Creatine primarily works by increasing the availability of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), often called the body's energy currency. Here’s how it fuels your performance:

• Boosts ATP Regeneration: When your muscles contract intensely, ATP is broken down for energy. Creatine rapidly replenishes ATP stores by donating a phosphate molecule, allowing your muscles to sustain high-power output for longer periods. This means more reps, heavier lifts, and stronger sprints.
• Enhances Cell Volumization (Muscle Hydration): Creatine is an osmotically active substance, meaning it draws water into your muscle cells. This increased cellular hydration, often called "cell volumization," makes your muscles appear fuller and, importantly, can signal anabolic pathways. This cellular swelling stimulates muscle protein synthesis, contributing to lean muscle growth and an optimized environment for muscle repair.
• Stimulates Muscle Growth: By allowing for greater training volume and intensity, creatine indirectly stimulates muscle protein synthesis and hypertrophy (muscle growth), helping you build lean muscle mass more effectively.
• Aids Recovery and Reduces Fatigue: Creatine helps manage exercise-induced fatigue and speeds up recovery by helping to clear metabolic byproducts and supporting muscle repair processes post-workout.

Even though your body produces some creatine naturally, creatine monohydrate stands as the unequivocal gold standard for supplementation, extensively researched and celebrated for its superior efficacy over other forms like creatine hydrochloride, creatine ethyl ether, and creatine nitrate.

This highly pure and highly bioavailable form, used in Blonyx HMB+ Creatine, ensures optimal absorption and direct utilization by your muscle cells.

No matter what kind of athlete you are, creatine monohydrate can help you generate more power, increase your strength, and enhance your overall training capacity.

Here’s how it supports different types of athletes:

• Strength and Power Athletes: Creatine helps increase strength and power development from high-intensity efforts like deadlifts, squats, bench press, and explosive movements. It allows for more repetitions and heavier weights, driving faster development of lean muscle mass.
• Endurance Athletes: Emerging as one of the most effective endurance supplements, creatine significantly boosts your anaerobic endurance for critical moments within longer efforts. It extends your capacity for powerful intervals, helps you maintain speed and power during the decisive final pushes in races, and ensures you have explosive reserves for surges, breakaways, or powerful finishes in sports like cycling, running, and rowing.
• Hybrid, Functional, and Team Sport Athletes: For sports demanding repeated bursts of high-intensity action—like HYROX, soccer, basketball, hockey, or martial arts—creatine enhances your ability to sustain your maximum output for longer periods. It allows you to maintain higher speeds, execute more powerful bursts, and delay fatigue during intermittent, high-energy activities.
• Masters and Aging Athletes: As we age, maintaining muscle becomes harder. Creatine helps reduce age-related muscle loss (sarcopenia) and supports the preservation of strength, power, and muscle, making it a valuable tool for athletic longevity and maintaining an active lifestyle.

Beyond athletic performance, emerging research has linked creatine enhanced cognitive function, sharper focus, improved sleep quality, and even support for bone health, making it a truly comprehensive health supplement.

Your body naturally produces creatine in small amounts, and it's also found in certain foods, primarily:

• Red Meat (e.g., beef, pork)
• Fish (e.g., salmon, tuna)

However, to achieve the scientifically proven performance benefits, you need to reach a daily intake of approximately 5g of creatine.

This optimal dose is exceptionally difficult, if not impossible, to obtain consistently through diet alone, especially for vegans and vegetarians who naturally have lower creatine stores. This makes high-quality creatine supplementation essential for athletes and those seeking its broader health benefits.

Creatine monohydrate is a highly effective supplement, and for most individuals, it is well-tolerated. However, there can be a couple of side effects that are typically mild and manageable:

• Possible Gastrointestinal Discomfort: Taking creatine monohydrate on an empty stomach can sometimes lead to mild gastrointestinal discomfort, such as bloating, stomach upset, or minor cramps. This is generally easily avoided, and it's recommended to take creatine with or after food to ensure comfortable digestion and optimal absorption.
• Temporary Water Retention and Slight Weight Gain: Creatine monohydrate naturally draws water into your muscle cells. This physiological process, essential for its effectiveness, can lead to a small and temporary increase in body weight, primarily due to increased water retention within the muscles. This isn't fat gain, but rather a sign that the creatine is being effectively absorbed and is hydrating your muscle tissue, which is beneficial for performance

While creatine monohydrate remains the gold standard, various other forms exist, often marketed with claims of superior performance or absorption. Here's a look at some other forms of creatine:

Creatine Hydrochloride (HCL):

• Marketing Claim: Touted for better water solubility, supposedly leading to increased absorption and reduced stomach discomfort.
• Research Findings: Studies, though often small, show no significant advantage over creatine monohydrate in terms of strength gains.

Creatine Pyruvate:

• Marketing Claim: Allegedly boosts endurance capacity and offers higher absorption rates due to combination with pyruvic acid.
• Research Findings: Limited and conflicting research; some studies found it less effective than creatine monohydrate for improving body composition and strength.

Buffered Creatine (Kre-Alkalyn):

• Marketing Claim: Claims a higher pH protects it from stomach acid breakdown, leading to greater bioavailability and increased potency (e.g., up to 10 times more powerful).
• Research Findings: Research indicates it is not as effective as creatine monohydrate at elevating muscle creatine levels, even at comparable doses.

Creatine Serum:

• Marketing Claim: Marketed as being absorbed directly into the muscle, bypassing the digestive process for superior bioavailability.
• Research Findings: Found to be highly unstable before ingestion, breaking down into creatinine, and showing no significant impact on blood or muscle creatine levels.

Creatine Ethyl Ester:

• Marketing Claim: Claims its chemical modification enhances absorption and transport into muscles, overcoming perceived bioavailability limits of monohydrate.
• Research Findings: Research indicates rapid degradation in stomach acid and no superior effects on body composition or strength compared to creatine monohydrate or even a placebo.

Creatine Nitrate:

• Marketing Claim: Manufacturers claim improved dissolution for lower effective doses, with added nitrate potentially boosting endurance.
• Research Findings: Studies have found no significant difference in muscle creatine uptake compared to standard creatine monohydrate dosing, and more research is needed to confirm combined benefits with nitrate.

Creatine supplementation consistently increases lean body mass and overall strength during resistance training. These improvements are achieved as creatine enables greater training adaptations, leading to superior physical development over time. Creatine's impact on high-intensity exercise directly contributes to significant development in strength and power.

Creatine supplementation increases the concentration of creatine and phosphocreatine within muscle cells, boosting their immediate energy reserves. This enhanced energy availability allows athletes to perform more high-intensity repetitions or sets during strength training, significantly improving their overall exercise capacity and training quality. This heightened training stimulus directly leads to greater muscular adaptations and substantial gains in lean body mass over time.

Creatine helps maintain muscle mass by lessening muscle atrophy during periods of immobilization and significantly supporting muscle and strength gains during rehabilitation. It also reduces injury risk, with studies showing a lower incidence of issues like cramping, muscle tightness, strains, and overall injuries in athletes who supplement. These protective benefits are linked to creatine's role in enhancing recovery and improving the body's tolerance to heavy training loads.

Creatine supplementation helps repair muscle damage by significantly lowering markers like plasma Creatine Kinase and Lactate Dehydrogenase after intense exercise. It also reduces inflammation, attenuating inflammatory markers such as prostaglandin E2, Tumor Necrosis Factor alpha, and C-reactive protein, which promotes a faster recovery process. By mitigating these post-exercise responses, creatine enhances muscle function recovery and enables athletes to tolerate higher training volumes.

Creatine supplementation can significantly increase an endurance athlete's lactate threshold, as shown in studies with elite rowers where it rose by over 20W. This means athletes can sustain higher exercise intensities for longer periods before experiencing a rapid accumulation of fatigue-inducing lactic acid. Consequently, creatine improves endurance and anaerobic performance by enhancing the body's capacity to perform at elevated efforts.

Creatine supplementation can lower the body's oxygen demands at a given exercise intensity. This occurs because creatine helps shift the body's energy production towards the more immediate creatine-phosphate system. As a result, muscles can perform sub-maximal workloads with less reliance on aerobic metabolism, reducing the oxygen cost and the workload on the cardiovascular system.

Creatine supplementation significantly increases muscle glycogen stores by approximately 18% during a loading phase. This occurs because creatine ingestion itself directly stimulates muscle glycogen accumulation. Importantly, this increase in glycogen is not attributed to changes in insulin levels or GLUT-4 protein expression, suggesting a unique, direct mechanism.

Creatine supplementation is shown to improve brain function and memory, especially in older adults. The brain, which is highly demanding in terms of energy, benefits from increased creatine levels that support its metabolic needs. Studies show that when healthy individuals take creatine, especially those aged 66 to 76, they show significant improvements in memory tests compared to younger individuals and those on a placebo. This suggests that creatine can be a valuable supplement for enhancing cognitive function and memory by boosting the brain's energy capacity.