Creatine is more important than pre-workout.
If you’re going to spend money and attention on anything outside of training itself, it should be these three. Protein, creatine, and sleep. That’s basically the whole list. Everything else in the supplement aisle is either marginal, unproven, or ridiculously expensive and not worth the cost/benefit.
The order matters too, and most people have it backwards. They’ll buy the pre-workout and the BCAAs and the fancy recovery powder while sleeping six hours and eating 80 grams of protein a day.
Protein
This is the one that moves the needle most and the one people underestimate most.
For building muscle you want roughly 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of bodyweight per day. In pounds that’s about 0.7 to 1 gram per pound. For a 170 lb person that’s 120 to 170 grams a day. Crazy good chance you aren’t getting enough.
When we tell people that number it sounds like a lot but people are pretty confident they are eating around their target. Then we go through what they actually ate yesterday and it’s 70 grams. The gap between what people think they’re eating and what they’re actually eating is where most of the problem lives.
A few things that help close it:
Front-load it. Most people eat almost no protein at breakfast and then try to cram it all into dinner. Getting 30 to 40 grams in before 10am makes the rest of the day easy.
Every meal gets a protein anchor. Decide the protein first, build the rest around it.
A shake isn’t cheating. It’s 25-40 grams in about 90 seconds. If you’re short at the end of the day, that’s the easiest fix there is. (We wrote about how to make sure your smoothie isn’t calorie crazy in our last post)
Timing matters far less than total. The old “anabolic window” idea where you had to slam a shake within 30 minutes has been pretty well walked back. Hit your daily number and spread it reasonably across the day and you’ve got the important part covered.
Creatine
Creatine is the most studied supplement in sports nutrition and one of the only ones with a genuinely large body of evidence behind it. Hundreds of studies, decades of use, and a consistent finding that it improves strength, power output, and training volume. We wrote a whole blog about it here.
The protocol is boring, which is a good sign:
5 grams a day, every day
Take it whenever you’ll remember, timing isn’t important. Consistency is.
You don’t need to cycle off.
A couple of things worth knowing. You may gain a pound or two of water weight in the first few weeks as your muscles hold more fluid. That’s the mechanism working, not fat. And it doesn’t damage your kidneys in healthy people, which is the myth that won’t die. If you have existing kidney issues, talk to your doctor, same as with anything else.
Creatine is also one of the few supplements where the benefit for women over 40 is getting more attention lately, with some early research on cognitive and bone-related benefits. Still early days there, but the strength side is well established for everyone.
Sleep
Literally everyone knows they need sleep. Almost everyone is cutting corners with this to eek out another episode of a show they are watching or some late night news.
Seven to nine hours. Not as a lifestyle goal, as a training requirement. You don’t get stronger in the gym. The session is the stimulus. The adaptation happens while you’re asleep, which is when growth hormone release peaks and muscle protein synthesis does its work. We wrote more about all of this here.
What happens when you’re short on sleep is well know. Testosterone drops. Cortisol goes up. Strength output in the gym declines measurably. Hunger hormones get changed, which makes the nutrition side harder at the same time.
We’ve watched people get results just by fixing their sleep and changing nothing else about their training or diet. It’s no small thing.
The practical stuff is unglamorous and it works. A consistent bedtime, including on weekends. A cool and dark room. Screen time off 30 minutes before sleep. Caffeine cut-off around 2pm, because caffeine says in your system five to six hours and that 4pm coffee is still affecting you at 10pm.
Sleep, Protein, and creatine are pillars of strength training and healthy living.
Track your protein for a day and see if you’re in the range for health and fitness.
The order of operations
If you’re doing none of these, start with sleep and protein. You already have both in your life, you just need to modify them a bit and they do most of the work. Add creatine once those two are handled, because 5 grams a day on top of a 90 gram protein intake and six hours of sleep isn’t going to rescue anything.
And all three of them combined are the main pillars of support for strength training and healthy living.
Take the Next Step
If you want the training side sorted out so the rest of this actually pays off, come in for a free No-Sweat Intro and we’ll build a plan that fits your life.