The dose: 3 to 5 grams, every day

Three to five grams of creatine monohydrate per day. That is the whole protocol. Not a scoop of something with eleven ingredients and a proprietary blend, not a pre-workout with creatine somewhere in the mix. Plain creatine monohydrate powder, three to five grams, daily.

Take it every day, including days you do not train. Creatine works by saturating your muscles over time, not by giving you a hit before a session. Missing a day is not a disaster, but the goal is a full tank you keep topped up, not a pre-workout boost.

Bodyweight matters a little. Someone at 130 pounds does fine on 3 grams. Someone at 180 pounds should sit at the 5 gram end. Beyond that, more is not better for most people, and the extra just gets excreted.

Why women may have more to gain than men

This is the part that gets skipped. Women carry substantially lower baseline creatine stores than men. A 2021 review in Nutrients covering creatine across the female lifespan put the gap at roughly 70 to 80 percent lower endogenous stores compared with men.

That matters because creatine supplementation fills a tank. If your tank starts closer to empty, the same 3 to 5 grams represents a bigger proportional top-up. The practical read: creatine is not a men''s supplement that women are also allowed to take. If anything the headroom is larger.

The same review found strength and performance benefits in women who train, and favourable effects on bone when creatine was combined with resistance training rather than taken on its own. That last clause is the one people ignore. Creatine is not a bone drug or a muscle drug. It is a training amplifier. No training, no amplification.

Does timing matter?

No. Not meaningfully.

You will find studies comparing before-workout to after-workout dosing, and the differences are small enough that they disappear in the noise of real life. Muscle saturation is the mechanism, and saturation is a function of taking it consistently for weeks, not of the hour on the clock.

Take it whenever you will actually remember. In coffee, in a shake, in water, with food, without. It is stable enough in liquid for the minutes it takes you to drink it.

The only timing rule worth keeping: attach it to something you already do every day. Creatine fails for most people not because the dose was wrong but because they took it for nine days and then the tub moved to the back of the cupboard.

What it actually does, and what it does not

What it does, reliably, in people who lift:

  • More total work per session. An extra rep or two at a given weight, session after session, which compounds into more strength and more lean mass over months.
  • Better performance in short, hard efforts. Sets in the 5 to 15 rep range, sprints, hill repeats.
  • Some evidence for cognitive and mood effects, strongest in sleep-deprived or stressed states. Interesting, still early, not the reason to take it.

What it does not do:

  • Burn fat. It is not a fat loss supplement in any direct sense.
  • Build muscle on its own. Without a training stimulus, there is nothing to amplify.
  • Work overnight. Give it four to six weeks before you judge it.

Which kind to buy

Creatine monohydrate. That is it.

You will see HCl, buffered, liquid, micronized, and various patented forms sold at three times the price on the claim that they absorb better or avoid bloating. Monohydrate is the form used in the overwhelming majority of the research, it is the cheapest by a wide margin, and no alternative has beaten it in head-to-head trials.

Micronized monohydrate is simply monohydrate ground finer. It mixes with less grit. That is a texture preference, not a different supplement, and it is usually worth the small premium if grittiness is what makes you skip it.

Look for a third-party testing mark on the tub if you want assurance about what is actually in it.

Is it safe to take long term?

Creatine is the most heavily studied supplement in sports nutrition. The International Society of Sports Nutrition reviewed the evidence in its position stand on creatine safety and efficacy and concluded that monohydrate is safe for healthy people at recommended doses, including over multi-year use.

The standard caveat still applies and is not a formality: if you have kidney or liver disease, or you take medication that affects them, ask your doctor before starting. That is a real conversation, not a disclaimer.

The honest framing

Creatine is cheap, boring, and works. It will not transform your body composition by itself. What it will do is let you do slightly more work every session, and the accumulation of slightly more work over a year or two is most of what training progress actually is.

The protein target still matters more, and the training still matters most. Creatine is the third lever, not the first.

Once you are training and supplementing, the thing that actually decides whether any of it compounds is whether you eat enough protein consistently. That is the part people quietly fail at, and it is why TrakMac lets you log a meal by saying it out loud instead of hunting through a database.