The bottle on your shelf is probably costing you triple

Go look at your creatine.

If the label says HCl, buffered, Kre-Alkalyn, ethyl ester, or anything with a Greek letter in the name, you’ve been paying for marketing.

I had Dr. Mike T. Nelson on the podcast recently to properly go through the creatine research. He’s a PhD exercise physiologist who’s been using the stuff since 1995 and has spent the last few years buried in the newer literature. He also wrote a 47-page manual on it, and I asked him

for a code for you.

Transparency: I get a cut if you buy through my link. I’d still be sending this. Half my coaching conversations touch on creatine, and it's useful to have one document that answers all of it.

Here is what Mike had to say about Creatine Forms

For two decades, the supplement industry has been trying to convince you that creatine — a molecule we have studied harder than any other ergogenic aid in history — secretly has a more sophisticated cousin. One that absorbs better. Dissolves cleaner. Penetrates the muscle cell with greater finesse.

That is not what the data says.

Monohydrate absorbs through the human gut at roughly 99% efficiency. There is no meaningful headroom for a “more bioavailable” form to occupy, because the floor and the ceiling are touching. You cannot improve on 99% by enough to matter, and nobody has.

The HCl pitch leans almost entirely on solubility. HCl does dissolve more readily in a glass of water. That part is true. It’s also irrelevant. Solubility in your shaker and absorption in your gut are two different variables. Food colouring dissolves beautifully, and you wouldn’t pay a premium for that either.

Now the head-to-head, because we finally have one.

In 2025, Londoño-Velásquez and colleagues ran a randomized clinical trial in elite handball and softball athletes. Monohydrate versus HCl. Same training, different molecule.

Both groups improved body composition. On most neuromuscular and strength outcomes, the two were comparable. The one measure that separated them — fat-free mass index — went to Monohydrate.

So: HCl runs roughly two to four times the price. Performance comes out equal, with monohydrate edging it on lean mass.

Dr. Darren Candow, who has spent his career on this, puts it less politely than I would: “Every day I lump [novel creatine forms] into quackery. This idea that you can get higher bioavailability, more stability in solution, more solubility, and God forbid it got into the cell quicker — I tell everybody: just stick to monohydrate.”

Two more things worth knowing while you’re standing in front of your supplement shelf.

Micronized monohydrate is fine. It’s the same molecule with a smaller particle size, so it mixes better in cold water. No efficacy advantage, but no downside either. Just don’t pay a real premium for it.

Liquid creatine, on the other hand, I’d walk away from. Pre-dissolved creatine spontaneously converts to creatinine over time, and faster in warm temperatures or low pH. Creatinine is the waste product. You’re paying extra for a bottle that degrades on the shelf.

What to do about it: replace whatever’s in the cupboard with third-party tested creatine monohydrate — NSF Certified for Sport, Informed-Sport, or USP Verified. That certification matters more than the form does, because the supplement market is enormous and poorly policed, and heavy metal contamination and label inaccuracy are documented problems. You’ll spend somewhere around ten cents a day instead of thirty-plus. Over a year that’s a decent pair of training shoes.

The molecule is the molecule. Everything else is brand work.

Dr. Mike T. Nelson, PhD

The full evidence table on every novel form, the cost comparison, and the third-party certification guidance is Section 6 of the Complete Creatine Manual — 47 pages, 50+ peer- reviewed references, with input from Dr. Darren Candow, Dr. Scott Forbes, and Dr. Eric Rawson.

$37. Code PAUL takes $10 off, so $27.

30-day refund, no questions asked.

https://creatine.miketnelson.com

NOTE: If a supplement company has to invent a new molecule to differentiate itself, ask what was wrong with the old one. Usually the answer is “the patent expired.”

Keep Raising the Bar,

Paul Oneid MS, MS, CSCS