Dr. Daniel Amen

What does that mean?

It means that the creatine, which is actually stored in your muscle as phosphocreatine, is there and ready to be used to make energy.

So it takes – again, it takes about a month or so to do that unless you are really giving your muscles a high dose, right?

So the five grams a day, it can only do it for so many days, and then finally you get saturated.

When you do this loading phase, you kind of just accelerate that whole process.

And so that's why when people are doing these experiments where they want to test the effects of creatine –

They want the participants to have really high levels of creatine in their muscles quick because they don't want to do a month-long experiment, right?

They want the experiment to be like a couple of weeks or a week.

So that was kind of the whole concept behind this loading phase.

If you're not someone who's going to some kind of competition, you know, like your CrossFit games or something,

You don't really need to do that loading phase if you've already been supplementing with five grams a day for like a month.

When it comes to the brain, what's happening if you get above that five grams, that's pretty much all consumed by the muscle.

You're having some left over in circulation and the brain takes it up and it takes it up, right?

What it really shines is under that stressful condition, which again, for me, I feel like every day is like cognitively demanding for me because I'm constantly, you know, learning new material or learning new information or working on things, right?

And so there's a lot of cognitive stress on my brain.

And so I feel like I'm constantly under that stress.

And that's where...

Getting the creatine in your brain helps you make that energy quicker.

And so that's why, like I've done, I've had, you know, been jet lagged and have to give a talk at, you know, like 5 a.m.

in the morning, my biological time after not getting sleep.