[Frostback2005]

I'll reply to this, as I have a little knowledge on the issue. Your muscles use phosphorylated creatine (creatine-ATP). Your muscles need ATP. If you start working your muscles, you have 2 seconds worth of ATP handy. When you use that, you have maybe 10 seconds worth of creatine-ATP. Your body recycles the ADP resulting from the burning of the ATP; makes ADP to ATP. Your body already has the creatine and ADP needed to make creatine-ATP. The physiology of your cells will determine how much ATP and creatine-ATP you can have in your cells. And that's it. You can take creatine-ATP, but it will degrade quickly, even if you take it intravenously.

Creatine has been shown to increase muscle volume through osmotic effects (your body very tightly regulates the osmotic potential of cells, and if you move some solute into your cells, water will go in to keep the osmotic potential of the cells constant). If you take creatine, it will get into your muscle cells. So if you want to look "pumped", creatine can help you there.

Now, on the "plus" side, if you want to think creatine might help, maybe by adding creatine to your cells, you might add a few nanoseconds onto the 10 seconds you have (on average)!

Now it could be, however, that since your muscles cells take up the creatine you ingest or inject, that excess creatine may interfere somewhow with the chemistry of your cells. No data show this happeneing because other than the osmotic effects, there are no data showing taking excess creatine has any effect at all on muscle performance.

My opinion is that taking excess creatine has a negative effect because your body has to get rid of it, and that will add a metabolic load to muscles cells that is not normally there. While it's there, that excess will throw off your muscle cell chemsitry a bit (it has to), but that chemistry is highly regulated enough that your cells obviously make up for it, as data show no effect of creatine on muscle performance. However, in making up for the excess creatine you could get indirect effects on other physiological processes in the cells that could mean something if the cell is challenged in some other way (because in dealing with the excess of creatine, some other system is compromised). Maybe, maybe not, but why take the risk for no benefit?

I am personally highly biased towards the view that you should let your body function normally, and do things to maximize normal body functions, without going to extremes. I suspect that people whose body does not function normally, and have to go to extremes just to maintain function, might appreciate such a view more than people who think that normal body function somehow isn't good enough! I'll gladly take normal body function till the day I die if it is ever offered as an option to me!!!