[Music] I'm Dr Steven Cornish I'm an associate professor in the faculty of cesy and Recreation management here at the University of Manitoba my background includes both uh exercise and nutritional interventions for both healthy aging and people that are maybe going to be experiencing things such as sarcopenia which is the loss of muscle mass as people get older my PhD thesis was predominantly focused around kind of inflammatory markers and how those can affect different disease processes in terms of metabolic syndrome and sarcopenia my current research is focused largely on myokines which are proteins that are released from muscle that can have an influence on other tissues or on the muscle itself and currently I've just published well in 2019 a couple years ago now I guess I published along with some colleagues at some different universities a couple review Les on Creatine my Master's thesis was on Creatine supplementation in in ice hockey players and then we've done a couple studies on Creatine in relation to Performance enhancement that it can do in terms of lifting weights in the weight room as well as study looking at the anti-inflammatory potential of creatine in neee osteoarthritis patients we did show an effect with resistance training we actually had a a study where we used three different supplements so we used creatine conjugated linolic acid and whey protein and we had three different groups so one group received just the Whey Protein one grouped whey protein and creatine and one group received all three of the supplements so we showed an effect where the all three of the supplements were effective and improving performance but the whe in the creatine were more effective than just the whe itself as well so there's definitely performance-enhancing benefits that can be found with regards to creatine in regards to strength and lean tissue Mass gains for sure with way in of itself we still did see an effect there where there was an improvement in performance but there was a significantly greater effect with creatine and whey protein combined so there might be some type of synergistic effect that we're not aware of in terms of the mechanism underlying that but definitely that's probably uh a synergistic effect of all three of those supplements that that show the the positive effect more so than than the two or the one by itself there's been lots of research done on Creatine of course since the 1990s it kind of started and and uh since then has kind of exploded but there's been some metaanalyses done where they look at the effect of creatine versus a placebo plus the resistance training and they show a significantly greater effect with creatine on lean tissue Mass gains and strength gains as well so if you're looking for you know something that's going to benefit you in terms of performance overall then creatine is one of those substances that that seems to show potential in terms of its ability to enhance performance over time basically it's the it's the responders versus the non-responders in terms of creatine and what they're finding is if they take muscle biopsies from people that that are responders versus non-responders they find that the creatine content in their muscle already is pretty much saturated in the non-responders and in the responders it's not as saturated so when they take the creatine it seems to be taken up into the muscle more readily and then can be used for energy generating Pro process is within the muscle itself kind of the physiology behind type two and type one muscle fibers you know the type one are the slow oxidative types of muscle fibers that typically are used for endurance type activities such as cardiovascular exercise or aerobic exercise and the type two muscle fibers are those fast twitch highly explosive type of muscle fibers that are activated more so when you're doing sprinting type activities or resistance training activities that are with heavy loads those types of things so there does seem to be some suggestion that creatine might be more beneficial in the sense of enhancing those type two muscle fibers in the in the sense that it provides the energy source that they need to be able to contract more forcefully so creatine is a composition of three amino acids okay and it's considered an organic acid okay so it's not it's not a protein per se but it is a a combination of three amino acids Arginine Glycine and methionine and basically it's produced endogenously in your body so your body can produce it in and of itself but then we consume it exogenously like through food and particularly meat products so you know poultry Seafood those types of meat products can be can be used in terms of uh the source that we get it from in our daily diet and red meat as well of course when we're looking at what creatine is it basically is part of your initial Energy System sometimes called the phosphagen Energy System sometimes called the alactic Energy System creatine is is used to recombine inorganic phosphate with itself to form phosphocreatine and phosphocreatine acts as a buffer to make sure that the ATP or the energy currency that you utilize the Denine triphosphate that you utilize in your in your energy process uh especially for Sprint type activities is replenished at an adequate level it basically provides an increased amount of creatine and phosphocreatine in that system to be able to buffer ATP production and and the initial Energy System if you were to do 100 meter sprint that's the predominant Energy System that you would use during that time and so what they found is that for short burst duration activities creatine has been effective in terms of improving performance for those types of activities for sure there actually is some research on that in terms of the different types of meats that have higher amounts of creatine and I think one of the meats that actually has the highest amount is Herring there's been some evidence to suggest that that has the higher amounts of creatine um maybe because they use that Energy System more in terms of you know the types of activity that they do in terms of day-to-day activity for for a herring right for the most part you can endogenously produce it but you also need to get some exogenous sources of it as well through the meat to be able to adequately U maintain the levels that you need in your body yeah they should not that many people would eat it probably though I think there's a little bit of research that has looked at different types of uh creatine and what they're combined with for the most part the most of the research has been done on the creatine monohydrate and that's been shown to be quite effective in terms of its ability to enhance performance in those short burst duration activities I can't really answer that question in terms of specific studies that I'm aware of that have been done in that area but I can answer the question in the sense that you know creatin monohydrate has been the most researched and probably is the most efficacious in terms of what it's able to do the performance-enhancing benefits of creatine are well established now but now what's been researched more is the kind of the health effects that creatine has and in an aging population so older adults in particular creatine has been shown to be quite effective at delaying the development of sarcopenia or the development of loss of muscle mass over time you know it's not going to delay it to this extent that by itself that resistance training combined with creatine is probably going to do but if you combine those two modalities together you see quite a robust response in terms of maintaining muscle mass and strength in in older individuals as well which might help them with their activities of daily living right so depending on whether they need to carry groceries up the stairs or whether they get the groceries out of the back of the car or shovel the walk or whatever the case may be those types of things might be more doable for an older adult and might increase the amount of time that they have living independently for a longer period of time as well there's been more clinical research done now on Creatine and one of the areas of research that I kind of mentioned to you at the front end is that we've done some look looking at whether it has inflammatory potential there's been other research that's been shown that you know after certain types of activities so like long duration activities half Iron Man for instance there's one study that showed that creating supplementation 5 days before that actually decreased or attenuated the response in terms of some of these inflammatory markers that you can look at in the blood as well so it depends on the study design depends on the methodology that you're looking at but there's definitely some effects that that are that they're probably beneficial in terms of the health of the individual there has been research to show that carbohydrate ingestion along with creatine can enhance the uptake of creatine into the muscle cell itself so you get more of a bang for your butt with some simple carbs added to the the mixture if you're going to take it with something probably taking it with juice or you know apple juice or orange juice or something like that can be more effective in terms of getting the creatine into the muscle cell itself one of the things that's actually been shown as well there seems to be some indication that if you're taking caffeine and creatine together they they seem to negate each other's effect to a certain degree so that's something you you'd want to consider as well one of the things you should look for is that it has a natural health product number and that's certified through Health Canada to be efficacious and safe okay so if it doesn't have a natural health product number on it it's uh not been certified by Health Canada as a as a safe and effective supplement there are two methods that you can go about using creatine so one is to use a loading phase and usually you use about 20 G per day broken down into 5 G doses four times throughout the day and You' usually use that loading phase for 5 to 7even days and then you'd go on to what they call a maintenance phase so a maintenance phase is usually about 3 to 5 Gams per day and there's been research that shows that you could do that extensively for really long period of time as well and it's still going to have a benefit in terms of probably your performance over over overall the other way that you can go about doing is is just avoiding the loading phase and doing straight 3 to 5 grams per day and it'll take a little bit longer probably for your muscles to be saturated with the creatine and then increase their fossil creatine content as well but eventually it gets there as well and it should be over time like after a month or so it would be similar to what you did with the loading phase as well as far as I'm aware there there has been some studies done around the timing of creatine intake and it didn't seem to matter as to when you took it as to whether or not it would be effective in terms of enhancing your performance there wasn't more of an effect after or more of an effect before you would take the creatine before your workout or after your workout type thing typically like most of the research that's been done has shown no potential negative side effects of creatine use even over a longer term time period one of the things things that we have to be aware of though is that people with different pathologies or different disease processes especially people with chronic kidney disease it might be uh prudent for them to avoid using creatine I know of one animal study that was done I believe it was in rats where they supplemented the animals that had pre-existing kidney disease uh with creatine and it actually accelerated the disease process so there's caution to be said in terms of warranting that now of course animal physiology and human physiology maybe is not 100% exactly the same but at the same time there's caution to be warranted there I think in terms of the population that is actually using creatine as a supplement [Music]