The sports supplements industry, like any industry or business, seeks to be profitable and sell its products to the greatest number of profiles within a population.
To do this, segmentation strategies can often be used in which a supplement is offered to a specific group of the population, in this case women, with the promise that it is specifically designed and engineered for them.
While it is true that there may be supplements that by their nature are aimed at women (especially those related to the menstrual cycle or fertility such as inositol), the vast majority of supplements provide exactly the same benefits regardless of whether we are men or women .
In this article We explain if creatine offers different benefits to men or women or if, however, the benefits of the supplement transcend gender.
What does creatine do?
First let’s start by answering the question of what it does. As an ergogenic aid, that is, as a substance that is capable of increasing sports performance, it increases maximum strength and total work capacity, as well as facilitating the release of calcium ions. The first leaves no room for doubt: it can give you a certain gain in strength and improve the ability we have to endure certain work. The second simply implies that improves the ability of our muscles to contract.
Furthermore, beyond athletic performance, creatine has also been shown to offer cognitive benefits and in fact, it is being investigated in neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s or depression.
Regarding how it is capable of achieving an increase in sports performance, it must be said that creatine is a substance already present in our body and is part of the energy production systems. Although it is already present and our bodies are capable of synthesizing it on a daily basis, adding a little more through supplementation (5 grams per day is the standard dose) has been shown to cause the performance increases we discussed.
Let’s imagine creatine as a fuel that participates in one of the processes for obtaining energy. It is capable of binding to isolated phosphorus molecules, giving rise to phosphocreatine. This phosphocreatine acts as a facilitator for the regeneration of ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which is the key molecule in the process of obtaining energy since its breakdown releases energy and constantly requires phosphocreatine to repeat the cycle over and over again.
Is creatine more beneficial for women than for men?
No, it is not. Creatine, as we said, is a substance present in the body of any human being whose supplementation works by accumulation, that is, maximum benefits are experienced when we saturate our muscle cells with it.
In this way, regardless of whether you are a man or a woman, the moment your cells are full of creatine you will experience its benefits. Keep in mind that if we start taking creatine at the rate of 5 grams daily, it will take about three or four weeks to experience the benefitsprecisely because this is the time it takes approximately to completely fill our cells.
There are some exceptions in terms of people who can experience the effects of creatine more significantly. We talk about vegetarians, but especially vegans. The consumption of foods of animal origin such as meat is associated with slightly higher basal creatine levels than in people who do not consume it. In this way, as a vegan starts from slightly lower levels of creatine, supplementing it causes the magnitude of the effect to be greater because the margin when it comes to accumulating it is higher.
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