What Creatine Actually Does (The Part Nobody Explains)

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If you've been watching all of my other content teaching you how to optimize your energy production system using peptides like SS31, N80+, and MOTC, then this video today is going to be very interesting to you because I'm going to teach you how one of the most popular supplements out there actually enhances this system in ways you probably never knew.

You see everyone talks about creatine like it's just stored energy sitting in your muscles waiting to be used but that's only half the picture and understanding the other half is going to change how you think about this supplement entirely.

But before we go any further just a quick note this is not medical advice and I do suggest that before you put anything into your body you always consult with a licensed physician.

Start with the whole chain, because the shuttle only makes sense once you can see where it sits.

Your mitochondria are the power plants inside your cells and what they do is they take the food you eat and they convert it into usable energy called ATP and I've used this factory analogy to explain how it all works together.

The cell is the factory, the mitochondria are the power plant, NAD plus is the fuel, SS31 is the maintenance crew, and MOTC is the efficiency upgrade.

Now there are a few other pieces like CoQ10, l-carnitine, and magnesium that we'll cover in future videos but today we're focused on creatine.

So here's the question if the mitochondria are the power plant and ATP is the electricity where does creatine fit in? And here's what most people don't understand your mitochondria produce ATP but the mitochondria are in one location inside your cell and the muscle fibers that actually need that energy are in another location and ATP is a large molecule so it doesn't diffuse well through the cell.

So if you had to rely on ATP slowly floating from your mitochondria to your muscle fibers energy delivery wouldn't be really efficient and your muscles would fatigue much faster than they should.

So your body solved this problem with something called the phosphocreatine shuttle and this is the part that almost nobody talks about when they explain creatine. The idea was laid out by Bessman and Geiger back in 1981 as a transport model for muscle energy, and the shape of it has held up since.

There are two different versions of an enzyme called creatine kinase in your cells and you can think of enzymes as little workers that do specific jobs inside the cell.

So one version of this worker sits inside your mitochondria right next to where ATP is being produced and the other version sits at your muscle fibers right where ATP is being used for contraction and these two workers run a relay system.

So here's how it works your mitochondria produce ATP that's the electricity but ATP can't travel very well on its own because it's too big and it moves slowly through the cell.

So the first worker grabs that ATP and attaches the energy part of it onto a creatine molecule and now you have something called phosphocreatine.

Phospho just means it has that energy packet attached to it and phosphocreatine is smaller and faster than ATP so it can move through the cell much more easily so that phosphocreatine travels across the cell to the muscle fiber where the second worker is waiting and the second worker takes that energy packet off of the phosphocreatine and attaches it to a molecule called ADP and when ADP gets that energy packet attached to it it becomes ATP again usable energy right where you need it for muscle contraction and so now you have empty creatine with no energy packet attached so that empty creatine travels back to the mitochondria to pick up another energy packet and the cycle repeats over and over again thousands of times every day. I should be straight with you here, because on the specific question of relative diffusion speed and the exact number of cycles per day, the research hasn't given me a clean figure I can hand you, so treat those two details as the working model rather than measured fact.

Energy packets getting loaded onto creatine at the power plant, phosphocreatine carrying those packets across the factory, energy packets getting unloaded at the muscle fiber, and then empty creatine heading back for another load, and all of that looping together is what people mean when they refer to the shuttle.

In the factory analogy the phosphocreatine shuttle is the electrical grid that delivers electricity from where it's made to where it's actually used.

The shuttle is not a fixed pipe either. Perry and colleagues showed in human skeletal muscle that mitochondrial creatine kinase activity and phosphate shuttling get turned up acutely by a single bout of exercise, so the delivery system responds to training in the same session you train it.

Now here's the other piece that people do talk about but they don't actually connect it to the shuttle. Your muscles store a reservoir of phosphocreatine and when you need energy faster than the mitochondria can produce it that reservoir provides instant ATP regeneration right at the muscle fiber.

This is a one-step reaction, one enzyme, phosphocreatine donates its energy packet to ADP and you get ATP immediately, there's no complex chain of events, and that's exactly why it's the fastest energy system in your body.

This is what powers efforts lasting about one to 15 seconds so think about heavy deadlifts, sprints, explosive jumps, basically anytime you need maximum force production for a brief period of time.

In the factory analogy these are the on-site battery banks at each workstation, so when demand spikes and you need instant power faster than the grid can deliver those batteries dump energy immediately.

So now you understand the complete picture and here's where it all comes together. When you supplement with creatine you're not just building a bigger battery you're also expanding the capacity of the entire delivery system.

When you increase the total creatine pool in your cells, more phosphocreatine can be formed at the mitochondria and more of it is moving through the shuttle at any given moment and more free creatine is available to return and get recharged, so the entire transport system is now running at a higher capacity than it was before.

It's a bigger battery and more delivery trucks running the route simultaneously.

And this is exactly why creatine helps with recovery between sets. You can replenish faster because the shuttle is moving more volume per unit of time.

Now here's why this matters for everything else I've been teaching you. If your mitochondria are damaged or inefficient they produce less ATP and that means less phosphocreatine gets formed and so the shuttle runs at a reduced capacity and no amount of creatine supplementation is going to fix that.

Bellissimo and colleagues found the reverse holds just as tightly, since in a mouse model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy, the mitochondria stopped responding to creatine at all until the mitochondria themselves were rescued with a membrane-stabilizing compound.

This is why I always say foundations first. SS-31 repairs the mitochondrial membrane, N80+ provides the electron carriers, MOTC optimizes efficiency, and creatine expands the shuttle system that delivers ATP to where it's needed.

You need the factory working before the delivery system matters, but once the factory is running well a bigger delivery system means you can actually use what the factory produces.

Your brain also has creatine kinase and uses the phosphocreatine system for rapid ATP regeneration, and there's actually a 2024 study that showed a single high dose of creatine improved cognitive performance during sleep deprivation, working memory and processing speed both improved because creatine helped maintain phosphocreatine and ATP levels in the brain even under severe stress, which tells you the muscle tissue mechanism and the brain tissue mechanism run on the same wiring, just installed at a different address.

In the first week or two of taking it you'll notice a slight increase in body weight, usually about two to five pounds, and this is water in your muscle cells not fat, because creatine pulls water into the muscles which makes them look fuller.

Within about two to four weeks you'll start noticing strength increases in heavy low rep sets, an extra rep or two on sets that previously stopped you.

There is a lot more of this inside the free community, and it is genuinely free, so if you want somewhere to ask the follow-up question the men's group is here: https://www.skool.com/jh-iron-forge-brotherhood/about

Research: Bessman SP, Geiger PJ, Science 1981; Perry CG, Kane DA, Herbst EA et al., J Physiol 2012; Bellissimo CA, Delfinis LJ, Hughes MC et al., Am J Physiol Cell Physiol 2023.

References:

Perry CG, Kane DA, Herbst EA et al.. Mitochondrial creatine kinase activity and phosphate shuttling are acutely regulated by exercise in human skeletal muscle. J Physiol. 2012. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22907058/

Bessman SP, Geiger PJ. Transport of energy in muscle: the phosphorylcreatine shuttle. Science. 1981. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6450446/

Bellissimo CA, Delfinis LJ, Hughes MC et al.. Mitochondrial creatine sensitivity is lost in the D2.mdx model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy and rescued by the mitochondrial-enhancing compound Olesoxime. Am J Physiol Cell Physiol. 2023. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36689672/