Blood plasma levels of creatine peak 1-2 hours after oral administration. Its brief half life means that if you really wanted "stable levels" you would need to take it a few times a day. Beyond the fact that loading creatine is a waste of money, it certainly is possible to get a training effect out of acute dosing. Taking creatine before a workout DOES have an appreciable effect; I've found that as using little as 3 grams before workout can cause a great improvement in my recovery between sets.
Creatine helps draw water into your muscles. This increased retention helps the tearing of the myofibrils among other things of course. Why would you want to take a supplement that does this AFTER working out? It makes no sense at all. Taking something that is designed to help your muscles with a particular function, after you have already performed said function? I believe this comes from the particular intuition that one is aiming to "replace" creatine that has been lost in the workout, however that's avoiding the main argument here. The point of supplementation is to bolster already existing resources so that more may be available when it's needed. Creatine isn't a recovery drink.
A long time ago GNC used to have instruction labels on their products that would say to use creatine post-workout. I haven't been in a GNC for a while so I don't know if that sort of hogwash is still going around, but I assume it's at least partially responsible for the misunderstanding.
I think I posted this somewhere on here about the misconception of creatine and its half life...
Half life doesn't really mean much with creatine as it is referring to blood creatine levels post ingestion, not muscle creatine phosphate levels which have got a washout time of anything up to 4 weeks from full saturation. The idea of using creatine pre or during training is flawed, your muscles don't use creatine monohydrate as a fuel source, it uses creatine phoshate to convert ADP back to ATP, so ideally you want creatine phosphate stored in the muscle. As you say you don't need to load however it will take about 3 or 4 weeks to reach the same point as a 5 day load so why waste 4 weeks of your time not getting the full benefit of creatine. And it has to be used everyday, not just 3 or 4 days a week.
As far as creatine pretraining, maybe you could use it two hours or so before - it takes about 1 hour to increase plasma levels however probably also takes an hour or so to transit through your gut, depending on fluid levels, so if you use it 15 mins pretraining you'll probably have finished working out before it gets to do anything. Research suggests the body actually absorbs creatine mono most effectively post training
"Interestingly however, exercise may provide a comparable benefit for increasing muscle TCr to using a creatine-carbohydrate supplementation strategy. Green (1996b) reported that creatine retention in the muscle was similar when exercise, prior to ingestion, was introduced, compared to creatine ingestion with simple carbohydrates."
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On ingestion of 5g of monohydrate the plasma level of creatine has been shown to rise between five- and ten-fold after approximately 1 hour (Balsom 1994). This increase in plasma creatine content in turn increases the blood/muscle concentration gradient. Resultantly, more blood borne creatine is transported and trapped in the muscle cell. With a half-life of 1-1.5 hours, blood creatine levels remains elevated for a short time period (Havenetidis 2003). Repeating this dosage 4-5 times per day at ~4 hour intervals, therefore, keeps plasma creatine concentration constantly elevated and aids the movement of creatine from the blood into the muscle cell at a constant rate throughout the day.
While the greatest Cr uptake appears to occur within the first two to three days of supplementation with such a “loading” feeding protocol (Hultman 1996, Rossiter 1996, Flanagan 2004), administration periods shorter than 5 days have not been shown to effectively increase the muscle creatine pool. In a study by Odland (1996), subjects ingested 20g/day in 5g doses for just 3 days. Needle biopsies from the vastus lateralis revealed such a feeding strategy had no significant effect on the elevation of muscle PCr concentration.
Creatine supplementation, individualised to subjects’ body mass, has been shown to significantly increase the muscular TCr pool. Rossiter (1996) and Flanagan (2004) administered creatine dosages of 0.25g.kg bodymass-1 each day divided into four doses for five days. To elaborate, 2.2 kilograms= 1 pound. Therefore, a 200 pound man (90 kg) would be administrated approximately 22 grams of creatine per day in these experiments. In both studies, creatine uptake was calculated as the difference between the amount of creatine fed and the amount recovered in urine during each 24 hour period of supplementation. This protocol, in both studies, effectively raised muscle TCr.
This individualised feeding mechanism is largely similar to the 100g acute creatine loadings already detailed (Greenhaff 1994, Hultman 1996, Izquierdo 2002). For a standard 75kg (165 lb) male, the feeding pattern equals 18.75g in 4 doses for 5 days. However, the standardization to body mass allows for an increased supplementation for larger individuals or a reduced amount of supplementation for particularly small individuals and may be a logical improvement on the “one size fits all” administrations evidenced by Greenhaff (1994) and Izquierdo (2002), among others. At the very least, this would be a useful supplementation protocol to follow for particularly large or particularly small individuals.
Hultman (1996), demonstrated that continuous low dose creatine supplementation (3g/day, in one serving over 28 days) can, in the long term be as effective at increasing muscle TCr as the 100g acute creatine loading method.
Burke (2000) in a double blind study utilising a large subject base (n=41) detailed the ergogenic effects following a continuous low dose supplementation protocol of 7.7g/day for 21 days. Subjects performed more total work until fatigue, experienced significantly greater improvements in peak force and peak power and maintained elevated mean peak power for a longer period of time when exposed to low dose creatine supplementation in tandem with training as opposed to training alone.
Hultman (1996) rightly comments however that while the low-dose method will, over time, elevate TCr comparably to the acute method, the 100g acute method is a more rapid mechanism to increase the muscle TCr store than continuous low dose supplementation protocols and should be favoured.
It is important to note that there is considerable variability in the increase of muscle creatine content following supplementation. Some individuals are “non-responders” and experience little or no increase in muscle creatine content following usually effective loading protocols. Greenhaff (1994) found a dosage sufficient to elevate muscle TCr concentration in 5 of 8 subjects by ~25% had little effect on muscle TCr concentration in 3 non-responding subjects (see subjects 5, 6 and 8 in figure 1 below). Others individuals can be “high-responders” and creatine monohydrate supplementation can illicit a >30% increase in muscle TCr content (Rawson 2003). It is not entirely clear why there is such large inter-subject variability in muscle creatine content changes following supplementation. The strongest determinant of how much creatine is taken up into muscle appears to be the initial creatine content in that muscle (Greenhaff 1994, Rawson 2003). Published evidence demonstrates subjects with lower resting muscle creatine contents have the largest magnitude of increase following supplementation, while subjects with higher creatine contents will experience little or no increase (Greenhaff 1994, Rawson 2003, Casey 2000). Greenhaff (1995) comments that individuals with below average basal TCr contents (120 mmol.kg dry weight-1) can expect creatine supplementation to induce a >25% increase in the muscle creatine pool.
