Dr Karl

And if you want anything to happen in your body, you have to burn up ATP.

At any given moment, you've got about 200 or 300 grams of ATP, but in the course of a day, you'll make your own body weight.

And when you're pumping iron or working extra hard...

you kind of run out of ATP in a little way and then the creatine can kick in.

So it can act as a substitute for ATP and so you can push yourself a bit further and as a result of that, after a few months, come out with slightly bigger muscles than if you hadn't.

So what it does is it lets you push yourself a little bit harder but of course you don't want to go into damage.

You can go into serious damage, don't do that.

Right.

Oh, and by the way, Wendy Zuckerman has a wonderful podcast on that on Science Versus where she interviews a professor of exercise physiology who's also a bodybuilder.

Oh.

And so he's got a personal interest in looking gorgeous.

He's from somewhere in Texas.

I don't know where.

It's the same effect as pumping up a bicycle tire.

Have you ever done that?

No.

Okay, so if you have friends who have a bicycle, ask them if as they hold the bicycle pump in their hand, one hand, and then do the pumping, does the bicycle pump get hot?

And the answer is yes.

If you compress air, it gets hot.

And if you come into the atmosphere at several kilometres a second, you are compressing the air to a military industrial grade.