“Creatine improves muscle strength”

Creatine works. The useful questions are how much, on which lift, and for whom, and the answers are less flattering than the tub suggests.

The largest pooled analysis so far gathered 69 randomised trials covering 1,937 adults, meaning trials where people were assigned by chance to creatine or to a dummy powder so the two groups were otherwise alike [1]. Everyone trained. Averaged across those trials, the creatine groups finished with:

• about 1.4 kg more on the bench or chest press
• about 5.6 kg more on the squat
• about 1.5 cm more height on a vertical jump
• no reliable difference on handgrip strength, or on the leg press machine [1]

Two of those four not moving is the part worth sitting with. If creatine simply made muscle stronger, every strength test would pick it up.

A second review, covering 23 trials in adults under 50, puts the figures much higher: about 4.4 kg more upper-body strength and about 11.4 kg more lower-body strength [2]. The two reviews agree on the direction and disagree on the size, because they pooled different trials and different lifts. So a single headline number for "the creatine effect" reflects which review someone picked.

Then there is who was in the trials. In that 23-trial review, 460 participants were men and 49 were women [2]. The men gained upper-body and lower-body strength; the women did not measurably gain either [2]. That female result rests on 49 women across three studies, thin enough that "creatine does not work for women" and "nobody has properly tested it in women" both fit the evidence. The larger review split the same way, with no reliable gain for women on the squat, the leg press or the jump [1].

Age divides the evidence too, and here the reviews contradict each other. The 2025 review found the strength gains in younger adults and not in older ones [1]. But a meta-analysis built specifically for older adults, pooling 22 trials and 721 people whose average ages across the studies ran from 57 to 70, found the creatine groups gained about 1.4 kg more lean tissue, meaning everything in the body that is not fat, than training alone, plus a smaller but consistent edge on chest press and leg press [3]. Those two findings have not been reconciled.

The evidence does not describe:

• anyone taking creatine without training, since both groups were lifting in every trial counted here [1][2][3]
• women in any useful number [1][2]
• adults over 50 in the 23-trial review, which enrolled nobody older than that [2]
• anything beyond about a year, the longest trials having run 52 weeks [3]

For an adult who already lifts, creatine adds a small repeatable amount on top of what the training is doing, and the training is doing most of it. The honest version of the sales pitch is a few kilograms on the bar over several months.