Hey y'all and welcome to the everyday athlete podcast recorded live from Omaha, Nebraska and I'm your host, Katie danger U S army veteran and founder of Red H Nutrition providing everyday athletes just like you, clean, effective nutritional solutions, custom formulated to help you reach your absolute potential every single day.
Hey athletes, what is up? Welcome to episode number 26 of the everyday athlete podcast. And I'm so excited you're here. I mean I did every single week, but you're going to love the information day. It's going to make you more powerful. It's going to make you more explosive, it's going to help you have better endurance. It's gonna make you stronger, it's gonna make you faster and, you guys, it's not even a magic pill, it's real and is available to you right freaking. Now. So before I spill the beans though on what my favorite supplement of all time is, I want to ask you a question and I want to set up some conversation for a future episode.
(00:53): But really I just want some feedback on this. What do you consider a sport? I want you to send me your thoughts on this too. I want you to email me katie@reddishnutrition.com and I want you to tell me how you determine what a sport is like. Is chess a sport? Obviously things like football and basketball, those things, they make the cut easily for me. But this whole topic came up. I was in a local bar and I was watching some random sports competition because the sports world right now is very slow. So they're showing all these like fringe, really, really obscure sports. And the one that we happen to be watching was cornhole. And if you're not familiar with corn hole, it's typically at every single tailgate you could ever attend. But cornhole is a game where you have to get this bean bag sack into a hole on a platform and that platform is 27 feet away from you.
(01:42): Now, I don't know the scoring and everything, but whatever, just that corn hole was on and it was on ESPN. So does that like inherently make it a sport? Well, I got into a discussion with who I was with and I said, I just don't think that cornhole is a sport. And then here is my guide, here's what I use as my judgment. It has to include both gross and fine motor skills. So like with cornholes you have the fine motor skills, you have accuracy, but there is no lifting, there's no running, there's no, there's no use of a gross motor skill. There's no need for performance based on a gross motor skill. So anyways the discussion kept going back and forth. I basically ruled out a lot of things that I don't think are sports like chess, cornhole, definitely not a sport and poker.
(02:26): So I definitely don't think poker is a sport based on my definition that it has to have a gross and fine motor skill. So that's my question for you this week. I want you to ponder that. What do you consider a sport? And if you do consider things like chess or poker, cornhole sport, like let me know why. Let me know. Let me know your thoughts. Email me, katie@reddishnutrition.com let me know what you think a sport is and more importantly, what is not a sport to you and why. So you have those corn hole athletes and when it comes to supplements, I don't even know what they would benefit from from a standpoint except maybe like a pre-workout cause those things help with really, really acute focus and motivation. But other than that, like I don't really think to be a cornhole athlete. It's hard work.
(03:10): Who knows? I've never been in the shoes so if I happen to be corrected I'll let you know in a future episode. But those are my thoughts for now. But as far as the cornhole athletes concern, I just don't think they'd see much benefit from what this whole episode is about and it's my favorite supplement ever and that is creatine. That brings us to the topic of today's show and creatine and how it is the singular most important, awesome, fabulous supplement that you can get today. And if you're not using it, this podcast is going to give you plenty of reasons why you need to start using an ASAP, and if you're currently using it, fantastic. Keep it up. You're going to learn a little bit more about how it works and probably use it information to get even stronger. Keep boosting your endurance, keep boosting your stamina.
(03:51): So here's the one Oh one on creatine. Creatine is a substance that's found naturally in muscle cells. It helps your muscles produce energy during heavy lifting or high intensity exercise. I love creatine. I will say that many times throughout the steps, but I love it and it's also very popular in the fitness community because it works. It helps you gain muscle, helps you improve strength, it boosts your endurance. It boost recovery is almost the most complete supplement out there available for somebody who is into fitness performance and being their best and optimizing their whole system. Now, chemically speaking, it shares many similarities with amino acids. Your body can produce it from the amino acids, glycine and arginine. Several factors affect your body's creatine stores, including how much meat you eat, how much exercise, the amount of muscle mass you currently have, and then levels of hormones like testosterone and IGF, one about 95% of your body's creatine is stored in the muscles in the form of phosphocreatine.
(04:47): The other 5% is typically found in your brain, your kidneys, and your liver. Now when you supplement, and this is why creatine is important, this is why it's important. When you supplement, you increase your stores of phospho creatine. This is a form of stored energy in the cells and it helps your body produce more of a high energy molecule that I'm sure you've heard of, and it's called ATP adenosine triphosphate. ATP is often called the body's energy currency, and when you have more ATP, your body can perform better during exercise. So this is how it works in high intensity exercise. Creatine's primary role is to increase the phosphocreatine stores in your muscles. The additional stores can then be used to produce more ATP, which is the key energy source for heavy lifting and high intensity exercise. So you can do more work, you can do it faster and you can do it without getting fatigued.
(05:39): Creatine also helps you gain muscle in the following ways. It helps you improve your workloads, so if you can do more work or volume in that single training session, you're going to have more stimulus on your muscle and you're going to have better results. Longterm. When it comes to your muscle growth, it improves self signaling, so this improves the muscle repair and signals new muscle growth to occur. It improves and raises the anabolic hormone level and your body. So you'll see a rise in testosterone en insulin growth factor one IGF one. After taking for your team, you'll have increased cell hydration, so it boosts the water content in your muscle cells. It causes cell volumization and that plays a role in cell muscle growth. Now I want to take a quick segue on that. Increased cell hydration. One of the common misconceptions about creatine is that it causes bloat and water retention, and unless you're taking incredibly high doses greater than 20 grams a day, regularly, you are not going to have any of those side effects.
(06:39): So if you've heard that about creatine before, forget about it, okay? But it definitely does improve cell hydration, which is good because you need water to go through all the cellular processes that come with energy production. Okay? It reduces protein breakdown, it lowers myostatin levels. And why this is important is if you have high levels of protein myostatin in your body, this prevents new healthy muscle growth. So when you supplement with creatine, you reduce the myostatin levels, you increase that growth potential so you can see how all of these things, all of these factors come together and just help you create an environment in your body that is primed for muscle growth. There is also some really cool new research out there that shows creatine can increase the phosphocreatine stores in your brain, which improves brain health and prevents neurological disease. It's important because I currently have my 72 year old mother-in-law using, creating daily, I have her take five grams of protein daily and this helps her in two ways.
(07:40): It helps her main, actually it helps her a lot of ways, but the two main ways is we want to prevent any muscle wasting because as we age, even if we have that physical stimulus, even if we have some weight bearing exercises, it's still hard to maintain muscle mass. So creatine helps prevent muscle wasting, helps maintain that muscle mass so she can stay strong, but it also has neuroprotective properties. And if we have the prevention of neurological degeneration and we've got a 72 year old woman who is primed to head into her golden years, healthier and stronger than ever. That's why I have my mother-in-law on creatine. Creatine is by consensus, the number one supplement to help build muscle mass in both trained and untrained individuals. And that is very important to make a key in a note of as well because a lot of supplements don't work as quickly or as profoundly on untrained or trained individuals.
(08:29): You know there's a whole spectrum, but creatinine is great for everybody all the time. Everybody, no matter what you're doing, creating is important. That's why I just think a whole episode had to be dedicated to why creatine is so freaking important and why you gotta start taking it if you're not already creatine effective for both short and long term muscle growth. It assists many different kinds of people. Like I just said, sedentary, older adults, elite athletes, the everyday athlete. So here's some research. And also side note, if you guys need any references on the research, let me know. You can email me, you can message me. If we happen to be friends on social media, I will forward those to you. I just don't bog episodes down with a bunch of research footnotes and doing, you know, 2013 at Al and all this stuff. So if you want the research, let me know. I'll give you citations. But here we go.
(09:14): Yeah.
(09:17): Ever heard the same? Failing to prepare is preparing to fail. A major component to your competitive success will be your nutrition prep. And I created a competition nutrition guide to help you utilize pre intra and post-competition nutrition protocols, boost your confidence heading into a competition, recover quicker postcards so you get right back to training and increase your power output and max capacity so you can own that podium. I created this guide just for the everyday athlete and you can get your free copy at competition, nutrition guide.com I'll say again, competition nutrition guide.com one 14 week study in older adults determined that adding creatine to a weight training program significantly increased their leg strength and muscle mass. That isn't an untrained group. Then in a trained group, a trained group of weightlifters, they did a 12 week study and they found that creatine increased muscle fiber growth two to three times more than training alone.
(10:15): So the exercise they used for this was the bench press and they found that total body mass also doubled. This is in trained people. You guys train people who perhaps think they've had a plateau, start using creatine and all of a sudden they start gaining muscle, they're getting stronger. Creatine works you guys. And if you want to improve your strength, you just really need to look no further than creatine. Creatine helps with strength, has a power, helps improve high intensity exercise performance. And here are some even more cool research that's applicable to the functional athletes out there. In one study, adding, creating to a training program, increased strength by 8% in weightlifting performance and by 14% in a bench press one rep max, which was up to 43% compared to training alone. So all of these factors are improving compared to control groups who are not taking creatine.
(11:10): You don't really need much more research, but I'm going to give you another one. Okay. And well-trained strength athletes, 28 days of supplementing, increase their bike sprinting performance by 15% and bench press performance by 6% so you've got high intensity endurance athletes, bike sprinters, improving their performance and getting stronger. So we're seeing improvements not only in strength and muscle mass, but we're seeing improvements in endurance and stamina as well. And the power output over time creating helps maintain strength and training performance while increasing muscle mass. During intense training as well. So if you're one of those athletes who is always teetering on the brink of over-training and you kind of want to push your body to that limit, you know you're not quite stepping over the but you are really testing it. Creating helps bring you back or it certainly helps tow you tow the line a little bit better.
(11:59): What's going on here though is these improvements are primarily caused by your body's increased capacity to produce ATP. And I've said it in this episode already and if you have even a small background in fitness, nutrition training, exercise physiology, you're going to have heard of ATP, adenosine triphosphate before it is the energy currency of the body. And normally when we exercise, ATP becomes depleted after about eight to 10 seconds of high intensity activity. But when you take creatine, you produce more ATP and you can maintain the optimal performance even if it's just a few seconds longer. But we all know that when it comes to competition or when it comes to the stimulus we place on our body every second counts. Time under tension is important and that stimulus is incredibly important too for that long term result you're looking for. Now, I'm hoping at this point all of the benefits I've talked about, whether you are an elite athlete, whether you are a grandma, a grandpa, a mom, a dad, a sister, brother, whoever you are in whatever sport you happen to play.
(13:01): Hopefully at this point I've shown you that creatine is the number one supplement for you. It's the number one supplement to help build muscle strength, power, and improve your overall fitness performance. So how do you take it? Well, the most common type of creatine is creatine monohydrate. This form of creatine is the most widely used. It is the most studied and is the most verified for safety. There's other forms available out there. If you do a quick Google search of creatine, you'll find some. One of the more popular ones that is trademarked is CRE alkaline and it has been modified in a lab and it touts to be a superior form. It says it eliminates some of the side effects like bloating or you don't need a loading phase, which we'll talk about here in a little bit, but ultimately it has only been researched in house.
(13:47): So the independent research is lacking and that's why when it comes down to it, all of the actual scientific peer reviewed research done in a science lab done in a true experimental setting with controls with variables. Creatine monohydrate is your number one form. You can take it in a pillar of powder form. Now powder tends to be the most available, tends to be the most convenient, usable form pills can also be a little bit pricey because you often have to take a lot of pills to meet that effective dose of five grams. Five grams is going to be the dose that most everybody is going to take and if you take it, that's, that's the dose to take for the rest of your life. Many people who supplement start with a loading phase and I had thrown that term around a little earlier and a loading phase.
(14:30): What it is is it leads to a rapid increase in the muscle stores of creatine to load with creatine. It's suggested that you take 20 grams per day for five to seven days, and this should be split into four or five grams servings throughout the day. And if you happen to use a reddish nutritionist, pure creatine product, one scoop is five grams. So for that calculation you would need four separate scoops for different times throughout the day. There is some research that shows that absorption may be slightly improved when you do take it with a carb or a protein based meal because when there's the release of insulin, creatine is said to be absorbed better following that loading period, the general recommendation is about three to five grams a day to maintain the levels of creatine, your muscles. There is often bro science out there says that you need to cycle creatine so you have to load it high dose and then because it might damage your liver because of a toxification effect that you need to cycle off of it.
(15:28): And that's just, that's just simply not true. You can have long term benefits. And stay healthy by taking five grams of creatine for the rest of your life for as long as you exercise. If you choose not to do the loading phase, that's fine too. You just consumed three to five grams per day. Just note that it could take three to four weeks to maximize the creatine stores in your body and start experiencing the optimal effects. Now, since creatine pulls water into your muscles, it is advisable to take a glass of water with your creatine and stay well hydrated throughout the day. So now let's talk safety because one of the things that always comes up when I talk about creatine, especially with females, is that it's not safe. And there's a lot of that bro science out there that claims that creatine is harmful to your livers.
(16:08): And I mentioned the end of the cycle on and off to let your body detox. And you guys, this is so far from the truth. Creatine is one of the most well researched supplements available and it's safe for sport. NCAA athletes are using it. Olympic level athletes are using it. These people who are put up to rigorous drug testing are using it and are studying longitudinal studies that go up to four years in length and they show no negative side effects of daily creatine use. One of the most comprehensive studies measured 52 different blood markers and they observed no adverse effects following 21 months of supplementing. So that's one of the longest studies with one of the most, I guess, diverse group of markers to look at and none of them came back as an adverse effect. There's also evidence that creating harms the liver and kidneys and healthy people who take normal doses.
(16:57): Now that said, those with preexisting liver kidney problems, you should always talk with a doctor before supplementing and although people associate, sometimes people associate creatine with dehydration, but the research says that's just not true either. In fact, creatine can help reduce cramps and dehydration because it does pull water into the cell and because we are nutritionists like myself, we are suggesting to people, use water, drink a lot of water when you supplement. We want to make sure these things are getting through our body and also staying hydrated to just one Oh one for exercise performance, whether you're supplement or not. So drink water. Okay. Also, it is safe for guys and girls to take. It does not have any androgenic effect. When I say androgenic, it doesn't have any masculine producing effects on females. It does not affect your hormonal balance, you know, but as always, if you've got any concerns or this is new for you, always ask your doctor first.
(17:51): The bottom line is athletes. Creatine is one of the cheapest, most effective and safest supplements you can possibly take. It helps boost your strength, your power, your speed, your endurance. It helps build bigger muscles. It supports quality of life and older adults. I told you about my mother-in-law and her scenario. It's helping with brain health, maintaining muscle mass. It's great for vegetarians to vegetarians, you guys, vegans, you may not be obtaining enough creatine from your diet. Most people are getting the majority of their creatine through meat, so if you happen to be a vegetarian or vegan, creating supplementation could really, really help you put on some muscle mass. So there you have it. Athletes. Creatine is the real, real, real, real deal. I'm going to say it against the real deal, whether it's for you, your mom, your sister, your brother, your grandma, grandpa creating has a place in your supplementation routine.
(18:40): In fact, my personal recommendation and what I use is pure creatine from Reddit nutrition. It's creatine monohydrate. One scoop is five grams, and also since you're a listener of the podcast, you can get 20% off with code podcast 20 so head on over to that newly redesigned website, reddish nutrition.com check out pure creating, putting your cart, use code podcast 20 and save 20% that's all she wrote for this episode. Athletes next week, tune in, learn more about the different kinds of protein available. That's what episode number 27 is going to be all about, is all these different kinds of protein. We've got way plant-based soy, casein, et cetera. And I want you to start being able to understand how certain types of protein can be used for certain nutrition goals, certain strength goals, and then of course certain dietary goals as well. Protein is great if you want to put on muscle mass and lose weight faster.
(19:34): So the last thing I want to circle back to the beginning, remember to email me and let me know what your thoughts are on what makes this sport. I want to know what you think makes a sport. I'm going to feature, even though I'm going to feature the best answers and discussions next week. We'll circle back around with this, but email me your thoughts on that. What is a sport? What isn't a sport? Katie, at reddish, nutrition.com you guys athletes. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode on creatine, but for now though, I'm gonna let you go and I'll chat with you again next week. This is Katie D over and out.
(20:08): This is ThePodcastFactory.com.
