I can second this, do NOT start at 25g of creatine. If you're too lazy to read the literature a friendly AI tool will summarize it.
I can second this, do NOT start at 25g of creatine. If you're too lazy to read the literature a friendly AI tool will summarize it.
If your intention is to take creatine long term, skip the loading phase.
It might take longer to see full effects, but who cares if you’re intending to take it indefinitely.
Most guidance I’ve seen says to start with a loading phase of 25-30g per day for several days, then go down to 5g per day maintenance.
This sounds intense... I'm a small female and I recently started at 5g a day and now I've dropped down to 2g a day because even at just 5g I was getting signs of dehydration, despite tripling my water intake. It does seem to make a difference in my physical performance so I'm overall happy with it.
Also the NIH fact sheet for creatine specifically recommends against higher starting doses.
I did the 25g a day loading phase and I could not tell any sort of effect at all one way or another. I do lift either more weight or do more reps pretty much every time I work out now. What was repping to failure a month or two ago is not even a working set now.
Per day being a key part of that. 30g at once is going to give a good chunk of people pretty severe cramping or a trip to the bathroom.
I don't think you can even do 30g at once in terms of mixing it. Even 5g in water it seems like theres some that will just stay crashed out of solution no matter what. I have done 25g over the course of a day though for a week long loading phase, and didn't notice any ill effects.
I think a lot of the anecdata on creatine is probably from people misplacing confounding issues to the creatine use. People in this thread are talking about heart palpitations or trouble sleeping. Stressful days at work are enough to trigger that.
If you're too lazy to read the literature, then just don't take it.
Going to something that frequently hallucinates or misstates things to the point where it's "trust, but verify by reading the source" means you may as well just read the literature you'd have to verify the summary against anyway.