Touching on creatine, it is the most tested, safe, and effective support supplement we have. I mean, it's just, there are thousands of studies on creatine monohydrate now. And I would say very clearly too, if you're using any other form of creatine, I think you're wasting your money. Creatine hydrochloride has some hype around it.

Apparently, it's a little more soluble. The claim is that you need less, but there's only a couple studies on it, and it's more expensive. And creatine monohydrate is not particularly expensive. I realize people have different budgets, but it's not, it doesn't land in the, it's not a budget breaker.

Yeah, it's gotten more expensive because of COVID and supply chain issues. Even the, there's forms of creatine that appear to be as good, like hydrochloride, but it's more expensive. And then things like creatine ethyl ester has been shown to be worse than creatine monohydrate. Buffered creatine is as good or worse, and it's much more expensive.

So I tell people just take creatine monohydrate. It is tried and true. It's been shown to saturate the muscle cells 100% with phosphocreatine, and that's what you want. So creatine works through a few different methodologies. One, through increasing phosphocreatine content, which helps improve exercise performance. It also appears to improve recovery, and it increases lean mass, a lot of which is through bringing water into the muscle cells.

But that is, I mean, muscle cells are mostly water. So when people say, well, it's just water, that's what muscle cells mostly are. And it also increases strength and some other metrics. Now, it also has been shown in studies that people tend to get a decrease in body fat percentage.

Now that's probably because they're getting an increase in lean mass. And so the relative is a decrease in body fat percentage. But there are a few studies that show a decrease in fat mass as well. I don't think that creatine is a fat burner. I think that people are able to train harder, build more lean tissue.

And so that's probably having an effect on fat mass. Then they've actually shown more recently some cognitive benefits to creatine, which I find really interesting as well. But the only knock on creatine that anybody's been able to come up with, because they've debunked the kidney stuff, they've debunked the liver stuff, there's no evidence that it harms healthy kidney or liver, is hair loss.

So what about hair loss? Because there was one study in 2009 that showed that creatine increased DHT. But they didn't really show an effect on any other sex hormone. So it's kind of strange. Like you would think if there was an increase in DHT, there would be like something else that changes as well.

And it's only one study. And again, didn't directly measure hair loss, measured DHT, which we know is involved in the loss of the follicle. So what I would say is that I am not convinced. It's only one study, never been replicated to my knowledge, and it was looking at a mechanism rather than an outcome.

So if you're somebody who's prone to hair loss, and you want to avoid creatine because of that, I understand. But for most people, I don't think it's a, I don't think it's something to worry about. Do you emphasize the classic loading of creatine, taking it a bunch of times per day, and then backing off or just taking it consistently at the, I think five grams per day is kind of a typical dose that people take?

So again, no solutions, only trade-offs. You can load it and you will saturate your phosphocreatine stores faster, like usually within a week. If you just take five grams per day, it'll take two, three, four weeks, but you will get to the same place. And you're probably going to have a much lower risk of GI issues.

Some people, creatine can be a gut irritant. If it is for some folks, I would recommend splitting it into multiple doses. So maybe like multiple to one or two gram doses per day. And definitely don't load it if you're somebody who has GI issues from it.