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17 July 2026 · Team Brotein
Bloating, kidneys, loading phases. The three myths that keep lifters off the most researched supplement in sport, and what the research actually says.
Creatine is the most studied supplement in sports nutrition, and somehow still the most argued about. Let's put the three big myths down for good.
Creatine pulls water INTO your muscle cells. That is intracellular water, inside the muscle, and it is part of how creatine works. It is not the puffy, under-the-skin water people picture when they hear "bloat".
A 2021 review in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition addressed this directly: the water increase sits within the muscle, and studies do not show creatine causing the kind of subcutaneous water retention or "softness" the myth describes.¹
Fuller muscles that weigh slightly more on the scale? Yes. Bloat? No. If the scale moving up by a few hundred grams of water inside your muscle bothers you, remember that is the machinery that helps you add actual muscle over time. We break the whole plateau mechanism down in why lifters plateau.
This one refuses to die, and the research keeps burying it. The International Society of Sports Nutrition's position stand, built on hundreds of studies over decades, is blunt: in healthy people at recommended doses, creatine monohydrate shows no harmful effect on kidney function.²
The confusion comes from creatinine, a normal breakdown product of creatine that doctors use as a rough kidney marker. Taking creatine can nudge creatinine readings up without anything being wrong with your kidneys. If you have an existing kidney condition, talk to your doctor first. That is standard advice for any supplement, not a creatine-specific warning.
A loading phase (around 20g a day for a week) fills your muscle stores faster, but it is optional. Take 3g to 5g every day and your stores reach the same saturation point in three to four weeks.² Same destination, gentler road, less chance of an unhappy stomach.
The thing that actually matters is the boring part: take it every single day, training day or not. Consistency beats protocol.
Three grams to five grams of pure creatine monohydrate daily, any time of day, forever. That is the whole protocol. Still on the fence? We wrote up the full safety and value case in is creatine safe and worth it.
