Workout of the Day:
Overhead Squat
3-3-3-3
and then,
For time:
400 Meter Run
30 Front Squats (Heavy)
30 Box Jumps (High)
400 Meter Run
(Challenge yourself by going as heavy and high as you can handle. The weight you select should be heavy enough to require you to break the 30 reps into 3-5 sets.)

Happy Birthday Rhonda!

And a belated Happy Birthday to the newest member of the CrossFit Invictus staff, Moses Aum (who sacrificed his facial hair for the job).

Supplements: Creatine
Written by Mark Riebel 

No other supplement for enhancing athletic performance gets as much press as creatine. This darling of the supplement industry is purported to increase muscular size, strength, and endurance in those who take it. It’s so popular that an estimate of up to 4% of the American population has taken creatine at some point, with an estimated $14M spent annually on the supplement. But does it actually work?

First a quick picture of what it is and how it functions. Creatine is an amino acid that both occurs naturally in our food and is produced in our bodies by the liver, pancreas, and kidneys. Its function in the body is to aid in energy production. If you’re not familiar with it, every single bit of energy produced in your body comes from a molecule abbreviated as ATP. There are various ways of making ATP, but all the energy for every process in your body comes from breaking off a phosphate molecule from ATP to form ADP. Now you see a minor problem—how do we get another phosphate back on there to make more energy? Fortunately, the body maintains a stockpile of these phosphates coupled with the creatine molecule. When the ATP is spent, more phosphate can be taken from the creatine phosphate and used to create more ATP. So by supplementing with creatine, in theory, you’re increasing your energy stores and thereby increasing performance as well as your ability to recover from exercise. Seeing as how the phosphagen energy system that creatine is a part of only lasts on the order of a few seconds, most of the benefit is seen in explosive activities like weightlifting and sprinting.

Scientific studies and reviews of the supplement show positive performance increases approximately 70% of the time, while the others show no statistically significant results. So it would seem that taking creatine has a good chance of increasing your strength and sprint performances, though it’s not guaranteed. 

If you choose to supplement with creatine, it’s most often taken for a 5-day “loading” period of 10-25 g/day of the supplement in order to saturate the tissues, followed by several weeks of a “maintenance” dose of 3-5 g/day. Side effects seem to be primarily anecdotal or in isolated cases, though reports of nausea and intestinal discomfort seem to be the primary complaints. So far, it appears that long-term use of the substance is also safe, though more research needs to be done concerning that matter.

As always, ask your doctor before taking any supplements, and realize that any performance enhancing substance will not exempt you from having to work hard in the gym and is in no way a substitute for a healthy diet and lifestyle.

Tags: Supplements

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Workout Of The Day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.