I’ve been using creatine for a fair amount of time - so long that I don’t remember if it actually does anything for me. So, I’m going to go off of it for a little while and see how things go. I remember when Ribose-C came out, Poliquin (or was is Staley?) said that he didn’t feel anything from regular creatine either. Is this common - that creatine doesn’t do anything for some section of the population? Anybody have any idea why and how to make it more effective for these people?
Sorry about not getting the swolen feeling from creatine. My only advice is when you cycle off creatine, stay off for at least 3 months. I would seriously try to do this, especially after being on for so long. Best of luck!
Creatine just doesn’t work on about 20% of the population, including me. I read somewhere that this might be due to the fact that these people already hve high “natural” levels of creatine. The first time I tried creatine I pissed 18 times in one day! I guess it went right through me. But I’ve tried it for extended periods of time at high and low doses, and never noticed anything.
If you eat a lot of meat, you may not see drastic improvements with creatine. Vegetarians explode on it however because they are so deprived with their meatless diets.
You can improve the uptake of creatine by timing your dosage of it. See it takes about 1 hour for creatine powder to hit the blood stream. Then it takes another 1.5 hours for it to either be taken into your muscles or to be expelled from your system. So if you take it 1 hour before you workout, and then workout for an hour, your body will be depleted of much of the creatine in your muscles. Then within 30 minutes after you workout, you will have muscles taking the creatine in from the blood stream. So when you get back on it, be sure you are timing your intake of the creatine, so that it starts getting into the muscles shortly after your workouts.
When you take it on “off days”, try to take it around the same time you would normally take it on a workout day.
If you still don’t see any difference, then maybe you are one of those few who won’t see a difference.
Oh yeah, like greasygreek said, you should probably take a few months off of creatine.
Thanks guys for all the responses… I think
I’m going to lay off of it for at least 3 months (figure March I’ll get back on)… besides, with Mag-10, M, and everything else, I’ll be fine without it. Thanks again.