Dr. Darren Candow

So, and it's often not talked about, when you take creatine for at least a month, people say, well, how long does it stay in my muscles if I go on vacation?

What if I can't take creatine?

And in skeletal muscle, it takes about a month for those elevated levels to come back down.

In the brain, we don't have a lot of evidence, but it's speculated it takes about anywhere between five weeks to about three months for those elevations to come back down.

Harder or longer or more frequent.

So one of the things with creatine, it allows the muscle to recover quicker.

So you might be able to get back to the, you know, if an athlete's trained twice a day.

So either one of those seems to be one of the most plausible mechanisms.

So that is actually showing where the individuals would train and then without creatine and then take it over time as well.

It's a detraining and then taking it again.

Correct.

Taking it at week four and then that's where the elevations go up.

Yeah.

So it goes to show that when you have creatine, everything is elevated.

If you stop taking it, it takes about four weeks to come back down, but you'll notice that it was at the same level as a placebo.

And then when they take it again, they get a rebound effect.

So I think this has application for people who have injured themselves and they now need to go back and start training.

If you take creatine, it can accelerate the rehabilitation program.

It can gain increase in muscle mass.

It's not great.