FAQ: Creatine for Teens???

Bottom line (for parents): At the recommended dosages (0.1 g/kg of body mass/day up to 3g daily), creatine supplementation is safe in teenagers. Of course, there are not a lot of studies specific to this population (probably because it’s hard to get parents to consent to such a study), but there are hundreds of studies and over 30 years of evidence of safety in adults. Especially, at a adult size, I would postulate that there are no health concerns for teens using creatine correctly. The most encouraging of the pediatric literature is the use of creatine in treating muscular dystrophy which showed improvements in grip strength with no detrimental effects including looking at kidney and liver function. Of course the caveat is that your teen is healthy, without kidney impairment, at baseline and the he/she is actually taking the recommended amount. There has been case studies showing kidney injury at 100x the recommended amount.

Bottom line (for teens): There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ways that you can improve your athletic performance, size, and strength besides taking creatine. It is a complete waste of time and money probably only providing you with expensive pee because you likely urinate out nearly every supplement you take. You don’t need creatine to get stronger or faster. You need adequate sleep, a healthy diet, and proper training. There are no shortcuts to being “cut.” If you sleep at least 8 hours, eat only fruits and vegetables without any processed food, and exercise daily to near complete exhaustion, then you might, maybe benefit from creatine supplementation. Short of all that, everything you want to get “magically” from adding a supplement to your routine can be accomplished by just training harder.

I will answer this question as a parent, a researcher, a practicing medical provider, and an athlete. As an adult athlete, I have used creatine occasionally since college. Personally, I have never experienced any noticeable boost in performance, nor have I felt any side effects or ever had any health problems or abnormal liver or kidney studies at any point during or after using creatine. As a parent, I have never encouraged my kids to take creatine specifically because I had no reason to believe the added expense was necessary. In my limited prior research, I had no reason to believe creatine would harm my child but also had no data to show that it would help either. While I was aware of studies that showed the positive effects of creatine on athletic performance, I believe that in a young athlete, there are hundreds of things that can be done that will have a much larger effect on athletic performance. There is a huge difference between highly-trained, top-tier athletes gaining a tiny boost in muscle output, and a teenager, not even close to their peak, who can and will likely rapidly improve in strength and skill just through regular training and exercising. While a 1% gain in an Olympic athlete might be huge, a 1% difference in a rapidly growing teen would be nearly impossible to detect. Why waste time and money with a supplement?

I think of it like this…if you are driving a race car and looking to take a hundredth of a second off your lap time, fueling up with expensive gas might just help, but the “supreme” gas isn’t going to make a noticiable difference driving on the highway. Don’t waste your money on it!

Ha! Says the teenager who thinks they are already a sports car. Why not? Teens already “waste” money on expensive shoes, hairstyles, etc. If creatine doesn’t hurt and might help just 1%. why not?

The science…Is it safe?

Creatine is likely the most studied and most popular supplement for athletes with many studies showing that it can improve performance and recovery and is safe in adults at 30g/day for up to 5 years (see International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: safety and efficacy of creatine supplementation in exercise, sport, and medicine).

“studies provide a large body of evidence that creatine can not only improve exercise performance, but can play a role in preventing and/or reducing the severity of injury, enhancing rehabilitation from injuries, and helping athletes tolerate heavy training loads. Additionally, researchers have identified a number of potentially beneficial clinical uses of creatine supplementation. These studies show that short and long-term supplementation (up to 30 g/day for 5 years) is safe and well-tolerated in healthy individuals and in a number of patient populations ranging from infants to the elderly.

Authors of Common questions and misconceptions about creatine supplementation: what does the scientific evidence really show? address many myths surrounding creatine including specific questions about its safety in general and in children. One persistent concern with creatine is that it can cause kidney damage. After reviewing hundreds of articles over 30 years, these authors found no evidence that creatine causes kidney injury in healthy individuals when taken at the recommended amount.

The BIG caveat to stress here with teens and adolescents here is that it MUST be taken at recommended doses (3-5 g/day or 0.1 g/kg of body mass/day) with little evidence on how much a toxic amount would be, but that case reports have found kidney injury at doses of 100-times recommendations and in people with pre-existing kidney disease.

There is little data or studies addressing the safety of creatine use in young athletes, however, there are several clinical studies investigating the use of creatine to treat pediatric patients with lupus, muscular dystrophy, and traumatic brain injures all with good safety statistics including evaluation of kidney and liver function. These studies were promising with the use of creatine helping to improve grip strength in adolescents with Duchenne muscular dystrophy being the most promising as a corollary to use by young athletes.