How Much Creatine a Day?

1. What the 2026 trial actually did

The study came out of the Exercise & Sport Nutrition Lab at Texas A&M University. Sixty-four healthy, sedentary adults finished it. They were aged 45 to 65, average 54.5 years, and 40 of the 64 were women.

Each person took either creatine monohydrate or a maltodextrin placebo for 12 weeks. The dose was 2 × 5 g a day, not one 10 g scoop. That detail gets dropped in most write-ups, and it is the part worth copying.

Half the group also did resistance and aerobic training three times a week, on a diet set to a modest calorie deficit. The other half changed nothing about how they ate or trained.

Both creatine groups gained lean tissue. The group that trained gained close to 3 lb of it while body fat percentage fell. The group that did no training gained roughly 2.4 lb. Placebo plus training barely moved.

Two caveats belong here, and neither is in the headlines. The paper says people chose whether to join the exercise arm. Only creatine against placebo was randomised. And the authors call their own blood and cognition findings exploratory, so the reported shifts in lipids and HbA1c are a lead rather than a result.

Worth knowing who ran it, too. The senior author chairs the scientific advisory board of a company that makes creatine monohydrate, and declares it in the paper. That does not sink the work. It is a reason to read the numbers rather than the press release.

2. So should you take 5g or 10g?

One trial does not move a guideline. The International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand still sets the standard, and it is plain about the numbers.

“The quickest method of increasing muscle creatine stores may be to consume ~0.3 g/kg/day of creatine monohydrate for 5–7-days followed by 3–5 g/day thereafter to maintain elevated stores.”

So the map looks like this. A loading week runs at roughly 0.3 g per kg of body weight, which for an 80 kg person is about 24 g a day in four servings. After that, 3 to 5 g holds the stores you filled.

The 2026 trial skipped loading entirely and ran 10 g straight through. Three things make that interesting rather than reckless:

• •Older muscle holds less creatine to start with, so there is more room to fill.
• •Splitting the dose avoids the stomach upset a single large serving can cause.
• •Some of the newer interest in creatine is about the brain, and brain uptake looks slower than muscle uptake.

If you are 30 and lifting, 5 g remains the dose with decades of evidence behind it. If you are in your fifties and mainly interested in holding onto muscle, 10 g split in two now has a trial behind it. Neither choice is a treatment for anything, and if you have kidney disease it is a conversation for your GP first.

3. The one blood number a bigger dose moves

Creatine breaks down into creatinine. Creatinine is the waste product labs measure to judge how well your kidneys are clearing things. Take more creatine, and there is more creatinine to clear, so the reading sits higher.

eGFR is the knock-on. It stands for estimated glomerular filtration rate, and it is not measured directly. It is calculated from your creatinine, age and sex. Push creatinine up and the sum spits out a lower eGFR, with nothing wrong underneath.

The 2026 trial watched this happen in its own participants:

“As expected, creatinine increased in the NoEx+CrM and Ex+CrM groups, with a greater increase in the exercise group. However, this change was small (<0.15 mg/dL). Since eGFR is calculated from creatinine values and influenced by exercise and muscle mass, eGFR declined within the CrM groups, although remaining within normal clinical limits (>60 mL/min/1.73 m2).”

That is the trap. A healthy lifter on 10 g gets a kidney function flag, panics, and cannot tell the measurement effect from a real problem. The fix is a number from before you started.

The position stand is direct about the underlying safety question. Its authors conclude that “there is no compelling evidence that creatine supplementation negatively affects renal function in healthy or clinical populations”. A raised creatinine on creatine is a maths artefact, not damage. It still needs reading properly, which is what our creatinine guide goes through.

4. What to check, and when

Take the sample before you double the dose, not after. A baseline turns a scary future result into a comparison.

Be precise about which markers you need. Our Thyroid & Vital Organs panel (£159) measures creatinine and eGFR, plus urea, albumin, ALT and ALP. The General Energy & Wellness panel (£149) measures creatinine and urea. It does not carry the calculated filtration figure, so if that is the number you want to track, choose the first panel.

Both panels also report a full cholesterol breakdown, which is where the trial’s exploratory lipid findings would show up if they hold. Our cholesterol blood test guide explains how to read that set.

One practical note on timing. Hard training and dehydration both raise creatinine on their own. Leave a rest day before the sample and drink normally, or you will be reading the session rather than the supplement.

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