Does Creatine Increase Testosterone?

1. The short answer, and what the trials show

Creatine monohydrate does not meaningfully raise testosterone. The most thorough look at this question is a 2021 evidence review in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, which gathered the controlled studies that had measured the hormone. Two reported small, physiologically insignificant increases after six and seven days of supplementation. The remaining ten reported no change at all. Its conclusion is unusually blunt for a scientific paper:

“The current body of evidence does not indicate that creatine supplementation increases total testosterone, free testosterone, DHT or causes hair loss/baldness.”

That covers both halves of the myth in one sentence. The reason is mechanical: creatine works inside muscle, not on the testes or the pituitary. It does not act on the hormonal axis that produces testosterone, so there is no plausible route by which a normal dose would lift your levels. If your testosterone is genuinely low, a supplement aimed at training performance is the wrong tool, and a test is the right first step. Our guide to testosterone levels by age shows what a normal result actually looks like.

2. Where the testosterone myth came from

Almost every “creatine raises your hormones” claim online descends from one paper: a 2009 study of 20 college-aged rugby players. Importantly, it found no change in testosterone. What it did report was a rise in dihydrotestosterone (DHT), a more potent androgen made from testosterone: DHT went up around 56% after a week of creatine loading and stayed about 40% above baseline through two weeks of maintenance dosing. The ratio of DHT to testosterone rose by roughly 36%, then 22%.

That single result did two things. It got rewritten on forums and supplement blogs as “creatine boosts testosterone” (it did not), and, because DHT is the androgen most involved in male pattern hair loss, it launched the “creatine makes you go bald” worry that has shadowed the supplement ever since.

Two problems undercut leaning on it. First, the creatine group started with DHT levels about 23% lower than the placebo group, so some of the “rise” was a return toward the middle. Second, and more telling, no study in the years since has reproduced the finding. A result that cannot be replicated is a lead to follow, not a fact to build on.

3. Creatine, DHT and hair loss: the 2025 trial

For sixteen years the hair-loss question rested on that one rugby study and a lot of inference. In April 2025 it was finally tested head-on. A 12-week randomised controlled trial, again in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, gave participants 5 g of creatine monohydrate a day, the standard maintenance dose, and measured both their blood and their scalps.

The result: no significant difference between the creatine and placebo groups in DHT, in the DHT-to-testosterone ratio, or in any hair-growth measure, the last tracked with FotoFinder imaging that counts individual follicles. The authors describe it as the first study to directly assess follicle health on creatine, and conclude it provides “strong evidence against the claim that creatine contributes to hair loss.”

No single trial is the last word, and this one was modest in size. But it tested the exact mechanism the myth depends on, the DHT pathway, and found nothing. If you are losing hair and want to know whether something testable is behind it, the androgen story is usually a side-show: thyroid, ferritin and iron status matter far more often. Our guide to a hair-loss blood test walks through the markers actually worth checking.

4. What creatine actually does

None of this means creatine is useless. The opposite: it is one of the few supplements with genuinely strong evidence behind it. It just works through a completely different route than hormones.

So the honest framing is: creatine is excellent for what it is, a cheap, safe, well-evidenced training aid. It is simply not a hormone product. For the wider question of which supplements earn their place, see our review of supplements actually worth taking.

5. If you want more testosterone, measure it first

If you came to creatine hoping to lift low testosterone, the better move is to find out whether it is actually low. Plenty of men assume it is on the strength of fatigue or a stalled training plan, when the real driver is sleep, body fat, alcohol or an unrelated marker like thyroid or iron.

The levers that genuinely move testosterone are well established, and none of them are a tub of powder: losing visceral fat, sleeping seven to nine hours, cutting heavy alcohol, and training with weights. Our guide to raising testosterone naturally covers each in order of effect size, and our guide to what causes low testosterone walks through the common, reversible reasons a number comes back low.

What none of those guides can tell you is your own starting point. A blood test can. The markers worth measuring together are:

• Total testosterone— the headline number, best taken on a fasting morning sample
• SHBG— the protein that binds most of your testosterone and decides how much is usable
• Free testosterone— the biologically active fraction, which can be low even when total looks fine (see our guide to free vs total testosterone)
• LH and FSH— to separate a testicular cause from a pituitary one

Our Complete Male Hormones panel covers all of these from a home finger-prick sample, analysed by UKAS-accredited UK laboratories. Measuring beats guessing, and it certainly beats hoping a training supplement will do a job it was never built for.

6. The blood-test catch: creatine and creatinine

There is one real way creatine shows up on a blood test, and it has nothing to do with hormones. Your body breaks creatine down into creatinine, the very waste product labs use to estimate kidney function. So taking creatine can nudge your serum creatinine up and make your eGFR look lower, flagging perfectly healthy kidneys as “impaired” when nothing is wrong.

This trips up a lot of supplement users and the occasional GP. If you take creatine and your kidney result looks off, read our guide to creatine and creatinine before you panic. It explains why the number rises, what the evidence says about kidney safety, and how to interpret the result properly.

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