Can Creatine Supercharge Your Finishing Sprint? – Runner’s World

The list of legal supplements that enhance endurance performance is very short. If I’m asked for advice about what passes the evidential sniff test, I tend to mention caffeine, carbohydrate drinks, buffers like baking soda and beta alanine, beet juice—and, sometimes, creatine.

That last one gets an asterisk because creatine is mostly used by sprinters, weightlifters, and other power athletes who want to maximize explosive power and build muscle. While I’ve speculated that this might be useful for masters athletes concerned about muscle loss, most endurance athletes don’t want to pack on extra weight, either from muscle or from the water retention associated with creatine loading.

But a new study from John Hawley’s group at Australian Catholic University, led by Kristyen Tomcik and published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, considers a slightly different question: Can creatine enhance your ability to respond to high-intensity mid-race surges and to finish with a flourish?

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Creatine enhances the energy available from your “phosphagen” pathway, which you can think of as a “third energy system.” Runners tend to think in terms of aerobic energy powering longer, slower efforts, and anaerobic energy for more intense lactate-generating bursts. The phosphogen pathway is both anaerobic (it doesn’t require oxygen) and alactic (it doesn’t produce lactate), and it provides the instant energy for the shortest, most powerful efforts, with enough phosphocreatine in your muscle cells typically to last on the order of 10 seconds.

Taking a creatine supplement enhances the energy available through the phosphagen pathway, which is why it’s considered a good weight-room supplement. Consistently being able to hoist a little more weight, workout after workout, allows you to accumulate greater strength and muscle gains. As the study’s authors put it, “creatine’s ergogenic benefits stem from its ability to act as a ‘reservoir’ for substrates which are required for the rapid regeneration of energy during brief periods of high-intensity, maximal effort.”

But creatine also has a variety of other effects. As mentioned above, it increases water retention, which can be a negative for athletes in weight-sensitive sports like running and cycling. More promisingly, some studies have also shown that, when taken in conjunction with carbohydrate loading, it can enhance the amount of carbohydrate stored (in the form of glycogen) in your muscles.

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All of this sets the stage for the new study, which is impressively complex and multifaceted. The gist is that 18 cyclists did a grueling race simulation three times under three different conditions. The simulation was a 120-kilometer (74-mile) time trial with sprints every 10 kilometers that alternated between 1 and 4 kilometers in length. The time trials lasted a total of about three hours on average, followed immediately by a time-to-exhaustion test on an 8-percent uphill grade lasting about five minutes.

All of the cyclists did the first trial as a baseline. Then half were loaded up with 20 grams of creatine per day for five days, followed by a maintenance load of 3 grams per day for nine days, while the other half received a placebo. Along with the creatine or placebo, the next two trials were performed (in random order) with either moderate carbohydrate (6 grams per kilogram of body mass per day) or high carbohydrate loading (twice as much) for two days before the trial.

Confused yet? For simplicity, we’ll ignore the carbohydrate, which might have been expected to help the overall 120K time, particularly if the addition of creatine boosted glycogen to super-high levels. It didn’t, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, but may simply be that the race simulation was too complicated. The athletes were doing all sorts of sprints, and prioritizing their sprint and overall pacing differently, so any effects on overall endurance were impossible to disentangle.

The creatine, though, did produce some interesting results. The creatine-loaded cyclists were able to produce greater power in the final 4K sprints—a finding with real-world implications, the researchers argue: “The changes in power output we observed during sprints are likely to have a major practical impact on the final outcome of a race, as both cycling and running events are often won by the athlete who can either stay with the leading pack during breakaways, or sprint to the finish line in the latter stages of a race.”

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Strong words, indeed. So is creatine the next big thing for endurance athletes? At this point, the evidence remains very murky at best, given all the moving parts in this experimental protocol. But it’s certainly interesting enough to, hopefully, motivate a follow-up study with a simpler protocol—an hour or two of hard (but perhaps not self-paced) exercise followed by a sprint.

The results should also help allay fears about weight gain hurting performance, the authors argue. The creatine group did, in fact, gain weight by 1.54 percent over their baseline weight, compared to just 0.99 percent for the placebo group. But that difference didn’t produce any measurable performance penalty, even in the final hill climb, which was specifically included as a weight-sensitive test.

Bottom line: I wouldn’t rush out to the supplement store, but this is an idea I’d expect to hear more about in the future, and one that may be worth following if you do the kind of racing where the outcome is settled by late-race breakaways, surges, or finishing sprints.

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