I had Dr. Mike T. Nelson on to settle the creatine questions

Creatine is the supplement I get asked about more than anything else. It's also the one where most of the answers floating around are ten years out of date.

So I had Dr. Mike T. Nelson on the podcast to go through it properly. Mike has a PhD in exercise physiology from Minnesota, an MS in mechanical engineering, and he's been using creatine himself since 1995. I've known him for about three years, and he's one of the few people in this field who will tell you plainly when the data isn't there yet. That's rare, and it's why I wanted him on.

Here’s what Mike had to say…

Before you take anything I say about creatine as a reason to buy some, let me manage your expectations, because this is where most conversations go wrong.

Dr. Scott Forbes is one of North America's most prolific creatine researchers. Here's how he frames it:

"The sprinkles on top of the cake are essentially creatine — it can make the cake a little bit better. But it's definitely a small effect."

That's the honest version. Creatine won't reorganize your physique. What it reliably does is let you do slightly more work than you otherwise would — roughly 8% greater strength gains and 14% greater muscular endurance versus training alone, across the meta-analytic literature. Over months of consistent training, that compounds into something real. Over two weeks, you won't notice anything.

Which brings me to what I want you to take from this email.

Somebody in your gym has told you they're a non-responder. Statistically, most of them aren't.

Roughly 25 to 30% of people genuinely don't show a measurable increase in muscle creatine with supplementation. That's real, and it isn't a failure of the supplement. It's a ceiling effect. Muscle creatine stores top out somewhere around 150–200 mmol/kg dry muscle, and if you're already close to that ceiling, there's no room left to fill.

Who's already close? People eating a lot of meat. Typical omnivore baseline sits around 120–160 mmol/kg. A guy eating red meat six days a week starts near the top of the range, and adding creatine gives him very little headroom. Low Type II fiber density is the other correlate.

But most self-described non-responders aren't that person. They're the person who took it for ten days, felt nothing, and quit.

Muscle saturation on 5 g/day takes three to four weeks. That's the whole story. There's no sensation attached to it — no tingle, no pump, no signal that it's working. You just quietly get another rep or two somewhere around week five, and if you weren't tracking, you'd never attribute it to the supplement.

So before anyone writes themselves off, two questions. What does your diet look like — are you already near saturation from food? And did you take it consistently for at least four weeks, or did you quit before the curve?

That distinction is worth more to a coach than any dosing chart. It's the difference between a client with a physiological ceiling and a client with a compliance problem, and you handle those two people completely differently.

The rest of it — the biochemistry, the response data by population, the tracking worksheet I use for exactly this question — is in the manual.

Dr. Mike T. Nelson, PhD

The Complete Creatine Manual: 47 pages, 50+ peer-reviewed references, and direct quotes from Dr. Darren Candow, Dr. Scott Forbes, and Dr. Eric Rawson.

$37. Code PAUL takes $10 off, so $27. Code expires at some point, but let’s not wait too long ;-)

30-day refund, no questions asked.

https://creatine.miketnelson.com

PS. If you've been telling people you're a non-responder, check the fridge before you commit to that.

Keep Raising the Bar,

Paul Oneid MS, MS, CSCS