Transcript: Creatine, Muscle, and Metabolic Resilience

Full transcript with clickable timestamps linking back to the source video.

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If you're over 40 and you're taking creatine, I have some bad news. You're probably wasting most of it. Not because creatine doesn't work. It works. It's one of the most studied compounds on the planet. Over 700 human trials, and it keeps showing the same thing. It builds muscle. It protects your brain. And new research even shows it can actually shrink fat cells and rev up your metabolism after 40. But there's a catch. Nobody's telling you about this. If you're taking creatine the way 90% of people take it, most of it never reaches your muscle. It just floats around in your blood, gets filtered by your kidneys, and you pee it out, gone, wasted. Yeah. Expensive urine. And the symptoms of this looks like stubborn belly fat that just won't budge. Energy that crashes by 2: 00 p. m. Brain fog where you walk into a room and forget why you walked in there. weak workouts and recovery that takes 3 days instead of one. And that slow creeping muscle loss after 40 that you could almost feel happening. If any of that sounds like you, stay with me because by the end of this lesson, you're going to know exactly what's blocking your results and the simple facts that researchers say can boost creatine retention by up to 60%. Look, this isn't a creatine lesson. This is a metabolism lesson. Let me show you. Okay, first I need to fix something in your head because the way creatine got marketed the last 30 years, bodybuilders, big arms, gym bros, that's actually done a huge disservice to people over 40, especially women. Creatine is not a muscle supplement. Not really. Creatine is a cellular energy compound. It's literally the recharge for your ATP levels, which is the energy currency that your mitochondria, those little battery packs within your cells, produce. You see, your heart runs on ATP. Your brain runs on ATP. Your immune

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system runs on ATP. Your fat cells when they're burning fat run on ATP. But you may not know this. About 95% of the creatine in your body is stored in muscle. What about the rest? It's in your brain, your heart, your nervous system. the places that age the fastest. When you hit 40, like I'm 41, your natural creatine levels begin to decline. Your muscles start to shrink. That's called sarcopenia. And your mitochondria, as I mentioned, those little factories, energy factories inside your cells. They start producing less ATP. This slows your metabolic rate. Then recovery takes longer and brain fog eventually shows up. This is not a coincidence or happening because you're just getting older. This is a cellular energy crisis. A 2024 narrative review in the longevity literature called creatine one of the most underused compounds for the muscle brain access in aging adults. Not for bodybuilders, for aging adults. There's even a major Canadian university running a 26-week trial right now testing creatine in older adults with mild cognitive impairment. So when I say you may be wasting creatine, I don't mean you're wasting a gym supplement. What I do mean is that you're probably wasting one of the most powerful anti-aging molecules that we know about. And I'm going to show you exactly why this happens and what to do about it. You see, creatine doesn't just walk into your muscle cell. It can't. The cell wall doesn't let it in for free. There's a specific transporter, basically like a doorway, that has to physically pull creatine inside the cell. And that doorway needs one thing to work. Sodium. Yeah, plain sodium. Salt. The thing every doctor told you to avoid for the last 20 years. The transporter that carries creatine into your muscle is sodium dependent. And that's not my

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opinion. That's basic cell biology that has been established for many years. Without enough sodium pulling against the cell membrane, that doorway barely opens and then your creatine just sits outside the cell. And if that creatine doesn't get into the cell, you're not going to feel well. What's really fascinating is that most adults right now, chances are you watching and listening are walking around being chronically in a low sodium state, low electrolytes, mildly even dehydrated. They're drinking coffee in the morning. They're sweating during their workout. They're eating clean, which usually means low salt for a lot of people. Then they pop their creatine in plain water on an empty stomach while their cells are basically like a desert. and they wonder why creatine doesn't work for them. Take a look at this. There's a 1996 study published in Acta Physiologica, Scandinavia. 24 healthy men, a classic protocol. Half got 5 g of creatine in plain water. The other half got 5 g of creatine as well, plus carbohydrates. Same dose, same 5 days, same everything. The group that got the carbs with the creatine, yeah, the carbs that spiked their insulin, which actually boosted sodium pumping, which fired up that transporter, that group absorbed about 60% more creatine into the muscle than the plain water group. Same supplement, same dose, but 60% more creatine getting into the muscle just because of how they took it. That study, by the way, has been replicated. A follow-up study in the same lab in 1998, then again in 2000 all confirmed it. Insulin signaling and sodium together are what gets creatine into the cell. Not the powder, not the brand, the conditions inside your body when you take it. So, if you're taking creatine first thing in the morning, dehydrated on an empty stomach with one glass of water, you might be one of those people

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losing up to 30 to 60% of the dose that you paid for every single day. Okay, so you're losing creatine. How does this matter for fat loss? Well, creatine is not a fat burner the way like something like caffeine is a fat burner. It doesn't speed up your heart. It doesn't make you sweat. So, for years, people assumed that creatine had nothing to do with body composition. Well, it turns out that was wrong. A 2020 metaanalysis published in Nutrients looked at adults 50 and older doing resistance training. The people on creatine lost significantly more fat mass than the people on placebo. Both groups did the same workouts, the same diet, but the creatine group, they lost more fat. A bigger 2024 meta analysis in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research looking at 12 randomized trials in adults under 50 found the creatine group on average lost about 0. 7 kilograms more fat and dropped their body fat percentage by almost a full point compared to the people doing the same training without creatine. So how is this muscle supplement doing that? Three main reasons. Reason one, ATP. When your cells make more energy efficiently, your metabolism actually works. You see, tired cells store fat. Energized cells burn it. The more energy your cells produce, the more ATP, the higher your metabolic rate. Meaning, the more calories your metabolism burns when you're just sitting on the couch watching Netflix. Creatine is literally feeding the system that does the burning. Reason two, and this is pretty wild, there's a paper from 2015 in the journal Cell by a group at Harvard that discovered something that they called futile creatine cycle in fat tissue. In your beige and brown fat, which is the healthy metabolically active fat that burns more calories for heat, creatine drives a cycle that makes the mitochondria run hotter and burn more

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energy. They followed this up with mouse studies where they knocked out creatine in fat cells and those mice gained weight. They actually became insulin resistant because they couldn't regulate body temperature properly. The translation, creatine doesn't just live in muscle, it lives in fat tissue. And when it's there in the right amount, fat cells burn more energy. When it's missing, they don't. Reason number three is glucose. There's a study in the journal Diabetes. They put healthy people in a leg cast for two weeks. Would have sucked to be one of those people, but here's what they found. As you'd expect, something called the glute 4, which is the protein that pulls glucose into muscle, dropped by about 20% in the immobilized leg. Then they had everyone do rehab and split them into a creatine versus placebo group. The creatine group ended up with glute 4 levels around 40% higher than baseline. The placebo group just got back to normal. What that means is that your muscles on creatine become better at pulling sugar out of your blood and using it. Better blood sugar means better insulin sensitivity, which translates to more fat being burned, less mid-after afternoon crashes, and you having more stable energy. But this is the whole point of this lesson. None of that happens if the creatine never made it into the cell in the first place. This is the part that makes me angry on behalf of every person over 40 who's been told to just eat less and move more. Look, your metabolism after 40 isn't broken, it's just underpowered. Every system in your body, burning fat, building muscle, thinking clearly, recovering from a workout, regulating blood sugar, every single one of those systems runs on ATP. And after 40, your ability to make ATP starts dropping. Your mitochondria gets sluggish and tired. Your muscle

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cells hold less creatine. Your brain holds less creatine. So, when I hear somebody say, "I I just can't lose this belly fat anymore. Even though I'm doing what worked when I was 30, that's not laziness, lack of discipline, lack of willpower." That's a self that doesn't have enough fuel to burn fat. Let me say this one more time cuz it's very important for you to get this. You need cellular energy to burn body fat. If your cells are running on fumes, your body will refuse to let go of stored fat. This is a survival mechanism. The body says, "We're already low on energy. We're not going to start spending fat reserves." Right now, creatine, when it actually gets into the cell, flips the switch. Your muscle cells go from undercharged to fully charged. Glucose moves more efficiently. ATP comes online and your mitochondria fire harder. Your beige fat starts running that thermogenic cycle that the Harvard paper found. Your workouts feel better. Your recovery from those workouts shorten and quietly in the background. Your body composition starts to shift. Now, look, I'm not telling you creatine is a magic fat burner. It's not. Nobody who reads those studies is going to tell you that. Well, I hope not. The fat loss benefits show up alongside training and eating real food. But this might be the missing piece, especially after 40, especially if you feel like you've been doing everything right, but you're getting nothing back in return. The question is, is your creatine actually getting into your cells? Okay, let's get real specific because here are the mistakes that I see. Tell me how many of these you're making, you might be making. Mistake number one, you take it first thing in the morning, fasted with plain water, no food, no electrolytes. See, your body has been dehydrated overnight for eight hours. Your sodium, it's at its lowest point of the day, first thing in the morning. Your muscle cell transporters are basically they're asleep. So, you just dropped creatine into the worst possible window for absorption. Mistake number two, you take

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it right after a hot, sweaty workout or worse, after the sauna. I've personally made that mistake in the past. Look, you just sweated out a chunk of sodium and fluid volume. You're depleted. You shake your creatine into water and you chug it. And then you wonder why you feel bloated and your stomach hurts. The bloat isn't the creatine. That's creatine sitting in your gut because your cells can't pull it in. Mistake number three, which is probably the most common mistake I see, is cheap creatine. Okay, for some of you this is going to sound like a sales pitch, but it's not. We'll get there. But here here's the point. Cheap creatine is often poorly micronized, meaning the particles are huge and frequently contaminated with byproducts from manufacturing. The majority of the creatine out there comes from China and a lot of those creatines are contaminated with heavy metals. The problem with this as well is that those big particles don't dissolve well. They irritate the gut and they pass through you. Remember I talked about the expensive urine? That's where most creatine side effects come from. People blame the creatine. They should blame the powder. Okay, mistake number four. No carbs and or no electrolytes anywhere near your creatine dose. We just spent 5 minutes covering this. Insulin and sodium are what open the door. Without them, you're knocking on a locked door. So, I know many of you do low carb, keto, or even carnivore. You don't necessarily have to have carbs with your creatine, but you can have the electrolytes and the sodium. that will help tremendously. Mistake number five, inconsistent dosing. Creatine is not caffeine. It doesn't work in 20 minutes. It saturates your cells over a span of a couple weeks. If you take it three days in a row and then forget day four, you're never actually filling the tank. So, you've got wrong timing, wrong fluid state, wrong food pairing, wrong product, and wrong consistency. And then we tell ourselves, "Creatine doesn't work for me." Of course, it doesn't. We've been using it wrong the whole time. There is a better way. Look, if

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you know anything about me, if you've been watching my YouTube videos, listening to the podcast, you know that I'm very picky about what I associate with, what I put my name on, especially in the supplement category. There's a lot of garbage products out there and a lot of garbage creatine out there. And you could do your research, find a clean creatine product. There are a few out there. I've done my research. The one I've been using for years is the Myioscience Micronized Creatine. And I'll drop a link in the first description down below. And you can scan the QR code. You'll get a nice discount, too. But this is the one I actually take. This is the one I tell my mom to take, my wife to take. And here's why. I mean, first of all, it's properly micronized. Okay? You may or may not have heard that word before. I think sometimes that word gets thrown around. What it actually means is that the creatine particles are ground down small enough to dissolve cleanly in water and absorb cleanly in your gut. So, if you're looking for a creatine product, maybe it's this one, maybe it's another one, make sure it is micronized. That means there's no grit at the bottom of the cup. You could notice a difference when you stir it in. This means no bloating. You could pour it into cold water or room temperature water and it kind of just disappears. Second, and this is the part that nobody else talks about or does. You want to make sure your creatine that you're using is third-party tested. The one I use is third party tested. I looked at the report. This is important. So, you're actually getting creatine monohydrate, not creatine cut with fillers, not creatine with manufacturing residue. The label needs to match the bottle. Third, it's designed to be paired with electrolytes. The team behind this product over at Myioscience actually understands the absorption science we just talked about. They know that creatine without sodium and fluid support is creatine you're flushing down the toilet. So, if you've tried creatine before and you got bloated or your stomach felt off or it felt like nothing was happening, might have not been the creatine's fault. It might have been the powder, the timing, and the pairing all working against you. Look, you could try the one that I use for 30 days. It's called Myioscience Micronized Creatine

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Monohydrate. Just click the link down below or scan the QR code. It'll take you to this page right here. You could see the reviews. You could subscribe and save, do a onetime purchase, add it to the cart. One scoop of this is five grams and it also pairs perfectly with their vitamin D and K2 which I've made a lot of videos about. So, I'm going to add that to the cart. Coupon code is automatically applied, by the way. You just hit check out. And they also have it in electrolyte sticks. I talked about the electrolytes and sodium. They actually have the creatine with that. If you choose that, you could just type in electrolyte sticks. You could see they've got a ton of reviews, different flavors, and you could add the sticks, the jar, different flavors. You could add that to your cart. That coupon code is also automatically applied to the electrolyte sticks with the creatine. Okay, back to your protocol. Once you find that clean source of creatine, here's how to take the creatine so it actually gets into the cell. Save this part or rewind it. This is the whole game here. This is the whole point of this lesson. Okay. Number one, 5 g a day. Every day at the bare minimum. Don't skip days. Don't cycle days on and off. Do it every day cuz saturation matters. Number two, take it with food. Ideally with a food that has some carbs and some protein, not a sugar bomb. You're not taking it chugging Gatorade, just the real meal. Eggs and avocado, Greek yogurt, and maybe some blueberries, chicken, and vegetables. The small insulin response from a normal healthy meal is enough to fire up that sodium potassium pump and pull creatine into the cell. This teenage data from 2000 confirmed that protein plus healthy carbs hits the same insulin window as the old high sugar protocols without the crash. Now, sometimes I do put creatine in my coffee. I've made previous videos about this. So, what I do is I'll make sure I drink plenty of water with electrolytes right before the coffee and or I'll add some healthy fats to the coffee like a tablespoon of butter, maybe a tablespoon of heavy cream. That will help the absorption as well. Okay. Number three, hydrate first, not after

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the creatine. Drink high quality spring water 12 to 16 ounces about 30 minutes before you have your creatine. Number four, consider adding electrolytes, a pinch of real salt, some potassium, maybe some magnesium at night. You don't really need a whole bunch of fancy different products, but if you already have one, use it. Simply get high quality salt and just season your food with it. Number five, if you've worked out hard or use a sauna like I do, rehydrate first, then take creatine, not the other way around. Don't shove creatine into a depleted body. You'll just get the bloat and lose the dose. That's it. Five grams a day with food, hydrated, electrolytes every day. Boring, but effective. If you do that for 14 days, you'll start to feel it. 3 to 4 weeks in, you'll start to see it. Look, this isn't about getting jacked. This isn't a vanity supplement. The same compound that gets your muscles a little fuller is also the same compound that's keeping your brain energized when you're sleepd deprived or when you're traveling. There's a 2024 study in scientific reports that showed where a single dose, a single high dose of creatine measurably restored brain energy and cognition during a sleepless night. The same compound that's protecting your muscle from sarcopenia that takes about 8% of your strength every decade after 40. The same compound that's running that thermogenic cycle in your fat tissue. The same compound your heart cells use. the same compound your immune system pulls from when you're fighting off something after 40. This is one of the most important things you can do for your metabolism, your independence, your energy, and your longevity. Keep your cells charged. Creatine is the cheapest, most studied, proven ways to do that. And it works really well, but only if it gets into the cell. And hey, I put together a free resource for you to pair what you just learned and take it to another level. I put together a free guide that walks you

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through exactly how to use creatine the way I just described, plus the food pairings and some of the simplest routines you can do to fire back your metabolism. I'll put a link in the description down below. It's free. Take it. If this lesson has helped, hit the subscribe button. Drop a comment down below on YouTube telling me how long you've been taking creatine and whether you knew any of this. And I'll see you in the next one. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. And if you enjoyed this lesson, I just published a video on one scoop of this specific protein can build twice as much muscle than three eggs. And this is especially important if you're over the age of 45. Here's a clip from that lesson. Then click the video on the screen coming up in a few seconds and I'll see you in the next lesson. In this lesson, I'm going to break it all down. Why most high protein meals fail to build muscle, especially if you're over 45. what actually flips your body from breaking down to rebuilding and reversing aging. And how one simple shift can start changing your energy, fat loss, and strength within