You're experiencing sleep deprivation, right?

You're up sometimes 24 hours because the other evidence around sleep deprivation, maintaining ability and cognitive performance is robust at this point and really cool. Like, basically, if you have creativity on board, but you're essentially performing as well as your baseline, non-sleep deprived, after only getting three hours of sleep over 24 hours. That's insane.

Welcome to Trailhead of Trail Runner Nation. It's Friday again. Time for another run with all of our favorite people in our tribe. We're going on a run today with a guest that's going to help us become faster, healthier, stronger athletes, and maybe that translates into being better human beings. And today we're talking about creatine. Is it possible that there's something that could help us become better, stronger, faster and is right within the reach of a glass? Let's do it and let's talk about it. Time for another Tofosi Optics Clarity on the Trail Tip. This time, focused on gear you won't consider running without. Sometimes the smallest trail hacks make the biggest difference. We got this gym from listener Laura B. Toe Socks exclamation point. I think she's emphatic about this. They prevent blisters and keep your feet from lots of friction. They've been a game changer for me. And that's the spirit of clarity on the trail. Real runners, real lessons learned somewhere between mile three and 30. And speaking of clarity, let's talk about seeing the trail better too. That's where our friends at Trafosi Optics come in. Their lenses are incredibly clear with no weird distortion from cheaper lens products. And here's something I really appreciate Scott. They're highly scratch resistant. They come in a bunch of different lens collards for changing conditions. Or you can go with their photo tech lenses that automatically adjust darkness as the light changes. So send us your clarity on the trail tip via Instagram. This time we're looking for tips that help you out of a bunk, that little trick, the mind shift, or the trail hack that made you a better runner. Take trail runner nation and to focee using hashtag clarity on the trail. Or you can text us from the US at 916-235-3928. And don't forget you can get 20% off all to foci optics, including their sunglasses, their prescription glasses and their blue light glasses. Just go to our deals page at trailrunnernation.com and you can follow the directions there and get 20% off the entire store. Welcome to another edition of Trail Rene Nation. My name is Don Freeman and I'm Scott War. Have you ever heard of Criatine? Don, have you ever heard of Criatine? I've heard of it Scott but I'm wondering if I should be taking it or not. You know, you should hear about it because Don, at one point in his life, was part of the bodybuilding culture, the bodybuilding tribe out there. They've been using it for years, but is that something that we can benefit from as endurance athletes? Recent studies suggest that it actually may benefit endurance athletes with brain energy, aging, and possibly performance to help us understand what what creatine is and maybe if it's something that you should consider is Dr. Dan Party, he's a chief health officer at Qualia Life Sciences where he leads education to advanced health span and peak performance. So boy, his title says it all right there. That's what we want to do. We want to advance span and our peak performance. He holds a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from Leiden University and Stanford. And he speaks regularly at events like TEDx, VC firms and Institute for Human Machine Cognition. So first off, Dr. Dan, every once in a while I've heard that creatin is the natural steroid. What's the difference between an anabolic steroid and creatine? I mean, there's so little to that. I think the connection is that it's probably the first really robust organic aid in certain contexts that had measurable, repeatable, noticeable performance improvement as a part of taking it. Like, and about steroids would in certain contexts. And because that, the original population that was trying it also was doing bodybuilding and training hard in the gym. I think that there are a lot of different versions of the connection between the steroids and creatine were made. So some had to do on kidney health, swoling, bloating, on and on and on. And so sometimes the place in which a compound starts, the audience starts, creates some kind of lore around it and then you have to separate the fact from fiction and just try to understand all the cool on its own right and in different populations and in different contexts. So that's probably my best answer on that connection. It sounds like there's more differences than similarities as well you're getting at, right? Yeah. I mean, you know, anabolic steroids, of course, are playing on the different anabolic receptors to a different degree, whether they're endogenous or synthetic endogenous, so they're just trying to make a compound that the body does make, or if they're entirely novel synthetic compounds that are trying to manipulate the receptors that do lead to muscle gain, then that's really what those are designed to do. There's really hundreds of them that are out there, so they've been trying to manipulate those structures so that they're more anabolic or less androgenic or vice versa. And so that whole field has sort of been harnessed just by the idea of cheating in sports. But then I would say over the last like 10 years or so, particularly with testosterone replacement therapy, people have started to be more open about usage and then also thinking about it as well well, if muscle is a longevity organ because of the hormones it produces with usage and we lose muscle could an entire orientation around understanding the science of anabolic steroids be good for, could we see it differently, not as a substance to cheat, but as substance to cheat age. So that's one. That's probably the best parallel between anabolic steroids and creatine. Because creatine, so creatine's not acting hormonally primarily. It's more of a, it's something that's acting primarily on our energy systems, in particular, the phosphocreatine system. And what it does is, as we all know, the main currency of energy in the body is ATP. And so for every single process that your body is doing to maintain, to do all of its functions, we're using about 10 million ATP molecules per second, per cell. Mm-hmm, wow. And so we're using so much ATP that we are rebuilding our entire body weight every single day in ATP. And we know that when the body is under strain, and that can, that strain can just be from performance, right? You're pushing your performance. And it has a hard time maintaining the pace of ATP production that when the ATP production starts to become challenged, performance will drop off. And what creatine can do under certain contexts is help restore, we call buffer ATP, so that you actually get a little, like a couple more reps, if you will, in the gym. That's like a really intuitive way to understand it. If you could only do eight reps, and now you've been taking creatine for 10 weeks, at that same weight, you can now do 10. And there is the very clear evidence of its energetic benefit, particularly on repeat performances. So your first set, you're not going to notice that much, but your third or fourth, you probably will. So the bodybuilding community caught on earlier, recognized that, hey, there's some benefit I take this so I could do a few more more reps. You're looking swole now, bro. You know, so everybody's going along that path. Yeah. But it sounds like to me, everybody function that uses ATP, which is literally everything, that it can benefit that too. Cognitive, you know, focus, everything plays a role in just besides dumbbell curls or bench press. Yeah. The physical performance is one of the more intuitive ways to understand that it is working because you can see and feel it, but you're right. The potential for creating really has to do with all the places it does touch for energy, support. And while there is a possibility that it does influence all the different parts, all parts of the body, we're now like starting around 2010, the research field really started to widen in terms of what it was studying creatine for. So the last 15 years has really changed the narrative about creatine. And I think there's been an upswell in interest, or probably over the last seven years, as popular figures like Rhonda Patrick and Huberman and others have started to talk about it and talk about it in a new way. And so yeah, it does have legitimate. It's probably one of the best, ergogenic aids for certain things, but its value is definitely not grounded just to sports performance. Yeah, I want to share this. My mother that's 83 years old is starting to take creatine. Yeah, she says she's excited about what benefits might come to her, the cognitive piece, the energy piece, because she's active and she can outwork most people, but she's looking at this's looking at this saying Don have you tried creatine you've got to look at this because she's a researcher she'll look at every YouTube clip it come up with all kinds of conclusions and she's really excited about creatine is she is she on the right path is it good for her yeah yeah there's there's really two populations that we are thinking about with your mom so those who are older older and where exactly we draw the line in older, right? We're always older than we were yesterday. Yeah. What do we, what do we call that? So probably at least in like 50s and 60s where we start to see performance measurably decline from what we would perceive as our own peak. And then women. Right. So women constitute a very unique group. I would say it's all the benefits of men that men get plus additional. So women, I think, stand to benefit even possibly the most out of any population. And yeah, there's some studies that looked in elderly with 10 grams a day and they had, you know, for what they looked at, they had improvements in muscle mass and body composition, but there was also improvements in cognition. And of course, it was combined with resistance training. And so I'd say now part of the bifurcation in the literature is looking at do the beneficial effects come from the ability to do more healthy things like working out and doing resistance training, or are they independent? And there's a combination of both, right? So you probably see unique benefits just because you have the molecule in your body, the compound in your body, and then also what that can confer in a population that takes that newfound energy and then uses it in the form of exercise. Are there any side effects to this? It sounds like everything's an upside, but what can I expect? Are there any negative side effects? I think that none of them are very serious. Some people can experience cramping, which probably has more to do with their water balance and being dehydrated if they start to take it. The way to way to think about creatinus, a water loving molecule, and so it's hydrophilic water loving, and every gram will pull in like 52, so as you get more water and creatinus and sit outside of your cells, it gets pulled in through the creatine one transporter into cells like immune cells and dohyial cells in your gut, into the brain, of course, into your muscles. About 90% of your creatine, maybe even higher, is in your muscles, which is probably why we were looking there first. And it's also why we're now talking about a higher dose as being like an interesting daily dose, because think of your muscles as being really creat creating hungry. And so every day if you're using it, if you're using some, and you only take, let's say, three or five grams, you might just be repleting your muscle stores. But if you take 10, you now can roll past those saturated muscle stores and get into other tissues that really like it a lot, like immune cells, right? Like your brain. And that's where the conversation has gone

around dosing and creating.

But to go back to your question, and you know, are there side effects here? And one of the side effects, like I mentioned, is some people experience cramping right away and that has a lot to do with their hydration. So just make sure that you're taking enough water. Because if you're pulling a lot of them, the water that you have in your body into your cells,

into your muscle cells, you might experience some cramping,

but it's temporary and it's not. that you're taking enough water. Because if you're pulling a lot of that muscle, the water that you have in your body into your cells,

into your muscle cells, you might experience

in some cramping, but it's temporary

and it's not usually an ongoing thing at all. It sounds like the side effect is improved performance and I'll sign up for that every time. So we take it to the trail for a second and the summer's coming, it's hot out. It sounds like we're able to retain more water.

Is that something we can use to really carry down

the trail more water that we can use for evaporation and cooling? Or is there a negative respect to that? Yeah, I think that's a really, it's biologically plausible that the increased source of water could preserve hydration under conditions where hydration is strained over hours. So running on a hill, in hot temperatures, at altitude, all of those, I'd like to see that study directly before making any claim. Not about that, but there is biological possibility that that would be, you would expect that it could help. One thing that is off topic, but can help, we've seen that the non-essential amino acid torine can help with elevations in body temperature and performance. So if you're going to be doing performance in heat, taking a couple of grams of torine before your workout does seem to help keep your core body temperature lower while you're training, which is could be interesting in certain contexts. Yes. Interesting. So obviously that there's some benefits from a muscular ability and producing more ADP. Yeah. Let's get specific on endurance runners. Now, I don't want to generalize, but typically endurance runners, whether they're marathon runners, half marathon runners, all the way up to the ultra running distance, they don't like to spend a whole lot of time in the gym and bulk up. They like to be out running and staying lean. And vice versa. Right, yeah, yeah. Right. And so what would you suspect and from the recent research, how would creatine be beneficial to an endurance runner? What benefits would they see performance benefits? Yeah, it's such an interesting question because there is now some evidence that creatine can help under certain conditions for what we'll call endurance athletes. And that was a little, I would say it's a bit of a surprise just because when you think of the mechanism, it was a lot of the evidence has been grounded. We'll go from like a sprint and then we'll go to longer distances so we can think of it that way. So as I mentioned earlier, you wouldn't expect any performance benefit on a single max sprint. The benefit that you would get from that is with training with creatine and being able to do repeat performance, you know, repeat efforts in your training that might lead to a single faster max print speed. But the biochemistry is probably not going to be lending itself to doing something faster in that moment with, let's say something that takes only 10 seconds. Repeat performances, yes. So that's, I think, a really good way to ground our understanding because this is where the strongest evidence base is. If we move to, let's say, middle distances, so let's say 800 meters to a mile, which is kind of a hybrid between anaerobic and anaerobic, you have basically mixed results on overall time trial performance. So better tolerance at the finishing kick is what has been seen. Over the last 200 meters, there's evidence that you actually might do better with creating onboard. And this can actually help in tactical races where you need to basically do some repeated paces, changes, and surges throughout the race. And so think of it being beneficial in that distance when you have to sprint in the middle of that type of race. Let's say you have to do that three or four times or just a couple of times. Now if we move on from like let's say the mile to somewhere around like the 5K to a marathon, that's of course a real big dominant. And so you're trying to maintain the highest steady state pace that you can. And there's really little or no direct improvement that we see. But the benefit does can emerge at specific moments. Again, the final kick, the last two to 400 meters hill sections and middle-ray surges. So, anaerobic spikes in the steady state race. and thenibly with late stage the key one's glycogen runs low So glycogen super compensation When you basically kind of cold load with carbohydrates or faster recovery between these hard sessions and you have this increase in Cumulative training quality and then if you want to go beyond that, right? So you see the last two, whether it's the mile or up to the marathon, it's really helping during sprinting in anaerobic efforts in that race. And then for ultra endurance, so this is aerobic plus really like a really intense cognitive load. Not like the shorter distances don't have their own cognitive challenges, but you know, in a lot of ways, doing an ultramarathon has a very strong challenge to the brain and maintaining your concentration over time. From what I've heard, I've never done so mind. It sounds like you have, that's a big piece of it.

The brain is so busy trying to figure out and project how long is this, how much further I need to go, what do I need to do, what is the ground doing in front of me? Making decisions all the way through, so a very large cognitive load to your point. Yes, right. Yeah, a good friend of mine, back in Marin, is an ultra endurance athlete. And so I've, I've talked to her about what the constraints

are for, you know, is an ultra endurance athlete. So I've talked to her about what the constraints are. What hamper's her performance. She just talks a lot about getting into that mental state where she's almost like in a dream and just the performance is like this long dream. She's really good. And then, yeah, but I mean, I'd say in this audience overall, the evidence is pretty thin.

But... And yeah, she's really good. And then, yeah, but I mean, I'd say in this audience overall, the evidence is pretty thin, but, you know, cognitive and endurance under extreme fatigue, there is emerging support for that way that you can infer directly from this board, but also from other areas like sleep deprivation. Creating seems to help the brain best when it is highly stressed. So extreme sleep deprivation. But even extended cognitive efforts. So you've been concentrating really hard for several days. You've got this report that you've got to get done. And you need to be sitting there and trying to concentrate for 12 hours a day and having creative in the board seems to be able to help with situations just like that. So ideally, it doesn't sound like, hey, take a shot of this, create team, let's pull you through this report, take a shot of this and try to get to the next stage station. It sounds to me like it's more of something for training for long

terms. Start taking it and expect to see changes over time using it as a training aid, not as a rescue, you know, elixir. Yeah, yeah. And that is right. And so now, you know, particularly for the longest distance sports, you have a bit of a tradeoff, right? Because if you do great gain, you know, five pounds of water weight in muscle, then does that water, does that weight carry a negative impact for the potential brain benefits? But the pattern that we see is it really doesn't make, you know, the endurance pace faster, but it does see it might help with resistance to fading, which could be a combination of physical and mental. I think we need more research in that area. Individual mileage may vary, so people could give it a shot and try it out. But like you said, it's not something that you take once, and that's how you feel the benefit. The way that people take creatine is with a loading phase typically, which is not needed, but you take it for five to seven days at 20 grams per day. So five grams spread five times across the day, typically. And what that does is it's going to saturate your muscle stores in that period of time. And so you'll see muscle creatine stores go up 20%, and if you're a vegan, then it's gonna go up 40%. And that is because if you're an omnivore, you're getting some sources of creatine in your diet from animal products, but there's virtually none in vegetables. And so vegetarian's vegans do stand to benefit the most from supplementation or at least have the most noticeable benefits. I have so many questions. I know. I'm going to try to get to the one that makes the most sense right now. One of our guests that we've had on multiple times is a sports nutritionist, Bob C. Bajar. He's been talking positively about creatine for endurance athletes for a long time. A few years ago, he sent us some and I tried it and it made me feel bloated. I've talked to him since about that. I want to get your opinion. You mentioned that there's a loading phase. This last time, I've been taking it since we were introduced probably, oh, I don't know, a couple months ago maybe, and I've been taking it, but I did not do the load phase. I started with five grams and stayed with that on a daily basis. I have not had the bloating issues. Can you talk about that if someone is considering taking creatine, talk about how important or whether the loading phase is necessary and what if there are some bloating symptoms? This is a really interesting question Scott because if you don't do the loading phase you will arrive in the exact same place that you did with the loading phase, but over a longer time scale. So instead of five to seven days, you'll get there in three weeks. However, as we were talking about previously, there might be some additional benefit to a higher daily dose that now bypasses muscles and gets into other tissues particularly like like the brain. So we've seen, while the muscles can increase their creatine storage by 20 to 40 percent, depending on diet, you'll see level increases in the brain, somewhere between 5 and 15 percent. But the benefits there are pretty remarkable, like particularly with sleep deprivation. I'll tell you about one rugby study, which I think is fascinating. So they took trained, they took trained rugby athletes and they were like elite level and they gave them only three hours of sleep in a 24-hour period. And so really dramatic sleep deprivation. And then they tested their rugby skills. So thinking on the fly all the way down to tactical maneuvers, and what they found is that those who weren't taking creatine had what you'd expect, really measurable drop-off in performance. What, this was a single daily dose, by the way.

So some of this literature is giving creatine at really high amounts. So an amount, I'm 215 pounds, that would be, and the amount that they gave in this study would be like me taking 35 grams in one day. Wow. And so they're studying the effects of very high doses under certain conditions to help the brain maintain energy when it's tired. So this is actually another reason where I think ultra-indurance could benefit a lot. And I think what we need to get there is figuring out the timing because when you take it because it's water loving and you take a big huge dose like that, it can go right through you. So do you want to take it with like a fiber source that blows down the transit, helps with absorption instead of going through you? There's a lot of different things that I think would be interesting to test in ultra endurance athletes. Like for example, you know, taking 15, you know, 10 grams every

three hours. But particularly because that's for your experience sleep deprivation, right? You're up sometimes 24 hours. That could be where we see really dramatic benefits for this particular type of athlete because that other evidence around sleep deprivation, maintaining ability and cognitive performance is robust at this point and really cool.

Like basically other evidence around sleep deprivation, maintaining ability and cognitive performance is robust at this point, and really cool. Like, basically, if you have creatine on board, there can be a slight decrement in performance, but you're essentially performing as well as your baseline, non-sleep deprived. After only getting three hours of sleep over 24 hours, that's insane. Yeah, that's a huge benefit, I would say athletes that are doing the longer events, right, Don? Yeah, and I think this falls right under the category of try nothing new on race day. This is something you need to experiment with before you commit your bid to it. That is so true, and I love that as advice. And yet I think about this, and I don't know, and you guys know this much better than I do, but how many ultra-indurance runners actually are able to go for a 24-hour run in their training? And more do they really sort of kind of, they're really only experiencing that during the event. So I'll say this, adding three grams of creatine to your drink, you know, every hour might be the way to go, right? You're, it's a smaller amount. And by the way, those numbers are just pulled from the ether. So take it with a grain of salt. But what you could do is test your own GI tolerance with that type of intake amount over a period of time, during your shorter performance training regimen. And then you could see, I can actually, I'm doing all right, like I can do, I can take three grams of creatine once every hour and I don't have any GI issues from it. I figure that out, every individual can figure that out. Yeah, and that fits another one of those, you know, 10 commandments of trail running is that you had to make sure that what are the 10 commandments? Oh, there are 10 commands of true. Wait, I had a good experiment of one. Experiment of one is where you're going. Thank you, Scott. Experiment of one. Everybody's different just because the guy you're running with or gal has done something and it works for them. You've got to try it for yourself. Well, yeah, you pulled me out of that with Scott. How did you know where I was going with that? I know you too well. Dan, I have a question again. This podcast is a lot of times therapy for me alone. I will tell you, I've been taking a daily 5 gram dose. I did not do the loading for the seven days, but I was worried about that bloating thing. But I've been doing it for probably two months now, and I will tell you it's working. I go to the gym on a regular basis because I'm an older guy and I want to maintain my health span, and I can tell that it's helping with muscle development. You would mention a couple times that maybe five grams you is not enough. Should I bump that up to 10 grams and see what happens and do the experiment of one, or am I fine with the five grams? The preponderance of evidence is around five grams, but the most exciting, recent evidence that doesn't have as robust of a history behind it to answer all the little questions is probably closer to 10 now per day. And with punctual dosing that can go beyond that 0.35 grams per kilogram under certain conditions. And actually, there's a really great group out of Germany at this institute. I cannot pronounce it sort of way too long. But it's like the NIH in Germany and they have done some studies where they're doing the 0.35 grams per kilogram during sleep loss. And what was so cool about that is they showed evidence that creatine did support cognitive performance under sleep deprivation like previous studies, but then they also explored the mechanism as as to why. So when you are sleep deprived, you see levels of brain acidity and ammonia go up and what that does is it seems to have an impact on the blood brain barrier which allows more creatine to get into the brain. It's like the brain becomes thirsty for it under conditions to stress. Interesting. So then just this year, and actually it was in April, they came out with another study that was looking at a lower dose. So 0.2 grams per kilogram and they are now now testing the sensitivity. Like maybe you don't need to take that huge of a dose. Well, it turns out that they showed most of these same effects, but not with the same magnitude. So yeah, it was still good, but it does appear that that higher dose under certain conditions does show additional benefit. Now let's be clear that doesn't mean, oh, we should be taking 35 grams a day. It means that very specifically under highly stressed conditions, it seems like the brain can continually benefit from that very high dose. Maybe it's even more. They didn't, they haven't tested beyond that. So right now that's like the highest level that we understand to how these effects to come from. But I think as a good daily dose, five to 10 is great. That's pretty much what I do myself. I will take 10 grams and that just slows down the transit. And so that's become my habit and routine. And then in terms of timing, what do you wanna do before exercise or after?

Researchers have looked at that and at least for muscle gains and the gym, it doesn't really matter. So yes, if you look approximately, you can see yeah, there's a little bit more uptake here with creatine. At the end of the day, the training effect, if you look at the training effect, They did a really cool study where they had them the same person in a crossover trial do

one side. And then they took creating after the workout, the other side. And basically, they made identical strength gains with those two protocols. So don't major in the minors, as my friend Tommy Wood says, just released a great book, The Simulated Mind, everybody should read it. But it doesn't like, you know, just focus on getting it into your body and doing it a time where it's convenient and reliable for you. And so start with five, like you Scott, see how you do. And you could always test 10.

And if you handle it, you don't feel, when you don't go bloated, you know, you can stick with that. But for bloated, what does that mean? Was it GI or was it more like you felt like you were holding water? You know, my stomach just got full. So it was probably more of the water holding. But I'll tell you, when I did it this last time, it was probably a few years ago that I

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