#174: 💪 Creatine: The Supplement Women Should Actually Be Taking
The Gym-Bro Supplement That's Actually Built For Women
Hey friends,
While I was taking my Dad to visit his cousins in Australia, I was hustling in the shadows.
I launched a second podcast, Longevity.Technology UNLOCKED, with co-host Phil Newman, one of the leading voices in the longevity space.
Now you can hear from me three times a week!
🎙️ Mondays: LT UNLOCKED interviews with leading longevity innovators, clinicians, and scientists
📰 Wednesdays: Nina’s Notes in your inbox with interviews, deep dives on longevity & neuroscience
🎙️ Fridays: LT UNLOCKED News, a weekly news roundup of the latest in longevity
Find Longevity Technology UNLOCKED on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
Building two shows while writing weekly has made one thing clear to me, I want to do this fulltime. If you read my work and find value in it, here’s how you can help make that happen.
Upgrade to a paid subscription: $80/year.
With it you get:
My 9 longevity guidebooks (a $243 value)
Access to the full Nina’s Notes archive
Live Q&As with me
Exclusive deep dives for paid members only
Thank you for being here.
It means so much to me.
xoxo,
Nina
💬 In this note:
💪 Creatine: The Supplement Women Should Actually Be Taking
📚 The Last Murder At The End Of The World
⚡️ FoundMyFitness Creatine Page
#174: 💪 Creatine: The Supplement Women Should Actually Be Taking
I’ll admit something a little embarrassing.
I spent years covering longevity supplements, NMN, rapamycin, resveratrol, all of it, and somehow I barely touched creatine.
I filed it away mentally as “the thing bodybuilders take.”
A gym-bro supplement.
Not my thing.
Then I started digging into the research on women’s health and muscle loss, and creatine kept appearing.
I saw creatine in the studies on post-menopausal women, in literature on depression, and in papers on cognitive performance under sleep deprivation.
It was everywhere I wasn’t looking.
Turns out, creatine might be the most underrated supplement for women across the lifespan, and the most overlooked.
What Is Creatine?
Creatine is a naturally occurring compound made in the liver from three amino acids: arginine, glycine, and methionine. About 95% of it is stored in your skeletal and cardiac muscle, with the rest distributed in the brain, liver, and kidneys.
Its primary job is energy. Specifically, creatine helps regenerate ATP, adenosine triphosphate, the main energy source in your body.
It’s also the molecule your cells use as fuel during high-intensity activity. Creatine phosphate is a fast-charge battery that kicks in when your cells are burning through energy faster than they can make it.
You get creatine two ways: your body makes it and/or you eat it (mostly in red meat and fish, around 4–5 grams per kilogram of animal weight). Fruits and vegetables provide almost none.
Creatine supplementation has been studied extensively since the 1980s. We’re talking about hundreds of clinical trials. It’s one of the safest and most researched supplements in the world.
And yet, most of that research was done on men. Surprise, surprise.
The Female Creatine Gap
Women have 70–80% lower endogenous creatine stores than men.
Women also consume significantly less dietary creatine than men, largely because they eat less meat.
But, women actually have higher resting levels (~10%) of intramuscular creatine concentrations than men.
This means women start from a lower total pool of creatine but use what they have more efficiently at baseline. The implication is that women may need higher doses to see the same supplementation response as men, or we may benefit differently.
What’s also been largely overlooked is how female sex hormones interact with creatine metabolism throughout the lifespan.
Estrogen and progesterone directly influence creatine kinase activity, the enzyme central to creatine recycling. These fluctuations happen across the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, post-partum, perimenopause, and menopause. At each of these stages, creatine demands shift.
This creates windows where supplementation may be especially useful.
Why Women Might Benefit Even More Than Men
Muscle strength and exercise performance
The evidence for creatine improving muscle strength and exercise performance in women is solid. Multiple studies show improvements in strength, power, and anaerobic capacity, without the dramatic weight gain that gets weaponized as a reason women shouldn’t take it.
The weight gain question deserves a direct answer: creatine does cause initial water retention inside the muscle cells, which is actually a good thing, it supports performance and recovery.
The rapid weight gain seen in men during bulking is far less common in women. Body weight and body fat percentage remain largely unchanged across the studies.
Post-menopausal muscle and bone
Now this is super compelling!!
The menopausal decline in estrogen accelerates muscle loss (sarcopenia) and bone density loss (osteoporosis). When creatine supplementation is combined with resistance training in post-menopausal women, the research shows meaningful improvements in lean mass, upper and lower body strength, and physical function measures like chair stand tests. Some studies also show benefits for bone mineral density in the hip region.
The key word is combined. Creatine alone, particularly at low doses, doesn’t do much. Muscle contractions from resistance training enhance creatine uptake into cells.
Which is why the combination of creatine and resistance training is where the real benefits emerge.
For my paid subscribers, I go deeper into the creatine dosing strategies, the brain benefits, and the depression data: read it here.
📘 Speaking of diving deeper? Check out my guidebooks.
Over the past three and a half years of writing Nina’s Notes, I’ve turned the research I trust most into free, downloadable guidebooks, no fluff, no supplement brand agenda, just the science and the protocols.
Age-Fighting Drugs Guidebook
Breathwork for Longevity Guidebook
Exercise for Longevity Guidebook
Men’s Health After 40 Guidebook
Nutrition for Longevity Guidebook
Sleep for Longevity Guidebook
Stretching for Longevity Guidebook
Supplements for Longevity Guidebook
Thermal Therapy for Longevity Guidebook
You can download all 9 and more at ninapatrick.xyz/guidebooks.
Or if you want everything in one place, the guidebooks, the full deep dives, and early access to events, upgrade to a paid subscription. Paid subscribers get the complete library included.
Plus today’s deep dive on creatine, the brain, and dosing strategies.
📚 Book of the Week
Photo by author
The Last Murder At The End of The World by Stuart Turton
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆
This book comes from the author of The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which I read in 2021 and loved, so my expectations were high.
I’m genuinely not sure I’ve ever given a book one star but, here we are.
Maybe I’m too distracted right now and juggling too many projects, but every time I sat down to read this, my mind wandered. I wasn’t pulled in. I’d stare at the pages and absorb bits and pieces, but nothing landed. I still have no idea what happened.
Is that the book’s fault? Possibly.
Am I just exhausted? Also possibly.
Either way, it deserves a proper read before a proper verdict. So, I’ll be coming back to this one.
Have you read it?
Drop in the comments what you thought.
⚡️ Check This Out
The FoundMyFitness creatine topic page, compiled by Dr. Rhonda Patrick, is one of the most thorough free summaries of the creatine literature I’ve come across. If you want to go even deeper on any of the mechanisms covered in today’s note, it’s a great place to start.
🔮 Cool Job Opportunities
Are you hiring? Want to share your job with Nina’s Notes? Send me an email: hi@ninasnotes.xyz
🗣️ Looking for the Nina’s Notes Podcast?
You can also find the Nina’s Notes podcast on 🔴YouTube 🟢 Spotify, 🟣 Apple Podcasts, 🟠 Substack Podcasts
On the Nina’s Notes Podcast I interview entrepreneurs who are building products based on the science that I write about in the Nina’s Notes Newsletter.
You’ll also find voice overs of all the weekly Nina’s Notes.
Edited by Wright Time Publishing