Beginning around age 30, our bodies begin to lose muscle mass. With each decade that passes, we will continue to lose 3-8% (each decade), depending on overall health, sleep quality, nutrition and level of physical activity. By age 50, most of us have likely lost up to 10 percent of our muscle mass, according to the American College of Sports Medicine. This is one of the reasons we stress the importance ofresistance training and eating enough protein each day as both of these help your body build and maintain lean muscle mass, which is an important factor in health and longevity.
In addition to natural age-related muscle loss, certain medications, including new GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic and Wegovy can increase the risk for greater muscle loss, since reduced muscle mass is a side effect of these medications.[1]
As you lose muscle mass, you become weaker, and significantly increase the chances of slips, trips, falls, and bone breaks.
As we already mentioned, resistance training and eating enough protein (1-1.2 grams of protein per day for older adults) is critical to maintaining as much lean muscle as possible as we age. You may also want to consider one very specific supplement. One that’s traditionally associated with competitive athletes and bodybuilders -- creatine monohydrate.
What is Creatine?
While best known as a supplement, creatine is actually a combination of three amino acids ( arginine, glycine, and methionine) that your body naturally produces in small amounts. These same amino acids, as well as creatine itself, can be obtained from foods common to the diet, including red meat, poultry, fish, shellfish, eggs, dairy, and certain plant-based proteins and plant protein powders, including 1UP Vegan Protein.
As with many things in the human body, the body’s ability to both produce and retain creatine declines with age. Individuals at the greatest risk for low creatine levels are vegetarians, vegans, and others on meat-free diets.
What Does Creatine Do?
Creatine serves two primary roles in the body.
First, it enhances phosphocreatine stores in skeletal muscle tissue. This allows your muscles to rapidly replenish ATP stores so that you can increase your workout intensity (i.e. complete more reps across more sets for greater gains in strength and lean muscle as well as increased calorie burning!).
Second, creatine functions as an osmolyte, which encourages muscle cells to absorb extra water. This increases muscle volume and fullness as well as helps delay the onset of fatigue.
How Creatine Helps Older Adults’ Muscles
By increasing natural ATP stores and cellular hydration, creatine supports workout performance, lean muscle mass, and the body’s ability to tolerate heat stress. Lower stores of creatine can reduce workout performance, leading to less muscle mass and strength, and increased feelings of fatigue.
With less lean body mass, older adults are more susceptible to bone breaks/fractures due to poor balance, stability, and shock absorption (as muscle helps absorb shocks from impacts).
Creatine has been heavily investigated in recent years in older populations for these exact reasons.
In fact, a recent review titled Effectiveness of Creatine Supplementation on Aging Muscle and Bone: Focus on Falls Prevention and Inflammation stated that:
“Accumulating evidence indicates that creatine supplementation, with and without resistance training, has possible anti-sarcopenic and anti-dynapenic effects. Specifically, creatine supplementation increases aging muscle mass and strength (upper- and lower-body), possibly by influencing high-energy phosphate metabolism, muscle protein kinetics and growth factors. Creatine supplementation has shown potential to enhance bone mineral in some but not all studies, and seems to affect the activation of cells involved in both bone formation and resorption. Creatine has the potential to decrease the risk of falls experienced by aging adults which would subsequently reduce the risk of fracture.”[2]
Essentially, in older adults, creatine supplementation may:
- Increases muscle mass and strength (important indicators of longevity)
- Enhances bone mineral density
- Potentially decrease risk of falls
But, the benefits of creatine don’t end there.
Emerging research also highlights the brain-boosting benefits of creatine. Specifically, creatine can support the brains ATP requirements as well as improve short-term memory and intelligence/reasoning.[3] Recent studies also find that it may boost cognitive performance and processing speed during sleep deprivation.[4]
Are creatine supplements safe?
Extensive research has demonstrated that creatine supplements are generally safe and well-tolerated. In fact, since its debut in the 1990s, creatine has been investigated over 1,000 times with billions of servings of creatine have been ingested.[5]
In its position stand on creatine, the International Society of Sports Nutrition stated:
“Available short and long-term studies in healthy and diseased populations, from infants to the elderly, at dosages ranging from 0.3 to 0.8 g/kg/day for up to 5 years have consistently shown that creatine supplementation poses no adverse health risks and may provide a number of health and performance benefits.”[5]
It is worth mentioning that if you have any pre-existing medical conditions, which many older adults have, and are on medication, it is wise to consult with your physician before using any dietary supplement, even one as well-studied as creatine monohydrate.
I Eat Meat Every Day, Do I Need a Creatine Supplement?
As we mentioned above, your body naturally produces between 1-2 grams of creatine per day. You can also get creatine from animal proteins. However, you’d need to consume upwards of 3-4 pounds of meat/fish each day to achieve 5 grams of creatine.
Not many of us could tolerate eating that much food or afford to eat that amount of animal proteins each day.
One of the best things about creatine (in addition to its robust body of safety and efficacy research) is its affordability. Creatine is one of the most affordable supplements around!
The Best Creatine Supplement
There are many forms of creatine on the market, but none can match the amount of safety and performance data of creatine monohydrate -- the king of creatine!
1UP Pure Rebuild is creatine monohydrate advanced.
We know creatine works and there is no way to beat the G.O.A.T. of sports nutrition. So what we’ve done is taken the sturdy foundation that is 5,000mg creatine monohydrate and surrounded it with additional research-backed supplements, including glutamine, essential amino acids (EAAs), betaine anhydrous, and key electrolytes, that all work together to enhance recovery, restore hydration, and improve your results!
Take one scoop post workout to kickstart the recovery process. 1UP Pure Rebuild can be taken by itself as well as combined with our top-rated protein powders, including Whey Protein, Clear Protein, or Collagen Peptides.
References
- Sargeant JA, Henson J, King JA, Yates T, Khunti K, Davies MJ. A Review of the Effects of Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 Receptor Agonists and Sodium-Glucose Cotransporter 2 Inhibitors on Lean Body Mass in Humans. Endocrinol Metab (Seoul). 2019 Sep;34(3):247-262. doi: 10.3803/EnM.2019.34.3.247. PMID: 31565876; PMCID: PMC6769337.
- Candow DG, Forbes SC, Chilibeck PD, Cornish SM, Antonio J, Kreider RB. Effectiveness of Creatine Supplementation on Aging Muscle and Bone: Focus on Falls Prevention and Inflammation. J Clin Med. 2019 Apr 11;8(4):488. doi: 10.3390/jcm8040488. PMID: 30978926; PMCID: PMC6518405.
- Avgerinos KI, Spyrou N, Bougioukas KI, Kapogiannis D. Effects of creatine supplementation on cognitive function of healthy individuals: A systematic review of randomized controlled trials. Exp Gerontol. 2018 Jul 15;108:166-173. doi: 10.1016/j.exger.2018.04.013. Epub 2018 Apr 25. PMID: 29704637; PMCID: PMC6093191.
- Gordji-Nejad, A., Matusch, A., Kleedörfer, S. et al. Single dose creatine improves cognitive performance and induces changes in cerebral high energy phosphates during sleep deprivation. Sci Rep 14, 4937 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-54249-9
- Kreider, R. B., Kalman, D. S., Antonio, J., Ziegenfuss, T. N., Wildman, R., Collins, R., … 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(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12970-017-0173-z
