Creatine for Exercise Performance

Research suggests that creatine supplementation is one of the more consistently supported ergogenic aids in the sports nutrition literature, with multiple reviews and position statements — including those from the International Society of Sports Nutrition — finding reliable improvements in high-intensity, short-duration exercise performance, maximal strength, power output, and fat-free mass gains, largely through enhanced intracellular creatine stores and improved ATP regeneration. Studies indicate these benefits extend across diverse populations, including adult men and women, adolescents, and older adults, with women and vegetarians potentially seeing amplified effects due to lower baseline creatine levels, and emerging evidence pointing to additional recovery benefits such as reduced muscle damage and faster restoration of force production between exercise bouts. The evidence is more mixed, however, when it comes to endurance-based exercise and situations where increased body mass may be a disadvantage, and the bulk of the strongest supporting evidence comes from reviews and narrative syntheses rather than a uniformly large body of independent randomized controlled trials on every specific use case. Several studies linked here examining related topics — such as cold water immersion, sodium bicarbonate, massage, and nanobubble water — do not directly investigate creatine but collectively illustrate the broader, competitive landscape of recovery and performance research within which creatine's evidence base remains comparatively robust.