Nutrition plays a most vital part in helping one to lose weight, gain muscle and get rid of excess fat and bodybuilders use a variety of supplements in their diet to help muscle grow. Those which give artificial muscle growth are never used in natural bodybuilding.
Instead of using these supplements as artificial aids to muscle growth a combination of intense weight training and a complete nutritional balanced diet is the best way to gain weight and muscle. This doesn’t mean that supplements shouldn’t be taken at all though.
Plenty of supplements are available for building muscle but very few are really effective. Creatine is considered the most useful of all and is taken by many bodybuilders to enhance performance.
Creatine is probably the most extensively researched performance-enhancing supplement ever, with a quite amazing safety record, although there are some people will disagree despite the evidence.
Creatine has been studied constantly and any long-term side effects have yet to be found, although after nearly twenty years of regular use one might assume they are either insignificant or absent.
Here are a few different forms of Creatine:
- Creatine monohydrate
- Creatine citrate
- Creatine phosphate
- Creatine-magnesium chelate
- Creatine ethyl ester
Out of all the different types available, the tried and tested Creatine monohydrate is probably the best one to take for building muscle mass and performance. There have been many studies as to the effect of taking Creatine monohydrate for increasing strength and muscle mass and there is solid proof that it does just that.
In essence, Creatine helps to build muscle mass as it gives you more cellular energy to train harder.
Because Creatine increases the amount of cellular energy available you can train harder than normal and, as a consequence, develop more muscle mass. It may also help protein synthesis for building muscle.
However, despite its energy boosting properties, research has shown that Creatine doesn’t seem to be very effective for endurance sports such as long distance running and rowing. It is much more effective for sports such as weightlifting and sprinting that require short bursts of energy.
Health benefits of taking Creatine for older people
Where Creatine is a great health benefit is in preventing the steady loss of muscle mass among older people. The scientific term for this is sarcopenia. This is more likely to happen in less active individuals but even occurs in those who are more physically active so lack of activity is not the only cause of lean muscle loss.
The fact is, as people get older, even if they are still physically active, their individual cells die and are not replaced as quickly as in younger people. However, this is where Creatine can help to lessen the problem of age-related muscle loss by boosting cellular regeneration.
By increasing the rate of cell replacement in older adults you could even say that Creatine helps to keep you looking younger for longer.
Now that is one health benefit worth having when the time comes.