Is Creatine And Caffeine A Bad Mix ?

Caffeine and creatine are perhaps the two most effective natural supplementation outside of protein powder.Caffeine is a strong stimulant that improves muscular endurance and strength outputs and creatine provides a quick boost of energy that can help you crank few more reps.Your body's essential response to caffeine is the accelerating of your sensory or nervous system. This stimulation can enable our nervous system to involve more fat for energy and decreases your view of weariness as you work out.Creatine supplementation increases the natural creatine stores in your body. It can be used by your body as a brisk or quick energy form when on high intensity, short-burst exercises, for example, lifting a heavy weight or breaking into a dash or sprint.

What Do The Studies Say

Creatine and caffeine are two performance-boosting supplements often used in sports settings. There is a lot of controversies, however, over the effectiveness of using these two substances together.An examination distributed in the October 2001 "Journal of Applied Physiology" demonstrated that caffeine blunted the impacts of creatine; notwithstanding, a 2002 report in the journal "Medicine in Science in Sports and Exercise" indicated caffeine could be performance enhancing or ergogenic, after creatine supplementation.A study in 1996 found that when taking creatine and creatine+caffeine saw an increase in muscle creatine concentration as expected. But taking creatine+caffeine did not do any better than force production in terms of placebo. Whereas creatine alone did have significant improvements.This study has a few problems first is the sample size where at a meagre 9 subject may not accurately translate to an entire population.The next is lack of information on the subject diets making it unclear that they were given creatine in their food sources.But the most glaring issue is the fact that they used the crossover subject design.Instead of having different groups taking different things and comparing them, the subject instead compared themselves between a placebo phase and an experimental phase 3-weeks apart. But the problem is that creatine level can stay elevated up to 6 weeks of supplementation. With only three weeks between control and experimentation phase, it’s still very likely that subject had elevated creatine concentration thus complicating the result of the study.

Interaction

The main concern for avoiding creatine and caffeine consumption together is due to their interaction with water. Creatine and caffeine can influence the hydration or water level of your body.Caffeine being a stimulant can accelerate the loss of water through peeing. Stimulation of your nervous system means that all parts of your body are stimulated, including your urinary system. Caffeine causes you to urinate more often and expel a greater volume of urine.Creatine on other hand holds water in the muscle cells. It is important to consume more water when supplementing creatine because each molecule of creatine must be bound to water in the muscle.Caffeine tries to flush water while creatine tries to store it. They are working against one another in terms of hydration. Without proper hydration, our performance can affect a lot.

Conclusion

It is important to consume more water throughout the day in excess of normal guidelines when consuming both creatine and caffeine.Continuous use of caffeine can diminish its effect. It’s best to limit the consumption of caffeine on a sporting event or when exercising (especially HIIT).The best way is to use 5g of creatine daily with occasional consumption of caffeine especially when maximal performance is required.However, before using either creatine or caffeine, consult your physician and nutritionist to ensure that you can safely consume these products. 

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