Which Form of Creatine is REALLY Best?

If you are looking for the right supplements to take when it comes to building muscle and supporting your efforts in the gym, there is one, outside of protein, that you should be taking…

And that is… creatine.

Now, creatine comes in many different molecular forms, but in terms of their efficacy on your training, are unaffected by the type. The two most popular forms of creatine are creatine monohydrate and creatine hydrochloride, otherwise known as creatine HCL.

There is a small percentage of people out there (roughly 10-15% of all users) that will experience gut discomfort from taking creatine monohydrate. For those that do experience stomach issues from monohydrate will find that they do not have the same discomforts when taking the buffered form of creatine, creatine HCL.

Neither form of creatine is more effective than the other and both share the same safety profile, the only discerning factors being taste and effective dosing.

Creatine monohydrate and creatine HCL differ in their taste profile in the sense that monohydrate is tasteless and can be mixed into anything without affecting any flavors. However, creatine HCL is extremely sour, doesn’t taste good and requires it to be mixed with something citrusy or sour itself in order to mask its own sour flavor.

The effective dose of creatine monohydrate in the human body is 5 grams per day. However, creatine HCL’s effective daily dose is only 2-3 grams due to an increased efficiency of the human body to process it.

So, while it doesn’t matter what form of creatine you prefer, it does matter than you are supplementing it into your diet to support your efforts in the gym because it is more than likely that you are not getting adequate amounts of creatine through your diet alone.

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Jeff Cavaliere MSPT, CSCS served as both the head physical therapist and assistant strength coach for the New York Mets. Jeff earned his Masters of Physical Therapy and Bachelor’s of Physioneurobiology from the College of Health Sciences University of Connecticut Storrs. He is a certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist by the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA).

hydroch chloride I find is the most universal in that the 10 to 15% of people that have gut issues from monohydrate won’t have those issues generally when they take the hydrochloride version of it’s just based on absorbability and the byproducts of the breakdown of monohydrate versus hydrochloride that tends to cause some gut distension and bloat if that’s you you’re not going to have those issues likely with hydrochloride the downside to hydrochloride is that it’s so sour if you were to take it like you would M Hydro you throw M hydrate to anything you can throw into a shake right you can throw into water anything it’s it doesn’t have a taste but if you put hydrochloride in it it’s going to taste horrible y so usually it gets masked in other citrusy type things so in our case we have our pre-workout we have creatine hydrochloride and that you don’t really taste it because it’s already got that really citrusy taste yeah the upside of hydrochloride is that you could also take a lower dose to reach the same benefits so 5 G per monohydrate about 2 to three gram would do the same thing with hydroch chloride I will say this though