What to Know About Creatine and Alcohol

We often look for ways to make our bodies work smarter when we exercise. Whether it’s to improve our physical stamina, avoid injury, or build muscle, sometimes we want some extra help.

Creatine helps energize muscles and provides a supportive boost. The body creates creatine naturally, but creatine supplements have been around for many years and are very popular with athletes. Sales of creatine are around $400 million per year.

Alcohol, on the other hand, has the opposite effect on muscles. Exercising soon after drinking can cause muscle injury and slow muscle recovery. So, drinking alcohol might undo some of the muscle-building benefits of creatine.

Let’s take a closer look at creatine and alcohol and what role they play in muscle building.

What is creatine?

Think of creatine as a power cycle. When your muscles need energy, creatine provides that fuel for quick, powerful movements. When muscles use up the stored energy, you need more creatine to keep powering your muscles.

Creatine and building muscle

Exercises, such as resistance training, cause small tears or injury to the muscle fibers. Satellite cells are then activated to repair and build new muscle during rest periods up to a day or two after you exercise.

Muscles can grow in different ways. Amino acids, hormones, and a nutritious diet all help build muscle.

Creatine builds muscle by:

• drawing water into muscles
• growing muscle fibers
• slowing muscle breakdown

Typically, your body needs 1 to 3 grams of creatine every day to replace what you lose.

Most people eat seafood and meat to reload or build their stored energy. You can also take creatine supplements to build up your levels.

Adding creatine may also prevent muscle degeneration as you age and can be helpful for people who don’t produce creatine on their own.

Creatine supplements

Creatine is known as an ergogenic support tool, or performance booster, that’s popular with athletes.

These tools can be devices, nutritional supplements, drug therapy, or psychological practices to help boost abilities or improve training endurance.

Training or doing high-intensity exercise causes faster burning of creatine. Supplements may help with stamina, strength, and recovery.

Athletes and body builders often use creatine supplements to boost endurance. Creatine helps provide short bursts of energy to power up performance.

Creatine may have other benefits which are being studied, including improving brain functions like memory and recall. Creatine might also support your immune system.

How can creatine and alcohol affect you?

Alcohol has a negative effect on muscle movement

Animal studies indicate that alcohol can slow the movement of calcium into muscles. This effects muscle contraction.

More studies are needed to confirm these effects on humans.

Alcohol decreases your ability to get nutrients

To build muscle, your body needs fuel in the form of added nutrition during exercise.

Alcohol can slow your body’s absorption of nutrients, including protein and amino acids. This has a negative effect on how your muscles react to exercise. Muscles can become prone to injury and are slower to recover after exercise.

Alcohol makes creatine supplementation less effective

Drinking alcohol reduces creatine’s benefits of building muscle and helping with endurance and recovery.

This happens because:

• Alcohol takes water away. Alcohol pulls water from tissues and acts as a diuretic, causing dehydration, muscle cramping, and pain.
• Creatine can’t pull in water that’s not there. Creatine pulls water into your cells to build up muscle after exercise, so if you’re dehydrated, creatine can’t provide your muscles with power.
• Alcohol directly impacts the organs that make creatine. Regular heavy drinking can damage your muscles, liver, and kidneys. Since creatine is made and used by these organs, excessive alcohol can slowly weaken your body.

Things to consider about creatine

If you’re thinking about trying or are currently using creatine supplements, there are some helpful tips to keep in mind.

You need around 3 to 5 grams of creatine every day to boost performance. Most people, especially those who eat meat, can get this from their diet. However, if you don’t eat meat, creatine supplements can help you create a more balanced diet.

Athletes typically take loading doses of 20 grams of creatine over 5 days to build up phosphocreatine in the muscles before training. This might cause side effects like cramping, diarrhea, or nausea. To avoid these side effects, you can take smaller amounts (3 grams) over a longer time frame.

That said, you don’t need to be an elite athlete to improve your exercise benefits with the help of creatine.

It’s essential to drink plenty of water when taking creatine to get the most out of the supplements. Creatine might cause you to gain some weight from the water pulled into your muscles.

Creatine supplements come in different varieties, but creatine monohydrate has the most research backing its safety and effectiveness. Creatine works best when taken with easy-to-digest carbohydrates and proteins to quickly provide muscle boost during activity.

Avoid taking creatine with alcohol or caffeine, since they’re both diuretics that can cause dehydration. Also, if you have kidney or liver disease, talk with your doctor before taking creatine.

Creatine doesn’t work for everyone, but you can try it out to see how it works for your body.

The bottom line

Creatine can provide an energy boost for high-intensity exercise or training and help build muscle. It’s been used safely for many years by athletes to improve performance.

Alcohol can curb the beneficial effects of creatine because it has some opposite effects on muscles and cells. Alcohol is fine in moderation but avoid drinking on days you exercise so your muscles can benefit from creatine supplements.

Ask your doctor or pharmacist to help you choose a reputable creatine monohydrate brand with potency and purity guarantees. Dietary supplements like creatine aren’t approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and quality can vary among brands.

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