Creatine or Protein Shakes?
Creatine or Protein Shakes?
This may seem like a silly question to the more advanced athlete, but to a novice, who has never used supplements, it is a genuine question. The short answer is that both creatine supplements and whey protein shakes will enable you to advance your physical ability and appearance quicker and to a higher level, but really you should know why and I will explain below.
What Do Protein Shakes Do?
Protein shakes are the cheapest and easiest way of getting enough protein in your diet for your body to gain muscle. Protein shakes work out cheaper than chicken, tuna, or any normal food source and provide a better, more digestible form or protein. They are made from milk, via complicated processes that retains the protein quality, whilst removing the sugars and fats. The fact that protein shakes are very low in carbs and fats, means they are low calorie and you can therefore drink 3 or 4 them per day.
Your body can only digest up to 40g of protein every 2-3 hours and small regular meals avoid you gaining fat, hence the 6 meals per day recommendation. This sounds like a lot of eating, but all you need to do is eat breakfast, lunch and dinner and have a protein shake 2-3 hours after each meal. If your regular meals are low calorie, use a protein powder to boost protein content of your regular meals. When you consume protein every 2-3 hours, it keeps your body in an anabolic muscle building state, as opposed to a catabolic muscle losing state which occurs when your body hasn’t been supplied with protein in the last few hours. This is why a high protein breakfast as soon as you wake up is vital, similar applies for a protein shake before bed.
Every second of the day, your body is either gaining or losing muscle, well both actually, but the overall gain or loss is of most importance. Your diet controls this more than any other factor. Other factors include being well hydrated, performing regular high intensity exercise, not being stressed, not overtraining, getting enough sleep, eating plenty of fruit and veg, etc.
What Do Creatine Supplements Do?
Creatine is used by the muscles for high intensity exercise, lasting less than a minute. Creatine is found in beef and other natural foods and supplementing with additional creatine provides more energy for high intensity exercise, meaning you can lift slightly heavier for slightly longer, i.e. more reps and more weight. This means that you will be training to a higher intensity and you will therefore be able to stimulate more muscle growth, if and only if, your diet is sufficient for muscle growth, see above. You can literally gain 7 pounds in 7 days, but it will be mostly water, associated with the super hydration effect that creatine has on your muscles. When you stop using creatine you lose this water, but the net result is that you have trained heavier over the last 8 weeks or so than you would have normally and you should have therefore gained a lot more muscle than you would have done without using creatine.
So Creatine or Protein Shakes?
Protein shakes are the only realistic way of eating 6 high protein, low calorie meals per day, which is essential for muscle growth, so the answer is protein shakes! If you want better results, use a creatine supplement as well, but not instead!
