Does Creatine Cause Water Weight? Should You Stop Before a Race?
A listener asked us a version of this: I take creatine, but I've got a race coming up. Should I stop so I'm not carrying extra water weight?
Almost certainly not. Yes, creatine pulls a little water into your muscles, and yes, that can nudge the scale up a couple of pounds. But that water is intramuscular and useful, sitting right where your muscles can put it to work, not bloat parked on top of your splits waiting to sabotage you. And stopping a week or two out wouldn't even get rid of it.
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A little, and in the place you'd want it. Creatine is stored in muscle, and it draws water into muscle cells along with it. That's why people sometimes see the scale go up a couple of pounds when they start, especially if they use a loading phase. A review of common creatine myths by a group of leading creatine researchers concluded that this is mostly a short-term shift into the muscle itself, not the puffy, under-the-skin "bloat" people imagine, and that longer-term studies generally don't show creatine users holding more water than people taking a placebo (Antonio et al., 2021).
So the honest version is: a modest increase in water, inside the muscle, mostly early on.
Should You Stop Taking Creatine Before a Race?
For most people, no, for three reasons.
First, the water is doing a job. Creatine's whole purpose is helping you regenerate energy for repeated hard efforts. Muscle cells that are well stocked with creatine (and the water that comes with it) are not a liability. You'd be voluntarily handing back the benefits to chase a number that wasn't slowing you down in the first place.
Second, stopping doesn't work fast. Once your muscles are saturated with creatine, it takes about a month after you stop for levels to drift back to baseline (Hultman et al., 1996). Quitting the week of your race just means you stop getting the benefit without meaningfully changing what's in your muscles on race day.
Third, "race weight" panic is the real problem. The scale weight is not the enemy here, and race weight thinking has talked a lot of people into worse performances and worse relationships with food. A couple of pounds of water stored in working muscle is not the thing standing between you and a PR. If you notice yourself obsessing over it, that's worth paying attention to. (We wrote more about why gaining weight while training is normal, and why the scale is a lousy way to measure progress.)
Is Creatine Good for Endurance Athletes and Women?
Yes, though the reasons go beyond the squat rack. Creatine's best-established benefits are for repeated high-intensity efforts, strength, and lean mass, which is why it's one of the most researched supplements in sports nutrition (Kreider et al., 2017). For endurance athletes, that means it's most likely to help with the hard parts of training: intervals, hills, surges, strength work, and recovery from all of it. The evidence for a direct boost to steady-state endurance performance is less consistent, so think of it as support for the training that makes you faster rather than a race-day trick.
For women, the research has finally started catching up. Most early creatine studies were done on young men, but a growing body of work suggests creatine is safe and potentially useful for women across the lifespan, including for strength and muscle, and possibly for mood and brain health (Smith-Ryan et al., 2021). A 2024 meta-analysis found creatine modestly improved memory, with weaker evidence for attention and processing speed, though the brain research is still early and studies vary a lot (Xu et al., 2024).
The bone story is more mixed than the internet suggests. In a two-year trial in postmenopausal women who were also exercising, creatine didn't meaningfully change bone mineral density, though researchers saw some possible effects on bone geometry (Candow et al., 2023). Promising, not proven. Strength training is still doing the heavy lifting for your bones, literally.
How Much Creatine Should You Take?
You don't need the old loading protocol, and you don't need any fancy buffered, fizzy, or "advanced" version. Plain creatine monohydrate at about 3 to 5 grams a day is the most studied form there is (Kreider et al., 2017). Loading (a higher dose for about a week) saturates your muscles faster, but a steady daily dose gets you to the same place in about a month, often with less of the early water-weight jump (Hultman et al., 1996).
Creatine monohydrate is also one of the safest supplements studied, including with long-term use in healthy people (Kreider et al., 2017). If you have kidney disease or take medications that affect your kidneys, check with your doctor first. And if you're a competitive athlete, choose a product that's third-party tested (look for NSF Certified for Sport or Informed Sport) so you know what's actually in the tub.
For the full rundown on what creatine does and doesn't do, read What's the Deal with Creatine?
The Bottom Line: Should You Stop Creatine Before a Race?
Keep taking it. Creatine adds a little water to your muscles, which is where it's useful, and stopping a week or two before a race won't flush it out anyway. Plain creatine monohydrate at a few grams a day is one of the best-studied, most boring-in-the-best-way supplements there is, it's safe to take long term, and it works for endurance athletes and for women, not just guys grunting at the squat rack.
Spend the mental energy you were about to spend on water weight on literally anything else.
Got a question you want answered? We pick through supplement claims all the time on the Your Diet Sucks podcast, and listener questions like this one come straight from the YDS community on Patreon, where Kylee answers them every week.
References
Antonio, J., Candow, D. G., Forbes, S. C., Gualano, B., Jagim, A. R., Kreider, R. B., Rawson, E. S., Smith-Ryan, A. E., VanDusseldorp, T. A., Willoughby, D. S., & Ziegenfuss, T. N. (2021). Common questions and misconceptions about creatine supplementation: What does the scientific evidence really show? Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 18(1), 13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12970-021-00412-w
Candow, D. G., et al. (2023). A 2-yr randomized controlled trial on creatine supplementation during exercise for postmenopausal bone health. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 55(10), 1750–1760. https://doi.org/10.1249/MSS.0000000000003202
Hultman, E., Söderlund, K., Timmons, J. A., Cederblad, G., & Greenhaff, P. L. (1996). Muscle creatine loading in men. Journal of Applied Physiology, 81(1), 232–237. https://doi.org/10.1152/jappl.1996.81.1.232
Kreider, R. B., Kalman, D. S., Antonio, J., Ziegenfuss, T. N., Wildman, R., Collins, R., Candow, D. G., Kleiner, S. M., Almada, A. L., & Lopez, H. L. (2017). International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: Safety and efficacy of creatine supplementation in exercise, sport, and medicine. Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 14, 18. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12970-017-0173-z
Smith-Ryan, A. E., Cabre, H. E., Eckerson, J. M., & Candow, D. G. (2021). Creatine supplementation in women's health: A lifespan perspective. Nutrients, 13(3), 877. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu13030877
Xu, C., Bi, S., Zhang, W., & Luo, L. (2024). The effects of creatine supplementation on cognitive function in adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Nutrition, 11, 1424972. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2024.1424972
