improves muscle soreness especially after long bouts of cardio it also lowers fat levels in your blood and it also helps people with heart problems exercise a little bit more efficiently now there are also potential therapeutic benefits to taking creatine so creatine has been studied to have some benefit on a number of medical conditions like depression Parkinson's disease muscular distrophy and even multiple sclerosis now the research is early but if you know anybody that is suffering from those then I would look at creatine as possibly something that they can try out now with creatine are there any side effects and risks I would say that there are very minimal risks probably like a 01 risk but there are some side effects that you should be aware of number one when you get on Creatine because of the fact that you start to absorb more more water into your muscles you might see a minimal amount of weight gain and that's okay it's just water it's not fat but a lot of people live and die by the scale so that's just something to be aware of the other one I found with a small number of people is going to be gastrointestinal issues and there's so much Nuance to this it depends on the brand that you're taking which I'm going to be talking about next it depends on how you're loading it and it also depends on your genetics as well and how weak or strong your stomach is so for a very small number of people creat can make them feel nauseous it can cause diarrhea or even stomach Comfort especially during the loading phase and the thing that I would say for those people is the number one check the brand that you're using make sure there's no extra fillers that this brand is using and also load super slowly don't go with the loading phase that a lot of people do which is to take 15 to 20 gram and just to keep it there I would probably load starting with like 2 G to 5 G per day but I'm getting ahead of my saw and the other one that you may look out for is going to be muscle cramping for a minute number of people they have experienced some muscle cramps while doing creatine this has not been shown in evidence but it has been shown anecdotally because I have a pretty big following on X and we have seen a couple of people mentioned this when we talked about creatin now by now maybe you're in the camp where you're like okay well I want to try this out but what brand should I get well the very first thing is is that you want to make sure that the brand you're choosing is going to be third party test from what we know about creatine especially like multiple Brands out there because of the way some companies produce their creatine they have found large numbers of heavy metals inside of the supplement so this is a reason why you always want to buy supplements that are third party tested just to make sure that they don't have an abnormal amount of those inside the creatine and it should be only creatine monohydrate you don't need anything else you don't need any fillers and anything that is say marketed to men or marketed to women the only thing that makes it different is the marketing it all you need is creatine monohydrate and quite frankly they probably jack up the price if they do Market to a specific Niche but I digress creatine does come in multiple types you have your gummies you have your pills and then you have your powders I preferably like to use powders instead of the other two I think the gummies are just candies and what's the point of taking these unless you're a child and the other one is going to be pills which I've tried before and then you literally have to take a large number of pills every single time that you take creatine which I don't like doing I don't think you would like that either so you're probably wondering okay so what is the brand that I would recommend I personally would recommend a brand that is called naked creatine I have zero affiliation to them I've been using them for a few years and they have been third party tested and it comes in powder form and it is one of the more affordable creatines that are out there now the other one that I would probably recommend is Crea pure so they actually they have a very extensive manufacturing process and they have been known for their quality I'm not saying you need to get either one of these two Brands but these would be the brands that I would recommend because a lot of people will be asking for it in the comments now how exactly should you be taking creatine I look at this as like a multi-vitamin for your heart your brain and your body and your muscles you take it every single day now a lot of people say that you have to go through a loading phase where you have to max out the amount of creatine that you're taking this can actually cause some gastrointestinal upset for people who have less than strong stomachs and the thing that I recommend for anyone starting out is to start out with 2 to 5 gram if you're feeling a little skittish around creatine then start with two but if you're fine and you understand that there's not going to be that many side effects then you can start with five and then I would just take that for the next two to three months to see exactly how you feel and you have to be patient with creatine it's not something where you're going to be like you take it and you magically start to grow muscles and you magically start to be like that guy in Limitless and solve like the world's problems and mathematical problems and all this kind of it is a slow ramp up to getting the stuff saturated inside of your body and that can take weeks or sometimes even months and also if you're going to be taking creatine just make sure that you're well hydrated uh dehydration is not necessarily something you have to worry about but again just to be on the safe side just drink a little bit more water now let's get into my personal experience max dosing creates ctin so for the past 6 months I've been taking around 15 G of creatine every single day previous to that for the past couple of years I've been taking 5 G and haven't really noticed that much of a difference but when I started taking 15 G things started to get very interesting what I found is that my recovery increased I started to recover faster and it started to feel like I was 30 again like right when you hit 40 you kind of reach this point where your recovery is a little bit more hampered than usual and then when I started to up it to 15 G I found that between my workouts between my surfing sessions pretty much I surf every single day I work out two to three times per week I found that my body was fully recovered the day afterwards now in terms of increase in muscle size I'm going to say I haven't seen anything on my end but with that being said I'm not trying to bulk right now I'm actually optimizing for performance for my surfing and for keeping the muscle that I have I've actually been on the cut you've seen that in the last video but when I start to ramp up and start to focus on hypertrophy that's when I'll start to really test out whether or not this is actually beneficial in terms of like cognitive benefit I I'm not exactly sure to be honest and the reason I say that is because I have made some strides in some behaviors I've been trying to implement inside my life especially ones that are more cognitive focused things like journaling things like meditating now for the past few months I've actually been consistent with those and they have had had a tremendous impact on my life now is that because my brain was working better because I had more creatine in my body or is it because of the benefit that I'm getting from doing these cognitively beneficial things inside of my life I have to report back to you on that one I'm not exactly sure about that so we're going to label that as a maybe and lastly I have seen a benefit in terms of my cardiovascular fitness so every day I'm surfing I feel like I can paddle for much longer but is that a result of me getting better at pading and being more efficient or is it because the creatine is jacking up the energy in my body and allowing me to have more cardiovascular capability so I'm also going to tag that as like a maybe and you might be asking okay so how do you take the creatine uh so in the morning I always have a bottle of water about I'd say 750 ml and inside of that bottle I put my creatine in and I put my electrolytes in and I just basically shake it up and I drink it pretty much throughout the day until I'm done that bottle it usually takes me until like 11:00 a.m. to finish that bottle so my experience max dosing creatine at 15 G it actually has me feeling a little bit optimistic especially with the recovery part I mean this is I cannot stress this enough when you get older the thing that you have to balance is always going to be recovery and actually the thing that I realized when I turned 43 is that that my recovery had slowed down significantly now maybe that was because I had a second kid and all this kind of stuff or maybe because I was getting older but ever since I've been Max doing with creatine I found that my recovery day-to-day has been impeccable and I literally feel like I'm in my 30s again I can do anything I can actually run sprints every single day although I'm not going to be doing that now this is not medical advice I'm not saying that you should be doing this but I do say that everybody should be experimenting with their bodies and a lot of people also say like oh yeah after the 5 G all of it goes to waste and you're not going to be using the entire amount of creatine and and to that I say it's like yeah that's what science has showed us so far but I really do believe that everyone has an individual experience and they're all going to respond to supplements and also modes of training in very different ways and also throw in there like back then we thought that we could only absorb around 30 g of protein per me meal and now we're starting to see that we can actually absorb 100 gr of protein per meal so what I'm trying to get at with this is the fact that science changes and it's constantly changing and I never think the science is settled so use science as a guide but also use self-experimentation to see what works for you and that's it on Creatine I hope this has allowed you to make an educated decision on whether or not you want to be taking this in your life at least in my life I feel like it is like a multivitamin uh I'm going to to be taking this pretty much like every day for the rest of my life and also I'm going to be testing out bigger dosages to see exactly what happens with my body some people say I'm going to like get diarrhea and all this kind of stuff but who knows anyways I'll do a video on that when I start experimenting so I just hope that you got some value out of this and I hope this steered you in a little bit of the right direction all right see you on the next video peace