The best thing about creatine is that once you get the dose right, it stops being a decision. One number, once a day, indefinitely. No cycling, no timing rituals, no window to hit.
Getting there takes either five days or about a month, depending on which route you take. Both arrive at the same destination. Here is the map.
The destination is saturation, not a dose
Start here, because it reframes the whole question.
You are not trying to hit a daily target the way you hit a protein target. You are trying to fill a tank and then keep it full. Muscle has a finite storage capacity for creatine. Once your stores are at that ceiling, additional intake does nothing except replace what you lose to normal daily turnover.
So there are two phases in every creatine protocol ever studied: get to the ceiling, then hold there. Every disagreement you have read online is about the first phase only, and it is a disagreement about speed, not about outcome.
Route one: load, and be full inside a week
The loading protocol is the one the research established first and characterised most thoroughly.
Roughly 0.3 grams per kilogram of bodyweight per day, split into four doses, for five to seven days. For most men that lands around 20 to 25 grams a day — call it four servings of about 5 grams, spaced across the day.
That figure is not folklore, and it does not have to be taken on trust. J Int Soc Sports Nutr, 2017 — ISSN position stand: ~0.3 g/kg/day for 5–7 days to load, then 3–5 g/day to maintain. Both halves of the protocol come off the same page, which is why they are quoted together here rather than separately.
Then you drop to maintenance and stay there.
The reason to split it into four doses rather than taking it in one hit is straightforward: large single boluses are the main cause of the stomach complaints people attribute to creatine generally. Four small doses across a day are, for most people, uneventful.
Pick this route if you want to be at full stores before a training block starts, you are peaking for something, or you simply want the thing to be working now rather than in four weeks.
Route two: 3 to 5 grams a day, and be full in about a month
You do not have to load. Research comparing the two approaches found that a steady daily dose in the 3-gram range reached comparable muscle creatine levels in roughly a month — slower, same endpoint.
The work that settled it printed both routes side by side. J Appl Physiol, 1996 — 20 g/day for 6 days and 3 g/day for 28 days produced the same ~20% rise in muscle creatine. Loading is a shortcut, not a requirement. Same endpoint, different speed, and the only thing the extra powder bought was three weeks.
Pick this route if you would rather not manage a four-doses-a-day week, if your stomach is sensitive, or if you simply do not care about the difference between being full on day six versus day twenty-eight. Most men should probably pick this one. Nothing is riding on the three-week head start.
So which is actually better?
Neither. They converge. The loading phase is a speed option, not a quality option, and a brand that tells you loading is mandatory is selling you an extra week of powder.
What matters far more than which route you pick is whether you are still taking it in month four.
The maintenance number
3 to 5 grams a day, every day. That is the number the research settled on and it is the number you keep for as long as you train.
Bodyweight nudges it within that range. A larger man carries more muscle and therefore more storage capacity and more daily turnover, so the upper end of the range makes sense above roughly 90 kilograms. A smaller man is well covered at the lower end. This is a small adjustment, not a precision exercise — creatine's dose-response is forgiving and the range exists because it works across it.
The instinct underneath every escalation — that a bigger scoop must be doing more — has been tested directly. PeerJ, 2025 — meta-analysis: low-to-moderate creatine doses paired with hard training beat high doses. More powder is not more result. The same analysis, which used robust variance estimation, reported larger improvements in untrained than in trained participants, and larger effect sizes with high-intensity training than with low-intensity. That is a finding about the published literature rather than a promise about a scoop, and it is why the range above has a top as well as a bottom.
Take it on rest days too. This trips people up constantly. You are maintaining a store, not fuelling a session. Your body degrades creatine at a steady rate whether or not you trained, so skipping rest days simply lets the tank drift down.
Does timing matter?
Less than any other variable, which is good news.
Total daily intake is what determines your stores. Some research has looked at whether taking creatine after training produces slightly better outcomes than before, and there are findings that lean that way, but the difference is small and the evidence is not decisive enough to organise your day around.
Here is the honest hierarchy, most important first:
- Whether you take it at all.
- Whether you take it consistently, including on rest days.
- Roughly how much.
- Everything else.
Timing is not on the list until number four. Take it when you will actually remember — which for most men is either in the training bottle or alongside a meal.
That is why Base Work is unflavoured. It goes into whatever you were going to drink anyway, at whatever hour you were going to drink it, and nothing about the day has to move. A protocol you keep beats a protocol you optimise.
What to take it with
Water is fine. Creatine monohydrate dissolves better in warm liquid than cold, and micronized powder disperses faster than standard grind. If you find grit at the bottom of the bottle, swirl it and drink it — the creatine did not evaporate, it settled.
Carbohydrate or protein alongside it may help slightly. Some trials report slightly better muscle creatine retention when it is taken with a meal containing carbohydrate, or carbohydrate and protein. Worth knowing, not worth engineering. Taking your scoop near a meal captures most of it.
Caffeine is probably a non-issue. An older study raised the possibility that caffeine might blunt creatine's performance effect. It has not been consistently reproduced, and it is not treated as a practical concern by sports-nutrition consensus. If you take creatine and drink coffee, carry on.
If your stomach objects
Almost all of the gastrointestinal complaints attributed to creatine trace back to one of three things, and all three are fixable.
Too much in one sitting. A 20-gram bolus is a lot of anything. Split it.
Undissolved powder. Creatine that has not gone into solution can sit heavily. Use warmer water, stir properly, drink it before it settles out.
Empty stomach. Take it with food for a week and see if the problem disappears. It usually does.
If none of that works, drop to the low end of maintenance — 3 grams — and hold there. It is a perfectly adequate dose.
Do you need to cycle it?
No.
There is no evidence that continuous creatine use downregulates your own production in a way that matters, no evidence that a break improves subsequent response, and no established reason to stop. Long-term studies have run for years at maintenance doses without a consistent adverse pattern in healthy people.
If you do stop, nothing dramatic happens. Muscle creatine drifts back toward baseline over the following weeks, and with it whatever buffer you had built. Then you start again, and refill.
How to actually run it, start to finish
The whole protocol in six lines.
- Choose your route. Loading: about 0.3 g/kg/day split into four doses for five to seven days. No loading: skip straight to step two.
- Settle at 3 to 5 grams a day. Upper end if you are large, lower end if you are not.
- Take it every day, training or not.
- Put it somewhere you cannot forget — the gym bottle, or next to something you already do daily.
- Take it with food or a carbohydrate-containing drink if that is easy. Do not rearrange your life for it.
- Judge it on a training block, not on a session. Stores fill over days to weeks and the payoff is measured in completed work, not in how one set felt.
That's it. Creatine is the rare supplement where the correct protocol is boring, cheap, and finished.
Where our scoop sits
Base Work is creatine monohydrate and nothing else, in the daily slot — alongside Under Load before training and Night Work at 22:00.
Monohydrate specifically, because that is the form the entire dosing literature above was built on. Creatine monohydrate supports muscle strength and high-intensity exercise performance when combined with resistance training.* The panel is one line long: 5 g of creatine monohydrate per serving, 60 servings in a 300 g tub, one ingredient. It is printed on The Monograph, and an independent laboratory measured the raw material — lot CM20251225A, for Vox Nutrition, not a finished TARE tub — at 99.87% against a greater-than-99.5% specification. Read the panel, match it against the 3-to-5-gram target, and hold that number. That is the standard, on us or on anyone else.
*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
More in this cluster: what creatine monohydrate actually does and whether creatine dehydrates you. Or run the whole protocol: the Recovery Standard.