Creatine has become synonymous with the fitness supplementation market, and is largely associated with helping people build muscle, fast. Considered one of the safest workout supplements on the market easily, creatine can be taken daily, and acts as an amino acid that gets stored in the muscles to benefit your exercise regimen in a vast number of ways.
Creatine is the most popular among those who engage in resistance training, and people who want to bulk up love it for how fast-acting it is, while being completely natural. But, what about those who want to lose weight? Can creatine be paired with resistance training in a way that could actually help you lose pounds, or is it best to cycle off of it when you’re ready to shed excess weight? Let’s find out.
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How Creatine Works
To understand the role that creatine can play in weight, resistance training, and overall fitness, we need to talk about what this supplement is and how it’s used in the body. Creatine, an amino acid that’s produced in the body, is sent into the cells of muscular tissue.
From there, it powers the muscles to boost their endurance, strength, mass, and more, while drawing water into the muscles at the same time. Creatine aids in muscular water retention, and that’s something you’ll want to remember, as it has an effect on weight in relation to our fitness regimens.
Creatine works cumulatively, being a supplement, and the more consistently we take it, the larger our reserve. The larger our creatine reserve, the more the muscles can accomplish in a short period of time. People love creatine mainly because it helps them build muscle fast, by both enhancing performance, and literally helping the muscles grow both in terms of mass and hydration.
Resistance Training: The Basics
As we all know, there are all kinds of forms of exercise, each associated with achieving specific goals. For instance, cardio is a popular go-to for weight loss, as it burns a lot of calories at a fast rate. Then, there’s resistance training, which is also known as strength training, which aims to burn fat and calories, while building muscle at the same time. The form of “resistance,” which is used to gain muscle, can be anything from physical weights to the weight of your own body – such as pushups, squats, etc.
So, how does resistance training aid in weight loss? This is where it’s a little complicated. Resistance training can be enormously useful in helping people lose weight, but keep in mind that what you’re really losing is fat, which of course, is getting burned away at a particularly fast rate when you engage in resistance training.
However, at the same time, you’re gaining weight in muscle mass. More specifically, those who are at a generally healthy body weight are less likely to lose a high number of pounds, because while they’re losing fat, they are gaining muscle mass.
Of course, diet plays a crucial role in all of this, so we can’t talk about the relationship between resistance training, weight loss, and creatine, without getting into the impact of diet. Basically, if maintaining a caloric deficit, you will lose weight, whereas maintaining an excess of caloric intake means that you’re more likely to gain weight, but with heavy resistance training, that weight is going to get converted into muscle instead of fat.
This is where the terms “bulking” and “cutting” come from. “Bulking” is consuming excess calories to gain muscle, while “cutting” is engaging in a caloric deficit in order to lose fat and weight, while keeping that muscle that was gained during the “bulking” process.
What Creatine Does for Resistance Training and Wight Loss
We went over the main benefits of creatine that relate to fitness, and none of them relate specifically to weight loss. Basically, creatine is not a weight loss supplement. Still, that doesn’t mean that you can’t boost your weight loss goals by taking it, either.
Creatine promotes endurance and muscle strength, both of which can increase your ability to push yourself while doing resistance training. After all, that’s one of the main purposes for supplementing with it to begin with. And, while creatine can help build muscle mass, which can increase your weight if you’re doing forms of exercise that really build up those muscles, it can also enable you to burn fat by helping you work out harder.
Of course, there are forms of resistance training that don’t bulk up muscle as much as others. For instance, you can simply use lighter weights, so that you’re revving up your metabolism to burn fat, and tone your muscles, without bulking up and adding pounds in the form of muscle mass.
Again, diet also has a critical impact on weight, fat, and muscle gain/loss, so modifying your diet while taking creatine can have a lot to do with whether or not you lose weight, simply by adjusting your caloric intake, protein intake, etc.
Another thing that doesn’t get considered often is that creatine can help you maintain the energy to work out when you’re restricting your calories. Because it improves strength and endurance, you don’t have to worry as much about feeling physically weak because you’ve cut back on calories in order to lose weight. Creatine can do a lot of the heavy lifting, literally, for you in that regard.
Yes, It’s Possible That Creatine Can Help You Lose Weight
At the end of the day, creatine is a supplement that can support your workout routine in a way that is highly personalized. Whatever you’re trying to achieve, creatine simply enables better performance, especially in terms of muscular function, to help you reach your goals, whatever those goals may be, faster and more effectively.
Whether you’re trying to bulk up or shed pounds, creatine can be the perfect addition to your daily supplement regimen, as long as you modify your diet and exercise routine to accommodate what you’re trying to achieve.