If you’re taking creatine to support your gym workouts, you may be wondering if you should take creatine on rest days.
The short answer is:
Yes. Taking creatine on rest days will help maintain the level of creatine in your body to more effectively boost your next resistance or high intensity workout. Taking creatine before or after working out has no impact – having consistency in the time of day you take your creatine is more important.
Why take creatine at all?
Creatine is a very common supplement that is widely available. Creatine basically makes more energy available to your muscles during exercise. It is often taken by weightlifters to help them lift more, and by athletes to help them train longer.
How to take creatine?
Creatine comes in powder form. You should mix the powder with water or milk (and other liquid if you prefer!), before drinking the mixture.
The aim is to saturate your muscles with creatine. When you first start taking creatine it may take up to 4 weeks to reach saturation point. Anything beyond that saturation point will be peed out without harm.
Loading Phase
Be mindful that this means you will not get the full benefits of creatine immediately.
You may want to start feeling the benefit sooner than that, so you should consider a ‘loading phase’. This is short period of time where you take a higher daily dosage to help build up creatine levels in your muscles quicker.
RELATED ARTICLE: How Long Does it Take to Get Ripped?
An example loading phase would be 20g per day for 1 week. And thereafter, continue on the 3-5g dosage to maintain levels.
Loading is not a necessity – you will reap the benefits of creatine simply by taking the regular dose from Day 1. A loading phase simply helps you enjoy the creatine benefits sooner than not loading.
When should you take creatine?
Remember, the aim of taking creatine is to reach and maintain a saturation point, meaning you constantly have creatine in your muscles ready to help your next workout.
Maintaining a consistent level of creatine in the muscles requires taking creatine at consistent times of the day. So don’t take it in the morning one day, and then in the evening the next day.
This will create dips and spikes in your saturation levels, which may mean you don’t have the right creatine levels to fully support a workout.
Instead, take your creatine at the same time every day to maintain consistent saturation levels. Build it into a routine to help you remember, and void missing a day.
What matters is not what time of day you take creatine, but that you take your creatine at the same time everyday. This will allow you to reach and maintain consistent levels of creatine in your muscles to help with your workouts.
Should you take creatine before or after working out?
Taking creatine before or after a workout has no impact on that workout. It is simply not important – daily consistency is key.
Taking creatine on a rest day
By now you know that you should take creatine on rest days as well as workout days. This is to keep the levels of creatine in your body at the right levels, consistently.
Can you overdose on creatine?
A healthy doe of creatine is 3-5g per day. Most packs come with mini scoops of 5g, so one scoop per day is about right.
This dosage may need to vary for particularly big or small people, so please adjust accordingly.
There are no serious side effects from taking too much creatine (within reason) – your body will simply expel any excess in your urine.
