Creatine has been around the gym long enough to have survived several generations of invention. And reinvention. And re-re-invention… Let’s just say it’s been a supplement industry staple for decades; it’s cheap, well studied, and, when combined with resistance training, actually useful. Naturally, that wasn’t sexy enough. So, now the Internet has served up a study suggesting you can take creatine, skip the gym, and build muscle anyway. The next sound in my brain after I read it was Ronnie Coleman’s voice in my head sayin’ his famous line: “Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.”
But the study is real! Researchers at Texas A&M published it in August in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, and the results have been making the rounds again this fall. I’m very familiar with the ISSN, I’ve presented at one of its conventions. I know several of the members. The organization is legit. And Texas A&M is no joke either.
So, perplexing as this sounds, read on…
Can Creatine Build Muscle Without Lifting Weights?
Researchers recruited 73 sedentary adults between the ages of 45 and 65 for the 12-week study. Of those, 64 completed it. Some chose to follow an exercise-and-diet program. Others didn’t. Within those groups, participants were randomly assigned either ten grams of creatine monohydrate a day or a placebo.
Then this happened. The non-exercisers taking creatine gained about 2.4 pounds of lean tissue on their body-composition scans. The non-exercisers taking a placebo didn’t show the same gain. The creatine group also improved on some strength tests. So, yes, something interesting happened. But is it what we’re afraid it is?
Notice I said “lean tissue,” not two and a half pounds of brand-new muscle. The researchers used DXA scans to measure body composition. Those scans are useful, but they don’t distinguish freshly built muscle protein from all the water sitting inside lean tissue. Creatine increases water stored in muscle, especially when people first start taking it. The study didn’t directly measure changes in body water, so nobody can tell you how much of that apparent gain was actual new muscle.
A Small Comparison, with Important Caveats
There’s another detail that tends to disappear somewhere between the scientific journal and the breathless headline. The no-exercise comparison involved just thirteen creatine users and thirteen placebo users. That’s not worthless. It’s also not the population of a medium-sized city. And the researchers randomized the supplement, not the decision to exercise. Participants chose whether to join the training program, so comparisons between exercisers and non-exercisers aren’t the same as a fully randomized test of exercise itself.
The people who did train combined resistance and aerobic exercise three times a week with a calorie-restricted diet. Creatine users in that group gained nearly three pounds of lean tissue and showed greater improvements in several performance measures. That’s interesting, too, although the study can’t tell us that creatine replaces lifting. If anything, the bigger picture still favors the traditional arrangement: take the supplement if you want, but keep showing up and doing the work.
The investigators also reported some promising changes in memory tests, blood lipids, and blood-sugar markers. I’m not dismissing those findings. But they tested a lot of outcomes in a relatively small study, and the authors themselves say the individual cognitive and metabolic results are exploratory. That’s scientist speak for “hmm… now do it again with more people.”
Funding and Disclosures Deserve a Closer Look
For completeness, the study was funded by a foundation gift. A creatine manufacturer supplied the supplements and paid for one laboratory assay, and the senior researcher disclosed a position on that company’s scientific advisory board. That doesn’t make the results false. It does make disclosure worth reading, which is something every person reporting supplement research ought to do before writing a headline.
None of this changes my opinion of creatine. It’s one of the few products on the shelf with a substantial body of evidence behind it. Ten grams daily was the dose in this experiment; it doesn’t suddenly replace the more familiar 3- to 5-gram maintenance approach used by many lifters. And if you have kidney disease or other medical issues, a conversation with your clinician would be appropriate.
So can creatine help somebody who doesn’t lift? Possibly. This trial suggests it might, and that’s worth investigating. Has anybody proved that a scoop of powder builds meaningful muscle while you sit on your ass? Not from these data. The supplement is interesting precisely because it may do more than we once thought. And what we once thought was pretty damn good. We don’t have to turn it into magic dust to appreciate that.