I thought this was interesting. These data are from football/soccer players…they simulated an hour long even & tracked 20m sprint times over the course of an hour to compare supplemented vs placebo players.
This is interesting because I can see a close parallel with a mid-level crit event. Clearly, there is an advantage to supplementing with creatine. Whether or not the advantage offsets the weight gain depends, I guess.
Doesn’t sprinting have roughly the same weight to power trade offs as biking on a flat course?
This is a bit adjacent to the OP, but, would using creatine work as a way to “pre load” hydration for events you know will be hot and hard to keep up with hydration?
Maybe. But if I think greenleaf/sims acute sodium loading protocol is much more effective for 1hr/1.5hr bike races on a hot day. You can search this forum for ‘acute sodium loading’.
If I read that correctly (or at least, the abstract) it seemed to offset it for the soccer players and running is fairly sensitive to total body mass (I’d guess more than cycling on most courses).
I’ve used it previously and been thinking of making it a more continuous part of my regime. Though more for general health than cycling necessarily.
believe the summary stated an average weight gain of 0.8kg / 1.8lbs. Hard to get excited about 1.6% improvement, but maybe not for crits. For soccer/football I guess a 30cm / 12 inch advantage is about a 1 foot lead on a defender, possibly enough to get an advantage.
If you really want to think about how creatine impacts a more cycling specific simulation…not just increased sprint power due to creatine supplementation but also the extent to which power:weight offsets the benefits of creatine, you can spend several hours thinking about the results of this study:
Just a bit of advice, though…this is one of those studies where you can’t just read the abstract and really understand the results.
