5/6g a day.
Very demanding job with lots of ‘thinking’
3 times a week gym
Pre creatine I would struggle to maintain ability to do the hard thinking around 3pm. Just like, fog or I could feel my brain didn’t have capacity.
Now, I am capable till the end of the day. Feels like a well trained athlete at the end of a game being able to deliver rather than just holding on.
I really noticed the effect coming back in but now it is my new normal.
If so creatine is supposed to help people push themselves harder and thus build more muscle. As a side-effect of intense exercises you'll create more testosterone. Increased testosterone leads to balding.
I've also read that maybe massaging the muscles around the scalp to loosen it might help. E.g., a scalp that's too tight can have detrimental effects on the hair follicles.
That being said, I don't know what kind of evidence there is to support either of those things. Seems like a safe enough thing to try though.
that said, natural free test levels are at a fraction of what enhanced pro bodybuilders tend to supplement, and there are mass monsters with hair. cutler, yates, ferrigno and golden era bodybuilders like schwarzenegger, zane, columbu all had full heads of hair.
Steroid consumers have al least ten times my leves, and while this is a factor indeed, in is not necessarily decisive.
Even early 90s famous era mass monsters were not all bald.
Baldness is known to be related to a bunch of things: testosterone levels, something to do with blood delivery to the scalp, deeper genetic factors.
Surprsingly, for some of the cases scalp massage is known to help.
Secondly, yes, someone might have just won a genetic lottery but 5α-Reductase inhibitors are quite popular these days.
Using steroids does have the effect. And a bunch of others, most of them unhealthy.
These things might look correlated as steroid ppl often consume creatine as well as some other things.
But if you want to go down that road, there's also indications that the oil in pumpkin seeds reduce the enzymatic process that turns testosterone into DHT - so just eat some pumpkin seeds with your creatine and the problem goes away! It's that simple!!!
I am now on Minoxidil and Finasteride, with no creatine, and no longer have shedding.
> At one point I stopped Mino and Fin, but kept the creatine and the shedding increased rapidly.
I think it's a common for shedding to accelerate after stopping Minoxidil.
I just want to raise my voice that, in my experience, yes, I had hair loss issues on creatine. Every time I respond to a comment on reddit, youtube, twitter, here, there is always a sea of "Nope, sorry" comments that I must be mistaken. My hair line disagrees. The extra rep isn't worth it.
100% correct on shedding after mino stoppage however.
My body has a strange reaction to comonly used substances, though. For instance, even a single soda's worth of caffeine causes me to have an extreme 18-24 hour mania phase and then a two day crash afterwards. So, your mileage will definitely vary.
5g would probably be fine without a lot of training ( I train about 10hrs a week). Seems like I need 10g to both get the physical and mental benefits, especially during peak training blocks (running 50-60 mpw with strength training).
The point is that it doesn't work like those Witcher potions. Nothing changes here and now.
Personally, i only saw that it works over time because of my journal. Most people dont do records.