I MEGADOSED Creatine for a Week and Here's What Happened

0:00 I mega dose 28 gram of creatine for a week to see how it affects my sleep and cognitive performance. The inspiration for this came from a recent 2024 study where after 21 hours of sleep deprivation, a single large dose of creatine at 0.35 g per kilogram or 0.16 g per pound reversed the decline in cognitive performance and even improved it. The participants had higher processing speed and cognitive performance. There are other studies with similar findings showing that creatine counteracts sleep loss and helps to reduce sleep demand. So in this video, I experimented with this 0.35 g per kilogram, which for me would be 28 g to see how it affects my sleep, specifically after sleep deprivation. I'll also cover the optimal dosage for

0:45 creatine for this kind of intervention later in this video. And basically, we're going to take out 30 g of creatine. Boom. And god damn, that's quite a lot of of the creatine here. Put it in water. I had some milk further here. There you go. Finished. First 28 g of creatine. Why does creatine have these effects on sleep? Well, one of the reasons is that creatine is needed for ATP recycling and production. Your body uses 20% of your daily energy and it has a lot of creatine. Creatine is usually thought to enhance exercise performance, which is true, but it's also been seen to improve memory and cognitive performance, as well as help recover from traumatic brain injury. A 2022 meta

1:32 analysis showed that an improvement in memory in healthy individuals at doses between 2.2 g up to 20 gram per day. I mentioned that a single large dose of creatine reverses the decline in cognitive performance after sleep deprivation. In elite athletes, taking a 100 milligrams per kilogram of creatine has been seen to counteract the harmful effects of sleeping only three to five hours on skill performance. For an 80 kg person like me, that would be only 8 g, which is much smaller than the 28 g of creatine that they saw in the previous study. So, we got an early flight today. It's 5:30 and uh yeah, let's see how the creatine can help with that short sleep. All right, let me share with you my experience. The main takeaways I

2:17 experienced when taking 28 grams of creatine for a week. Generally, I did notice that the 28 grams of creatine did make me feel better after I slept shorter if I slept something like 6 or 7 hours per night than I felt as if I had slept something like 8 hours when I took like 28 grams of creatine. And the those feelings came specifically after I ingested the creatine. So like after waking up in the morning, I slept 6 hours or something. then yeah like you feel like you you slept six hours but after I took the 28 grams of creatine then in like one or two hours after the fact I felt a lot more like energized and much more like sharp with cognition. So based on my own experience I can tell that yes it does counteract some of the decline in cognitive performance that you see from mild sleep deprivation. The

3:03 downside to all of this was that I did feel a little bit nauseous and um you know a bit bad after taking the creatine. the feeling was a bit yeah my stomach was upset and uh felt like yeah just kind of nauseous it wasn't like massive it was just yeah I did feel that there was something different in terms of nausea another side effect were number tw's my stool was a little bit more liquid not complete diarrhea liquid but the type five Bristol stool chart which is kind of this soft blobs would I recommend this well I think that um as a short-term experiment if you've you know slept only a few hours or you're experiencing prolonged sleep deprivation then creatine can help to counteract some of the decline in cognitive performance and and processing speed and those kind of things. It probably also has similar effects for physical

3:49 performance. So, if you are sleepd deprived, taking larger doses of creatine will help to counteract the decline in your physical performance as well as cognitive performance. Is it a long-term strategy? You know, I don't think that it's necessarily a healthy thing to take 28 grams of creatine for the rest of your life every day, but in the short term, for up to a week, it hasn't been shown to have any negative side effects in otherwise healthy people with properly working kidneys. All right, let's talk about the dosage. What is the right dosage? The goal of taking creatine for physical performance is to saturate intramuscular creatine stores. You can achieve that by taking a low dose every day or taking a very large dose for 5 to 7 days and then dropping to a maintenance dose. That's called the creatine loading phase. The idea behind loading is that you reach the saturation point much faster within a week and then

4:35 dropping to a maintenance dose, you can maintain the saturation effect until you keep taking the creatine. With a daily load protocol, you will reach the saturation point only after about 4 weeks. Both options work in raising your muscle creatine stores, but the loading achieves it faster, which is why a lot of athletes tend to use this option. Whereas for regular people, the maintenance dose does the trick. The reason why people don't do the loading phase usually is because of the potential side effects like potential diarrhea, gastrointestinal problems, nausea, headaches, or something else like that. It doesn't appear to have any other real side effects on your like overall health. In the studies on muscle strength and memory performance, the optimal dose appears to be 100 mg per kilogram per day, which for an 80 kg weighing person is 8 g per day. If you

5:21 weigh 50 kg, then it's 5 g a day, etc. I personally take around 5 to 8 grams a day if I'm not loading. Creatine is one of the most evidence-based supplements out there that has a lot of evidence that it works. But there are at least a dozen other supplements that also have evidence that they work. Check out my video about the top 15 most evidence-based supplements out