The effects of Creatine in Sports Performance

The criteria for articles chosen was that each piece of research needed to involved the intake of CR, and being physically or athletically tested pre and post ingestion of CR with no other supplementation, steroid, or health related drugs involved. All research articles were double blind with placebo groups to prevent the effects of bias and placebo effects. All research was done within the previous 16 years and a balance of gender was aimed for in order to be unbiased but resources were mainly male orientated. Time period was not contained as a variety of short and long term supplementation is good to compare the different effects of sports performance over different durations of supplementation. Age of subjects in experiment weren’t specific but fell into ages between 16 and 25 beside Gualanoa (2014) article who were considerably older subjects.

Main Text

The results suggests that Cr is safe to use as not one of the article results showed a side effect (see table 1), this is hard to distinguish using the research articles found as only 3 of the 7 experiments went on for longer than a week, but the long duration experiments also concluded no side effects. The lack of experiments which involved females made it very difficult to establish if Cr can enhance female athlete’s ability. 4 of the studies involved females but only 1 of those 4, gualanoa (2014) was entirely female base, but is not as sport specific as they were all older women and were measured in terms of physical ability not athleticism. Ziegenfuss (2002) was the only experiment which involved half and half male female participation and for the other 2 experiments researched females only made 25% or less of the subject numbers. In future more athletic, female related...

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... elite performers. European Journall of Applied Physiology and Occupational Physiology, 78(3), pp. 236-240.

Renata Rebello Mendes, I. P. A. O. J. T., 2004. Effects of creatine supplementation on the performance and body. Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry , Volume 15, pp. 473-478.

Rossouw, F., Krüger, P. & Rossouw, J., 2000. The Effect of Creatine Monohyrdrate loading on Maximal Intermittent Exercise and Sport-Specific Strengt in well Trained Power-Lifters. Nutrition Research, 20(4), pp. 505-514.

Vatania, D. S., Farajib, H., Sooric, R. & Mogharnasid, M., 2011. The effects of creatine supplementation on performance and hormonal response in amateur swimmers. Science & Sport, 26(4), pp. 272-277.

Ziegenfuss, T. N. et al., 2002. Effect of creatine loading on anaerobic performance and skeletal muscle volume in NCAA division I athletes. Nutrition, 18(5), p. 397–402.