Should Skinny Guys Take Creatine to Build Muscle?
Once upon a time, I was 23 years old and 130 pounds at 6 feet tall. I was skinny and underweight, with a BMI of just under 18. I was hunchbacked from all my time spent hunched over my desk studying graphic design.
My roommate, Shane, was similarly thin, so we made a pact to bulk up together. We called it Muscle May and spent much of April preparing for it. But even before I started lifting weights or eating more food, my body was already transforming.
In preparation for the start of Muscle May, I started taking creatine monohydrate a week early. I wanted to load up on creatine beforehand so that my levels were optimized for my first workout. I mixed 5 grams of creatine into a glass of blueberry juice. The creatine was grainy but tasteless. It was the first muscle-building supplement I ever took.
By the end of the week, before I started lifting weights or eating a bulking diet, I had gained 8 pounds from creatine alone. I couldn’t believe it.
My Experience With Creatine
If you’re a skinny guy and you’re struggling to gain weight, gaining 8 pounds in a week might sound incredible—maybe even unbelievable. I gained more weight than most people, but my results weren’t unheard of. Weight gain is a common “side-effect” of creatine. It draws fluid into our muscles, making them bigger and giving them greater work capacity.
My initial success with creatine is what set the stage for our muscle-building transformations. In our four-month experiment, I gained over 30 pounds, going from skinny to fit. Shane gained 25 pounds.
We got such good results that strangers on Bodybuilding.com were commenting that our bulking transformations must have been photoshopped. Some even accused us of using steroids. Neither of which was true. Just creatine.
Obviously, lifting weights and eating a good bulking diet gave us most of our muscle growth. Still, creatine played a meaningful supporting role.
So, what exactly is creatine? Can it help us build muscle faster? Can it help skinny guys gain weight? And if you do decide to use it, how exactly should you take it?
What Is Creatine?
Creatine is a substance we can produce in our kidneys, liver, and pancreas. We make this creatine from 3 amino acids: arginine, glycine, and methionine. We get these amino acids from the protein we eat. As long as we eat reasonably balanced diets, we can produce all the creatine we need to survive.
However, we can further increase our creatine levels by adjusting our diets or by supplementing with creatine directly.
Increasing our levels of creatine comes with a ton of benefits. In fact, studies have found creatine to be the most effective muscle-building supplement. Nothing else even comes close.
What Does Creatine Do?
When you first start taking creatine, you may gain some weight. Creatine also improves your workout performance, adding a couple of reps to your sets, allowing you to stimulate more muscle growth (meta-analysis). Perhaps most importantly for us skinny guys, it increases our rate of muscle growth by around 33%.
There’s also some preliminary research showing that creatine can help with cognition, bone density, and blood sugar regulation. However, those benefits aren’t as well studied and only apply to certain segments of the population (study, study).
How Does Creatine Work?
When you lift weights, your muscles burn adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as fuel. When you run out of that fuel, you stop being able to do more reps, and you fail your set. While you rest, you replenish your ATP with your aerobic system, giving your muscles the fuel they need to do another set. This takes a few minutes, which is why most people rest 2–5 minutes between sets.
While you’re in the middle of a set, you can get extra ATP from creatine phosphate, powering your muscles for an extra 10 seconds or so. Supplementing with creatine gives you more creatine phosphate, potentially allowing you to contract your muscles for a few more seconds.
You can also break down glycogen in the middle of a set, converting the sugar into fuel. This can fuel a couple of minutes of effort, making it extremely useful when lifting in a moderate rep range. However, it produces lactic acid as a byproduct, which is why higher-rep sets make your muscles burn.
So if you supplement with creatine, you can get more reps per set, increasing your training volume, thus allowing you to stimulate more muscle growth.
Plus, having extra fluid in your muscles may increase muscle-protein synthesis, allowing creatine to increase your rate of muscle growth in a second way (study).
The Side Effects of Creatine
Creatine is a normal part of a healthy body and diet. We naturally produce it from the protein we eat. We also eat creatine itself when we consume meat and fish.
Supplementing with creatine is different and could potentially have its own side-effects, but it doesn’t seem to. After reviewing thousands of creatine studies, The Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition concluded that supplementing with creatine is safe and healthy (meta-analysis).
The only known negative side-effect of creatine is stomach cramping. This can happen when you take too much creatine with too little fluid. To solve it, you can split your dose of creatine in half and/or mix it into a larger quantity of fluid.
Who Should Take Creatine?
Skinny Guys Who Want to Build Muscle
Creatine is an extremely effective supplement for bulking up. Creatine can help you lift heavier weights, lift those heavier weights more times, and reduce your risk of injury while doing it. Given that its main “downside” is bulkier muscles, well, this isn’t even a problem for skinny guys—it’s a benefit. So it’s only upsides for us. This is why it’s one of our core Beastly supplements, at the top of our list of recommended bulking supplements. (Here’s our article about the other best bulking supplements and how to take them.)
Vegans and Vegetarians
Creatine is a plant-based, vegan supplement. However, the best dietary sources of creatine are red meat and fish. That seems to explain why vegans tend to have lower levels of creatine. It also means that supplementation offers a greater benefit (study).
Studies have found that strength is correlated with how much creatine is in your muscles, so going from lower-than-average to higher-than-average can greatly improve your workout performance.
If your diet is lower in creatine, your body must pick up the slack by trying to synthesize extra. That isn’t necessarily a problem, but supplementing with it might free up some extra amino acids for building muscle (study).
For more, here’s our article about how to bulk on a plant-based diet.
Older Weight Lifters
Creatine is good for building muscle, and muscle is especially important for older people. Most research shows that people can build muscle quite well up until 60 or 70 years old, after which it becomes harder.
Older people who lift weights for a year gain around 3 more pounds of muscle if they supplement with creatine (meta-analysis). Creatine can also help older people gain strength, avoid injuries, and recover faster (study, study, study, study).
Adults Who Want to Be Bigger & Stronger
Creatine is the best supplement for gaining strength and muscle. It can also improve sports performance if your sport favours bigger people, stronger people, or demands 1–3 minutes of intense effort from your muscles.
If you want to be bigger and stronger for any reason, creatine is probably a good supplement for you. Mind you, weight training, eating a good diet, and getting enough rest is even more important. Creatine is effective, but it isn’t magic.
How To Use Creatine
The Best Type of Creatine
Creatine monohydrate is the most extensively studied type of creatine. It’s safe, and it’s just as effective as all the other newer types. In fact, it’s sometimes even more effective than the fancier types of creatine. For example, creatine ethyl ester performed worse.
Creatine monohydrate is also the cheapest form of creatine. Not that cheapness should play a role in how you should select the supplements you’ll be ingesting, but it when the most effective type of creatine also happens to be the cheapest, it’s definitely worth mentioning.
Is Micronized Creatine Better?
“Micronized” means to break something into very fine particles. Regular creatine monohydrate is grainy, settling at the bottom of the glass like sand underneath the waves that lap on the beach. Micronized creatine is finer, dissolving into the water like salt.
Micronized creatine isn’t any better or worse for building muscle. However, you won’t need to swirl the glass quite as much before taking your final swig.
How Much Creatine Should You Take?
When I first started supplementing with creatine, I did something called a “loading phase,” when I spent a week taking 5 grams of creatine 4 times per day. The idea was to fully saturate my muscles in a week instead of a month.
Loading phases are fine, but more recent research hasn’t found any advantage to them. Taking 5 grams of creatine per day seems to work just as well. It’s also easier, cheaper, and less likely to upset your stomach.
We recommend taking 5g of creatine monohydrate every day.
When Should You Take Creatine?
You don’t need to take creatine at a specific time of day. As you get into the habit of taking it, your muscles will slowly become saturated with it, giving you a lasting benefit.
Researchers like to surreptitiously mix creatine into people’s morning coffee. It produces great results. Many gym bros buy pre-workout supplements with creatine in them, having it before they work out. That works just as well.
We recommend having it first thing in the morning, mixed into a tall glass of water. That way, it’s easier to build a daily habit, and there’s less chance of it causing stomach upset.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Creatine Cause Weight Gain?
Creatine causes weight gain. When you start supplementing with it, your creatine levels will rise, causing you to retain more fluid (study). By the time your muscles are saturated with creatine, you may have gained a few extra pounds.
In my case, during my first week of taking creatine, I gained 8 extra pounds. Mind you, I was skinny, I hadn’t been eating a good diet, and I had an extreme response. I think my levels of creatine were unusually low. Most people gain half as much weight as I did. Some people gain nothing. Shane gained nothing.
If you combine creatine with an effective workout program and a good muscle-building diet, it will speed up your rate of muscle growth. Creatine seems to increase muscle growth by around 30%, so if you would have gained 10 pounds of muscle over the next few months, the creatine will add an extra 3 (study).
Should You Take Creatine While Cutting?
Creatine improves workout performance and increases muscle growth. That’s just as important while cutting as while bulking.
If you take creatine while losing weight, it should help you burn more fat and keep more muscle.
Does Creatine Cause Hair Loss?
There’s a rumour that creatine causes balding. The rumour originated from a study on rugby players that found increased dihydrotestosterone (DHT) in those supplementing with creatine (study). DHT is a masculinizing hormone, and higher levels of it are associated with male pattern baldness (study).
However, the study on rugby players didn’t find a link between creatine and balding. They weren’t even measuring hair loss. Plus, DHT remained within the normal range, which shouldn’t affect the rate of hair loss anyway.
Perhaps most importantly, further research has failed to find a link between creatine and DHT, removing the potential way in which creatine could cause balding.
Does Creatine Affect Testosterone?
Two randomly controlled studies found that creatine slightly increases testosterone (study, study). These increases aren’t significant enough to have any impact on muscle growth, though, if they even exist at all.
Creatine doesn’t improve muscle growth by increasing testosterone. Rather, it improves muscle growth by improving ATP regeneration and pulling more fluid into our muscles.
If you’re interested in increasing your testosterone, we have a guest post on testosterone written by Dr. Bhavsar. He explains how to improve your testosterone production by exercising, eating a good diet, and getting enough sleep.
What Happens When You Stop Taking Creatine?
One study found that when people stop taking creatine, they keep all the extra muscle and strength they gained while supplementing with it (study).
However, if you aren’t supplementing with creatine, your creatine levels will slowly fall back down to normal. You’ll lose the performance-enhancing and muscle-building benefits of having higher creatine levels.
What Are The Best Natural Sources of Creatine?
Meat tends to be the richest natural source of creatine. We can also make creatine ourselves by having enough of the three amino acids: arginine, glycine, and methionine. But still, most of our creatine comes from dietary sources, and meat and fish are the richest in it.
The best sources of creatine in foods are fish, beef, pork, turkey, and chicken, as shown in this chart:
For example, if you ate 225 grams (8oz) of cod for dinner, you could potentially get an additional 1.5 grams of creatine. Some of that creatine is broken down in the cooking process, but much would survive. It might be enough to slightly raise your levels of creatine.
Overall, it would be hard to get enough creatine from food to rival the amount of creatine you can get from creatine supplements. On the other hand, some people naturally produce or consume enough creatine to fully saturate their muscles. For them, creatine supplements do nothing. (Shane seems to be one of those guys.)
What’s the Best Brand of Creatine?
We have a subscription to ConsumerLab, which runs independent testing of all the top supplement brands. As of 2023, they recommend Bulk Supplements’ creatine monohydrate, saying they offer high-quality creatine at the best price. Optimum Nutrition’s creatine came in at number two, with similar quality at a slightly higher price.
Conclusion
Creatine is the most powerful muscle-building supplement. It allows your muscles to generate fuel more quickly, improving weight training performance, sports performance, strength gains, and muscle growth. It increases muscle growth by around 30%.
Creatine is considered safe by the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition.
If you decide to use creatine, mix 5 grams of creatine monohydrate into a tall glass of water. Drink that glass of water first thing every morning.
Alright, that’s it for now. If you want more muscle-building information, we have a free bulking newsletter for naturally thin guys. If you want our foundational bulking program, including a 5-month full-body workout routine, diet guide, recipe book, and online coaching, check out our Bony to Beastly Bulking Program. Or, if you want a customizable intermediate bulking program, check out our Outlift Program.
Jared Polowick, has a degree in visual design from York University, and is a certified personal trainer (CPT). He founded Bony to Beastly, Bony to Bombshell, and Outlive. He gained over 40 pounds while resolving his chronic tendonitis, alopecia, and joint pain.
Marco Walker-Ng is the founder and strength coach of Outlift, Bony to Beastly, and Bony to Bombshell. He's a certified trainer (PTS) and nutrition coach (PN) with a Bachelor's degree in Health Sciences (BHSc) from the University of Ottawa. He has over 15 years of experience helping people gain muscle and strength, with clients including college, professional, and Olympic athletes.
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Creatine doesn’t help me so still skinny!
Hi Hoi,
Creatine made me gain 8 pounds in water, but that didn’t solve my skinniness. Where it really helped was playing a part in me building lots of new muscle.
But even then, creatine won’t make you build muscle. What it does is it helps by giving you more strength and endurance, but you still need to put the work in (so your body gets the hint to adapt) and you still need lots of food from outside your body to get bigger with.
If you want to get bigger, you’ll need lots more building blocks (food) from outside your body, to add to your body.
So without the fundamentals mastered, creatine won’t do too much. But with the fundamentals mastered? It can really help to accelerate your gains.
You can buy our program for the step-by-step. Or if you’re still searching out answers, I’d recommend reading this article about how to gain weight:
https://bonytobeastly.com/gain-weight-youre-skinny/
And then from there, you can download our How to Eat More guide, and check out our recommended supplements here. Things like whey protein and maltodextrin can really help you get in those extra calories and protein without filling you up too much.
This is such an awesome site for skinny guys!This is a little off topics.I have small and thin wrists,(yeap true ectomorph problems).Can it cause problems while lifting?Is there a solution for thin wrists to lift safetly,efficiently and build muscles?I would appreciate if u take time to answer.Thanks.
Glad you’re liking it! Shane has very slim wrists. He has a video on bone breadth here that you might enjoy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVic0trLlVk
There’s no solution to your slim wrists, that’s part of your structure, but you can safely build lots of muscle 🙂
While technically illegal for *human* consumption, couldn’t Nutrabol/MK677 increase bone size such as wrists, since it has a marked increase effect on HGH?
I’ve always heard buffered creatine is more stable than monohydrate. What are your thoughts on buffered vs monohydrate?
So the buffered creatine coats it with an alkaline coating to protect the creatine from breaking down into creatinine before it can be absorbed.
When you eat a lot of food, your stomach pH goes down, so that’s when the buffered creatine could help. So you could buy buffered creatine to take with meals if you wanted to.
Or, you could wait 90 minutes and take creatine monohydrate on an empty stomach and your stomach pH will already be higher. Realistically though, it seems like you only lose a bit of creatine if you take monohydrate with meals, so you could just take a heaping scoop and all would be well either way.
There’s nothing wrong with buffered creatine either way.
I hear that Creatine HCL is clinically approved ( when done right ) to have better Bioavailability and it is more soluble over all than any type and all…
So it is the best type of Creatine.
Such claims and all can be found particular in Kaged & GNC Creatine HCL.
What do you guys think ?
Even if another form of creatine had greater bioavailability, had all the same benefits, and didn’t introduce any negative effects, creatine monohydrate wouldn’t fair poorly by comparison, you would just need to take a little bit more of it. In fact, the standard advice is to take 5 grams of creatine per day. Only about 3 grams of that needs to be absorbed to get the full benefit. That means that even if 40% of the creatine monohydrate weren’t bioavailable, you’d still get 100% of the benefit.
For example, taking creatine monohydrate with meals isn’t ideal, yet all of the participants in studies who took creatine with meals still saw optimal improvements in strength and muscle gain. For another example, taking creatine with coffee also isn’t ideal, yet the benefits of creatine were first proved when creatine was mixed into coffee. Taking creatine with meals and coffee remains effective, you just need to take a little bit extra.
Furthermore, there’s little downside to taking a little bit of extra creatine monohydrate in each serving. It’s by far the cheapest form of creatine even when factoring in that you’re taking extra, and there’s no other downside to taking extra—you just pee it out whatever you don’t absorb.
Here’s a solid recap covering the studies on creatine HCL: http://suppversity.blogspot.com/2016/01/first-study-to-provide-evidence.html
And just like Shane mentions, you’d be taking enough with creatine monohydrate anyways. Not to mention it’s really cheap and effective.
Thanks for article Jared. Great as usual.
I am glad my kidneys are OK. Good to know that can be issue for some people.
I am buying powder “Myprotein Creatine Monohydrate” long time. Will switch to tablets. Easier to take in the morning with my daily vitamins and fish oil. More expensive but easier to handle and non sticky.
One feedback…
It would be great to update the creation food picture with extra column. One showing satiety index for each meal. I know it. But it would be useful for new guys.
*creatine food picture
Btw in Czech we would pronounce…
Kray-ah-teen?
Kree-uh-teen?
… as Kre-uh-tin. Short. Not kree. You in the comics The Kree 🙂 Also not short pronunciation.
Yeah, the tablets seem like an easy no-hassle way of doing things.
That’s a cool idea! For right now, on the satiety note, it’d probably be the absolute best to have jerky/biltong style fish. The dried method of processing fish has the most creatine in it. Plus, drying the fish would remove the water content and take up less room in your stomach.
Beef also did really well in creatine levels, so having hamburger patties where the meat would be ground up to allow for less chewing, which would help with eating more.
hey, i read on a few forums that taking creatine caused men’s libido and overall sex drive to drop. Which I thought was very surprising. Whats your opinion on this, because prior to these forums I had never heard of creatine causing a drop in libido or sex drive; just a little confused, new to working out and supplements in general. thank you
I haven’t seen any research on this. I would say that there’s no reason to believe that it would affect your sex drive. But if you’re concerned, you can always try to just eat more foods with higher levels of creatine in them, rather than supplementing.
I’ve been mixing my creatine into my post-workout protein shake (2 scoops of protein, 1.5–2 cups of milk). After reading this, would it be preferred to mix it with water and ingest it between meals instead?
You could if you wanted to aim for optimal. But you’re only losing a tiny fraction of creatine in your workout shake, so you can either use a heaping scoop with your workout shake if it’s easier just to make up one drink every day.
Thanks for the article, Jared. I have some comments and mainly questions on Creatine. I’ve been taking Creatine for awhile I guess since September since starting training at the gym. I was taking this Creatine supplement by “Body Fortress”. Well, for one thing about that creatine supplement is that I don’t like it, due to this funny aftertaste and also that it tastes soooo sweet, and yet has very few grams of sugar in it. My body was thinking it’s getting a lot of sugar and then I sort of lose my appetite at breakfast time. Also, I thought maybe it contributed to some side effects in which caused me to almost faint at the gym one day. I’m looking to get a different Creatine supplement. Are one of the ones you mentioned in your article, have absolutely no flavors or sweeteners.? That’s what I’m looking for. My gym trainer takes a creatine supplement that he says has no sweeteners or flavors but I don’t know what the brand is.?
I take creatine anyways, but I’m not so sure it helps that much with getting more weight on.? At least with me. Since working out at the gym and taking Creatine I gained weight but not by much after checking it out in a months time. When I weighed myself at the gym after a month, I looked like I gained 7 pounds and then I weigh myself at home, it can be still that same weight or 3-4 pounds less. I don’t know why. Go figure on that one. I only take that creatine supplement I just mentioned on my non workout days, because due to it’s extreme sweetness that I get a side-affect from it.
So, I looked into the Body Fortress Creatine. And there’s a product called “Body Fortress Super Advanced Creatine Powder, Fruit Punch”. I’d say it’s a little misleading since there’s creatine monohydrate in it (good) but also creatine hydrochloride, a bunch of electrolutes, maltodextrin, amino acids, dextrose and sucralose (that’s the sweet part), etc.
Tons of stuff in there for something labelled as creatine!
The 5 products we’ve listed that Labdoor recommended are all pure creatine. So you’d need to mix it into water, preferably, and it’d be fairly tasteless. Or mix a bit more of it into your own favourite juice, your workout drink, etc. You could even take a tablet of it (MyProtein has some.)
Think of creatine more as a multiplier. It lets you do more work to get more gains. But it won’t really help with weight gain. (It helps modestly by drawing more water to your muscles, but will stop after it fills up.)
Weight gain will be determined mainly be your calories. So if you’re struggling there, I’d invite you to grab the Eat More guide at the top of the website on the right. It’ll help you out there.
Different scales can have different readings, and your body weight will change throughout the day as you use the washroom (different levels of hydration from water, different contents in your gut.) So the gym scale could be calibrated different than yours and you probably weigh yourself at different times of the time.
We normally recommending buying a cheap digital scale for your own home. Use it once a week right after waking up and before eating or drinking anything. If you want to weigh yourself daily, you can do that. Just add up your weight at the end of the week and divide it by 7 to get an average. It’ll be more accurate.
Hope that helps!
I was very intrigued by this post, especially when I read about the benefits of using creatine as a supplement for vegetarians. I’ve been a vegetarian for 40 years, and I am surprised I’ve never heard of this before. So as a skinny vegetarian, I decided to try it myself. I ordered a jar of the top-rated brand from Amazon. I mix a small scoop with a glass of water and drink it every day, a couple hours after lunch and before dinner. (I couldn’t drink it in the morning, on an empty stomach, because I wake up every morning literally starving, and I couldn’t wait another hour to eat.) After a week’s trial, I’ve only gained two pounds, but I feel more “solid”. I’ve also noticed a difference in my energy level, and more importantly, it has really fueled my workouts. I’m feeling much more strength, specifically in my arms. I have noticed a bit of gas and bloating, which I will try to aleve by drinking more water, as suggested in the article. There’s been one other “side effect”, possibly as a result of the longer workouts. I’ve been eating more than ever, and still hungry all the time. When mealtime comes around, I can’t wait to chow down. Overall, I couldn’t be happier with my test and looking forward to seeing the results at the end of the month when my creatine levels should have peaked. I feel as if I’m now on a path to growing stronger and heavier. Many thanks to Jared for this informative post.
Hey James,
Way to take action (most guys don’t act on the information they learn), and thanks for reporting back with your experiences. It sounds like everything is going perfectly to plan. Keep it up James!
Why did you guys swithed away from citadel brand for Creatine?
We still love Citadel Nutrition. But it wasn’t ranked by LabDoor. We still use it (I have some of their pre-workout in my cupboard right now, which has creatine in it.)
I’m still a big fan of Citadel Nutrition as well, and our article about the best muscle-building supplements still features them. That article is just as current–we update it frequently. But like Jared says, he was basing his recommendations on LabDoor’s ratings in this creatine article.
[…] But when it comes to powders, they don’t taste very good on their own, they don’t mix well, and they’re expensive. The main benefits would be the complete amino profile, being a great source of iron, selenium, vitamin A, vitamin b12, and folic acid, and some bonuses like having carnitine and creatine. While the creatine is a good argument, you might also want to be taking a creatine supplement anyways (check out this guide on Bony to Beastly.) […]
Hi Jared,
I have tried two different types of creatine, ON and Myprotein creapure.
The scoopsizes in both products have been 3 grams.
Why would they have 3 g scoops if the recommended doze is 5 g? Or am I misunderstanding something?
[…] Each food has their own blend of other nutrients in them. For example, creatine is critical when it comes to brain health and other body processes. Having an abundance can even make you build muscle faster since you will be stronger in your workouts. (You can supplement with it, or try and eat foods with more creatine.) Fish and beef are the top scoring foods with creatine with pork, turkey, and chicken not far behind. (If you’d like to learn more about creatine, check out my article here on Bony to Beastly.) […]
Hey Jared-
… Do brands really matter when it comes to Creatine? Or is Creatine just Creatine. I ask this because at the store there’s this weird looking organic brand at my Hyvee and I’m not sure if I should keep looking… any thoughts on this?
I’m not Jared but, as a general rule, the quality of supplements vary quite a bit from brand to brand. It’s usually best to check the reputation of the specific product (or brand) on a site like Labdoor or ConsumerLab. With creatine, you generally want it being sourced from CreaPure, and AllMax had a good reputation, last I checked.
Creatine is a cheaper supplement, though, and the regular stuff at the grocery store might be perfectly fine 🙂