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by byproxy 300 days ago
A 10% in strength drop after stopping creatine intake seems like quite a bit. Creatine certainly helps out in resistance training (if you're a responder), but generally by way of maaaybe being able to add another rep to a set at a given weight or maaaybe being able to add 2-3% more weight to a given set. This has cumulative effects, of course, but I wouldn't expect such a steep decline.

Unless you are a super-responder, that is!

2 comments

I'd like to emphasise that my ~10% figure is very vibes-based and I don't have hard numbers to back it up (I don't track my progression in great detail - and even if I did, I am sample size 1). My max rep counts for bodyweight exercises definitely went down, and I reduced the weight I was lifting to hit the same rep counts as before.
TFA says

>One review paper from 2017 concluded that creatine can give athletes a 10-20% performance boost in brief bouts of high-intensity exercise, such as sprinting past a defender or lifting heavy weights.

TFA is non a scientific journal, but summarizing/editorializing results from scientific journals. They don't cite their sources for that particular claim, but it appears to be from this^1 journal, which itself is an overview of other research. The "10-20%" number comes from this^2 2003 review of existing research on creatine that states 70% of the existing research at that time showed statistically significant results and give some example numbers of performance gains with regards to resistance training in the 5-15% range. However, I believe that's just an example from one study out of the many reviewed and I don't have access to more than the abstract. Not that I'd have the scientific/statistical knowledge to properly interpret the meta-analysis, anyway, but ..point being that "10-20%" number from the article can be misleading (surprise, surprise).

1: https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-017-...

2: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1022465203458