Dr. Darren Candow

Yeah, that's an excellent question.

So the thought is as we get older, we have reduced fossil creatine stores in our body, so they might need more.

And the hope is about 95% is housed in our skeletal muscle.

But now with the emergence of research, the rest is in bone and brain specifically.

So the hope is if we take in more, our muscles will be full, which is great.

But now hopefully we're going to have some trickling into our bone, which is even just as important.

And I think most people would argue from the neck up that's really important from a global perspective with all the neurological diseases, depression, anxiety.

So I'm one of the big proponents of taking a lot more than probably what's recommended based on the evidence-based research to sort of disperse throughout the whole body, not just skeletal muscle.

So, I mean, in 1992, Roger Harris came up with the seminal protocol, where, as you just mentioned, this loading phase, it's the most viable, rapid way to really saturate your skeletal muscle.

This has nothing to do with the bone or the brain.

And so that's 20 grams a day for about seven days is usually what's recommended.

A bit of new information, you only need to do that for two days, and then your muscles are saturated.

So...

The loading phase was designed for athletes to really rapidly sort of fill up the room, if you will, from a skeletal muscle perspective.

After that, you can reduce it as little as two grams a day.

So again, that's a half a salmon steak.

That would be a half a chicken breast or whichever.

So it's very viable.

They call that the maintenance phase.

The only problem with the loading phase is it's so rapid, it does cause water to enter a lot of our cells.