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The Benefits of Creatine Beyond Muscle Power

20th December 2022

Health Nutrition

20th December 2022

By Vikki Rich

As the new year is looming, people are starting to plan their new year’s resolutions. Whether that’s continuing to head to the gym or starting from scratch. People are looking for ways to boost and support their performance for the best results. The gym can be tough, we feel you, but there are many ways you can support your body with this new, or very familiar trip to the gym. You may have heard of creatine products, but if you’re still left wondering, what is creatine for? We’ve got you!

Creatine is a naturally occurring compound that people use to boost their athletic performance and to help build up their strength and muscles. It can be found in food supplements such as The Power Booster and is the go-to product for gym-goers and athletes as it’s perfect for high-intensity training. It’s increasing in popularity and quickly becoming one of the most popular sports supplements as everyone agrees… it works! But apart from the known results, does creatine have further benefits? Today we’re talking about all the creatine benefits beyond building muscle power that you may have not known about before.

Creatine for brain health

There have been studies that have shown, creatine not only has effects on your body, but it also has a positive effect on your brain health and helps to fight neurological diseases. Certain diseases that are neurological are caused by a reduction of the phosphocreatine in your brain. Phosphocreatine is found in your vertebrate and stores phosphates that provide energy for your muscular contraction. Increasing your phosphocreatine levels can maintain your daily function and reduce the level of cell death by 25%. Studies have shown that creatine has restored the level of phosphocreatine in mice that have Huntington’s disease. Making their brain’s levels of phosphocreatine 72% of the levels before the disease.

There have been other tests and research taken out on other animals that suggest creatine can improve other neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, and brain or spinal cord injuries. So, there’s no doubt that in animals creatine benefits the brain, and although more studies are needed in humans, it’s certainly food (supplements) for thought.

Further creatine brain benefits

Creatine can help to fight against neurological diseases but can also help to improve its function. Something a lot of people can struggle with is their memory, research has shown that in older people when they supplement creatine for 2 weeks they find that their memory significantly improved. It can also help to increase their brain function and reduce the loss of muscle and strength related to age.

Creatine is naturally found in meat, therefore vegetarians often have lower levels. A study shows that when vegetarians supplemented creatine, they found they had up to a 50% improvement in their memory.

Creatine against blood sugar levels and diabetes

Sugary treats are hard to avoid, especially when they are just so delicious. You may be happy to hear that research suggests that creatine can reduce your blood sugar levels. It helps to increase the functionality of your GLUT4 (glucose transporter type 4) which takes your blood sugar and distributes it into your muscles.

If your body has a short-term response to blood sugar after eating a meal, it can be a diabetes risk, so the faster your body clears the sugar from your blood the better. By boosting the distribution into your muscles by intaking creatine, you’re clearing your sugar from your blood quicker and reduces your risk of developing diabetes.

Reduce tiredness and fatigue

In a study that ran for 6 months on people with brain injuries, select patients were given creatine supplements and 50% of those supplemented found they had a reduction of dizziness. 80% of those patients given supplements found they didn’t experience any fatigue.

There were also studies on athletes that took a cycling test with creatine supplements didn’t get as tired. Creatine supplies your body with the energy needed daily as well as increasing your dopamine levels, making you less tired.

If you weren’t sure about trying out creatine, I’m sure these benefits will help you with your decision. Creatine is not only one of the cheaper options for food supplements, but it is also the safest out there. There have been over 200 years’ worth of research on this compound, with many studies that support the safety of long-term use of it. What are you waiting for, why not try it out?

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The Best Supplements for Muscle Recovery

The Best Supplements for Muscle Recovery

Nobody has ever asked me which supplements are best for muscle recovery. Instead, they ask how to build muscle. They ask how to tone up without getting bulky. Recovery is a big part of the answer to both, but one that nobody goes looking for. Which is a shame, because it's where an enormous amount of good training goes to waste. It's also where a lot of money gets wasted. Your local supplement shop or preferred online retailer is almost certainly full of products that either duplicate something you're already taking or do a completely different job to the one implied on the label. Neither makes them bad products, but it does make them a poor use of your budget. The short version is like the rest of the fitness industry – there’s a ton of misinformation out there and it’s easy to get lost in the noise. So this is the list I'd give you if you asked. Nine supplements that are well worth considering, three that are probably worth giving a miss, and how to put them together without paying twice for the same thing. Key takeaways Protein, creatine and tart cherry have the strongest evidence behind them. If you only ever buy three things, buy these. Magnesium, zinc and vitamin D don't speed recovery up so much as lessen the things that hold it back. Vitamin D is crucial, especially through a British winter where there’s not as much sun. Omega-3 and curcumin help manage the inflammatory response. These are useful during heavy training blocks, but not something you want to suppress all year round. Carbohydrate and electrolytes only become a priority when your recovery turnaround is short: think two sessions a day, endurance work, or training in heat. BCAAs aren't a recovery supplement. EAAs work but they usually duplicate your protein powder if it’s high quality. Glutamine's evidence in trained, well-fed people is weak. Tart cherry appears to help you produce force again sooner rather than make you feel less sore, which is the more useful of the two anyway. No supplement compensates for poor sleep, insufficient protein or badly managed training load. What recovery actually involves Before we get to the list, we should take a moment to understand what we're asking these supplements to do. It’ll also start to explain why some of them work and why others never really had a chance. After a hard session, you need three things to happen. Your muscles need repairing, which requires a steady supply of amino acids (the building blocks of new muscle tissue). The inflammation that follows training needs to run its course and resolve; it isn't the enemy here, it's part of how you adapt, but it does need managing rather than leaving to run wild. And your body needs to refuel and reset: your muscle glycogen needs replenishing, hydration restored, and your hormones and nervous system brought back to baseline, most of which happens whilst you're asleep. Which means a supplement can really only do one of three jobs. Supply raw materials. Moderate the inflammatory response. Or support the systems doing the actual repair work. If it doesn't fit into one of those three categories, it's an expensive maybe at best. Keep that in mind as we go, because it's the quickest way to work out whether something belongs in your stack. We've covered the science of post-workout recovery and what's actually happening when you get DOMS in more detail elsewhere. This piece is about what to take to aid things. The non-negotiables These three have the strongest evidence behind them and the biggest practical effect. If you only ever buy three things, make it these. Protein powder (the type matters less than you think) Protein is the raw material. It’s the headliner of recovery and anything muscle related as a whole. Everything else here is a supporting act. You can't build a house without bricks, and you can't rebuild muscle without amino acids. The research points fairly consistently to 1.6g to 2.2g of protein per kilogram of bodyweight per day if you're training seriously, spread across the day in servings of roughly 0.3g per kilogram. For most people that's 25g to 40g at a time. Powder isn't magic. It's simply the most convenient and cost-effective way to close the gap between what you eat and what you need. Where it gets interesting is which type, because that's where you hear a lot of marketing noise. Firstly, should you choose whey concentrate or isolate? Isolate is filtered further, so it comes in around 90% protein by weight against roughly 70-80% for concentrate, with less lactose and less fat. But here's the part the labels tend to skip: when your total daily protein is matched, isolate has no meaningful advantage for muscle growth or recovery. Choose it if lactose bothers you, or if you're on a tight calorie budget and want the nutrient density. Don't pay extra expecting more muscle. It pays (literally) to know what you’re getting. Casein digests more slowly and gives a sustained release of amino acids over several hours, which makes it quite useful before bed or across a long gap between meals. The better protein blends usually include at least some casein for exactly that reason. Egg protein is excellent, and one of the best options if you're avoiding dairy. But it's worth clearing up a myth that refuses to die: egg is not the most bioavailable protein you can buy. On DIAAS, the current gold standard for measuring protein quality, whey and milk protein score at or above whole egg. Egg is very good. It just isn't the winner it's usually sold as. You deserve a straight answer about beef protein too. It’s often marketed as a cleaner, lower calorie alternative to whey, but a significant proportion of beef protein products are made from hydrolysed collagen or gelatin rather than muscle meat, and collagen has a poor amino acid profile for our purposes. Very little leucine, and no tryptophan at all. It simply can't drive muscle protein synthesis the way whey does. The same applies to collagen powders generally: collagen is a protein, but it isn't a muscle-building one. For most people, a blend covering both fast and slow digesting sources is the most sensible choice. The Strong Protein gives you 34g per serving from whey concentrate, whey isolate and casein together, so you get the immediate spike and the sustained release without managing two tubs. Creatine monohydrate Creatine is the most researched supplement in sports nutrition, and it still gets filed under "strength and size" rather than recovery. That's a mistake. People view creatine purely for its ability to enhance performance, and it definitely does, but it also has value for recovery. That value lies in how quickly you can produce force again. By topping up the phosphocreatine system that fuels high-intensity effort, creatine helps restore performance between hard sessions, and it plays a role in glycogen resynthesis alongside carbohydrates. I do need to provide one honest caveat though. The evidence on whether creatine actually reduces markers of muscle damage is genuinely mixed. One systematic review is titled, without a hint of irony, The Paradoxical Effect of Creatine Monohydrate on Muscle Damage Markers. So I won't tell you it lowers your creatine kinase. What it reliably does is get you back to training hard sooner, which, being honest, is the outcome that really matters to many of the people taking it. Take 3-5g daily, every day, rest days included. Timing is irrelevant. Consistency isn't. You don't need to load, and you want plain monohydrate; the more expensive forms have never convincingly beaten it. If you want a proven, science-backed source of quality creatine, you can find that right here on the Innermost site. The Power Booster is 5g of German-sourced creatine monohydrate and nothing else. There's also 3g built into The Strong Protein if you'd rather not manage another tub. Tart cherry (montmorency) Most articles on the subject of tart cherry get it slightly wrong, so let’s be precise and clear things up. You'll usually see tart cherry described as a soreness remedy. A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis of 19 trials found something more interesting. There were significant improvements in the recovery of maximal voluntary contraction (your ability to produce force), and the effect grew over the days following exercise. There were also reductions in C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation. What there wasn't was a significant pooled effect on muscle soreness itself. So tart cherry appears to help you perform again sooner rather than help you feel less sore. If you're training or competing to a schedule, that's comfortably the more useful of the two. The authors of the review do flag low to moderate certainty and a lot of variation between studies, so treat it as promising evidence rather than set in stone fact. There's one other thing worth adding. Inflammation is part of the signal that drives adaptation, so suppressing it aggressively all year round may cost you some of the progress you're training for. Use tart cherry when recovering quickly genuinely matters more than adapting maximally. That might be during competition weeks, a congested fixture list, or perhaps a hard training camp. Then take it back out. The Strong Protein includes 300mg of Montmorency cherry alongside 250mg of bilberry, both for their anthocyanin content. The supporting cast These four won't transform your recovery on their own. What they do instead is help to lessen the things that might be holding it back, which for a lot of people is where the real gains are hiding. Magnesium Magnesium is involved in hundreds of enzymatic reactions, including muscle contraction and relaxation, energy production and protein synthesis. It's also one of the more reliable influencers of sleep quality, which makes it a recovery supplement twice over. It's worth paying attention to because UK intakes are frequently below the recommended daily amount, particularly among younger adults, and hard training increases what you lose through sweat. Form matters more than dose here. Magnesium glycinate or citrate are far better absorbed than the cheap magnesium oxide you'll find in most supermarket products. Aim for 200-400mg daily. There's 200mg in The Strong Protein, and magnesium appears again as part of the ZMA in The Recover Capsules. Zinc Zinc supports immune function, protein synthesis and hormone production, and like magnesium you lose it through sweat, so heavy training weeks are sure to increase the amount you need. We need to be precise about the hormonal claim here, because this is one of the most oversold supplements going. Zinc supports normal testosterone production if you're deficient. It will not push your levels above normal if you're already topped up, and no amount of fancy packaging will ever change that. Correcting a genuine shortfall is worth doing. Chasing a hormonal edge you don't have isn't. Don't megadose either, because sustained high zinc intakes interfere with copper absorption. Around 10-15mg a day is plenty for most people. The Recover Capsules include zinc as part of their ZMA content if you’re looking for a supplement to cover multiple bases in one. Vitamin D If you train in the UK, Vitamin D is one of the things that’s likely to be limiting you without you even realising it. Between roughly October and March, the sun doesn't climb high enough at our latitude for your skin to make meaningful amounts of vitamin D, no matter how much time you spend outside. The NHS advice is that everyone should consider a daily supplement through autumn and winter for exactly that reason. For recovery specifically, vitamin D is involved in muscle function and force production, and low levels have been linked to reduced strength and higher injury risk in athletes. It's also the least exciting item on this list, which is probably why it gets skipped over. Our Recover Capsules provide 1000IU per serving, which is 500% NRV. Whether you choose them or not, make sure you’re getting enough Vitamin D! I truly can’t stress that enough. Omega-3 (EPA and DHA) Omega-3 fatty acids help resolve your body’s inflammatory response rather than simply blunting it, and there's reasonable evidence for reduced soreness and better retention of muscle function after damaging exercise. Look for around 2g of combined EPA and DHA daily, and read the label properly. Plenty of fish oil products advertise an impressive capsule size whilst delivering a fraction of that in actual EPA and DHA. Third-party testing for purity is worth paying for if you’re unsure, and algal oil is an equivalent option if you don't eat fish. Worth it in specific situations These two aren't for everyone. In the right context, though, they're excellent. Curcumin Curcumin, the active compound in turmeric, has built up a reasonable body of meta-analytic evidence for reduced muscle soreness, lower creatine kinase and better retention of functional strength after damaging exercise. It's doing the same job as tart cherry: managing the inflammatory response rather than supplying raw materials. Bioavailability is the main thing to consider here. Curcumin on its own is poorly absorbed, so adding more turmeric to your cooking won't achieve anything useful. Look for a formulation enhanced with piperine (a natural compound found in black pepper), or a phytosome or liposomal preparation. Apply the same caveat as tart cherry. This is a tool for congested periods, not a year-round default. Carbohydrate and electrolytes Refuelling is the third job, and it's the one most lifters can happily ignore. If you train once a day and eat properly, your normal meals will restore glycogen comfortably before your next session. It becomes a real priority when the turnaround is short. If you’re doing two sessions in a day, lots of endurance work, compete in tournament formats, or are training in heat, you might need some additional support. In those cases the research points to roughly 1.0-1.2g of carbohydrate per kilogram of bodyweight per hour in the first few hours after finishing, which is difficult to hit through solid food alone. Hydration belongs here too. Sweat costs you fluid and sodium, and turning up to your next session dehydrated will take more from you than most supplements can give back. The Hydrate Blend covers the electrolyte side with sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium. It’s well worth considering if you’re in the market for a top tier electrolyte blend. What about BCAAs, EAAs and glutamine? This is where a lot of people spend too much money, so let's be direct. BCAAs Branched-chain amino acids aren't a recovery supplement, and the reason is simple. They're three of the nine essential amino acids, and you can't build a complete muscle protein from an incomplete set. If your daily protein is adequate, adding BCAAs on top adds nothing to the repair process. That's a separate question from whether they do anything at all. Taken before or during training they have a role in perceived exertion and central fatigue, helping the session feel more manageable rather than helping you recover from it afterwards. That's a legitimate job, and it's why you'll find 5g of BCAAs in The Workout Blend, sitting alongside citrulline, beta-alanine and caffeine in a pre-workout formula. Just don't buy them expecting a recovery benefit they were never designed to deliver. EAAs Essential amino acids do work. All nine are present, so unlike BCAAs they can genuinely fuel muscle protein synthesis. The problem is redundancy. If you're already hitting 1.6-2.2g/kg of protein a day from food and a protein powder, you're paying a second time for something you've already bought. There are real cases where they earn their place. Poor appetite. Avoiding dairy without a good alternative. Training fasted first thing in the morning. Older trainees dealing with anabolic resistance, where the leucine threshold is genuinely harder to reach. Outside of those, sort your total protein out first and pay close attention to your diet overall. L-Glutamine Glutamine has a strong reputation and a weak evidence base, at least for the people usually buying it. In trained, well-fed individuals it has repeatedly failed to produce meaningful improvements in soreness, strength recovery or body composition. The gut and immune benefits people cite are real enough, but they come largely from research in extreme endurance loads and clinical settings. Those are states of physiological stress that lifting three to five times a week simply doesn't replicate. If you're training hard and eating enough protein, you're almost certainly getting plenty of glutamine already. You’d be better off spending that money on protein or creatine. How to build your recovery stack Rather than buying everything at once, build it in layers. The Foundation: protein, creatine, vitamin D. This is the version almost nobody regrets. Raw materials, force restoration, and the deficiency most likely to be holding you back. If budget is tight, stop here. You're already in a really strong position and are capturing the majority of the benefits available from supplements when it comes to muscle recovery specifically. Complete: add magnesium, zinc and omega-3. Worth it once you're training four or more times a week and the basics are consistent. These address what accumulates with volume, and the sleep quality everything else depends on. Hard block: add tart cherry, curcumin, carbohydrate and electrolytes. Reserve these for periods where recovering fast genuinely matters more than adapting maximally. Then take them back out, save your money and rely on your diet, which should always be the foundation of everything you put into your body anyway. Notice that the list gets shorter as your budget gets tighter, not longer. That's deliberate. The most important recovery tool isn't a supplement It would be strange to write all of this without saying the obvious thing. Sleep is the single biggest recovery variable you have, and no combination of capsules compensates for consistently getting six hours or more of sleep a night. Your total daily protein matters far more than which powder you choose. And managing your training load, programming deloads before you need them rather than after, will do more for how you feel and perform than anything on this list. Supplements are worth taking. They're worth taking because they close specific, identifiable gaps, not because they replace the fundamentals. They're the final few percent, and the foundations have to be there first. If sleep is where you're struggling, The Reset Capsules combine reishi, L-glycine, lemon balm and chamomile for exactly that. But the habits come first.
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The Glow Blend: A Confession

The Glow Blend: A Confession

I need to tell you something I've never said publicly, and it's not flattering. When our product team first brought me a plan for a collagen supplement, my honest reaction was no. Not "let me think about it." A flat no. And if I'm being fully honest about why, it wasn't the science. It was that collagen felt, in my head, like a beauty category. Something for someone else's brand. Not ours. I built Innermost around performance and evidence. Protein, creatine, mushrooms, electrolytes. Things I could point to a study for and feel comfortable talking about at a dinner table full of people who workout regularly. Collagen sat in a different mental folder. Skincare aisle. Jars with gold lids and brand sponsorship by one of the Kardashians. I'd absorbed a version of what "beauty" meant without ever examining it. The argument in the room So we had the argument internally. A proper one. A few people on the team pushed back hard, and rightly so. One of them put it to me plainly: we started Innermost to follow the evidence wherever it goes, not to follow it everywhere except the places that feel awkward. That line stuck with me. Here's what changed my mind, and it wasn't a feeling. It was the research. What the evidence actually says Collagen is the most abundant protein in your body. It's structural, it's in your skin, your joints, your gut lining, and production declines steadily from your mid-twenties onward. That's not a marketing claim, that's basic physiology. The question was never whether collagen matters. It was whether supplementing it actually does anything, and that's where most of the category falls apart. Most collagen products on the market use whole collagen molecules, which are too large to be absorbed effectively when you drink them. The ones that do use hydrolysed peptides, which are broken down into smaller chains your body can actually take up, still run into a second problem: dose. A lot of labels list collagen content that sits well below the 2 to 10 grams used in the trials that show measurable effects on skin elasticity and hydration. You're paying for a placebo with good branding. The ingredient most brands leave out The third problem is the one that convinced me completely. Vitamin C isn't a nice-to-have alongside collagen. It's a required co-factor for your body to actually synthesise collagen at the cellular level. Without adequate vitamin C, the enzymes responsible for stabilising collagen structure don't function properly. You can take a perfectly dosed hydrolysed peptide and still get a fraction of the benefit if the product doesn't include enough vitamin C alongside it. Most don't. They sell you the raw material and leave out the one thing your body needs to use it. Once I saw the category clearly, laid out like that, the decision stopped being about how I felt and started being about what the evidence supported. That's the whole operating principle of Innermost. I couldn't defend saying no to a legitimate, well-evidenced product category. What we built So we built The Glow Blend properly. Hydrolysed collagen peptides at a dose that reflects the research, alongside vitamin C, hyaluronic acid for hydration, biotin and folic acid for hair and nail health. Nothing in it that doesn't earn its place. What surprised me after launch The part I didn't expect was the response once we launched it. A good number of the messages came from women, as you'd expect, and they were generous and specific about what they'd noticed. But a surprising number came from men. Customers writing in to say they'd felt exactly what I'd felt, that awkward little flinch at "collagen," and had quietly bought it anyway because the ingredient breakdown made sense to them. That response told me more about why this category needed an honest voice in it than any research paper did. I'm not going to pretend I have this fully figured out. I still catch myself, occasionally, hesitating slightly before I mention it in a room. Old habits sit deeper than good evidence sometimes. But I take it, and increasingly a lot of men I respect take it too, quietly, without needing to make a thing of it. If this sounds familiar If any part of this resonated, and you've felt that same small resistance to a category you assumed wasn't for you, hit reply and tell me. I'd genuinely like to know I'm not the only one who had to get over it. And if you know someone, a friend, a partner, who could use this exact reasoning rather than a tesimonial, forward it on. It might do more good coming from someone else's honesty.
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