Dry Scoop Your Creatine

A rant

“If \ I had a thousand sons , the first humane principle I \ would teach them should be to forswear thin \ potations and addict themselves to [dry scooping creatine].” - Falstaff, probably

Basically everyone should take 5 grams of creatine every day for their lives entire¹. In my social circle this has been catching on. Many who attempt this unfortunately end up taking creatine in the Wrong Way. The myriad Wrong Ways amount to either making the process so arduous that a durable habit does not form, or to cutting the wrong corners and accidentally consuming zero grams of creatine every day.

Luckily, I know the Right Way, and I will teach it to you.

When I try to teach the Right Way to people in conversation I am politely ignored. I think this is because it is hard to succinctly and persuasively explain what’s bad about the Wrong Ways. In the future, I’ll simple link the ignorant to this blog post and save everyone much anguish.

I start by explaining the good method briefly, and then take my time detailing what’s wrong with all the others.

The Right Way

Here’s how to dry scoop.

Take your 5 gram scoop and fill it. Then shoot the powder straight into your mouth.

Sip some liquid. Swish to dissolve the powder in your mouth. Then swallow. Done!

The Wrong Ways

Hot Creatine Water

Typically people will heat some water, dump their creatine scoop into it, stir to dissolve, then drink the solution. I found that there are a couple annoying drawbacks to this:

1. It is hard to get all the creatine to dissolve in the hot water. Takes a lot of stirring.

2. You are sipping hot chalk water for 5-15 minutes. If you are a slow drinker like me, the creatine will separate out and form dregs. That’s lost gains!

3. Overall takes too much time, and the ritual of preparation isn’t rewarding in the way brewing tea is.

In contrast, when you dry scoop the whole process takes 8 seconds and there is basically no taste.

Adding to Protein Shakes

Some choose to add creatine to their daily protein shakes. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but it’s unwise to couple the two habits. Remember: you should be taking creatine monohydrate every day for your whole life. You should not expect yourself to consume a protein shake every day for your whole life. Some days you do not need 20-40 additional grams of protein. This mismatch in consumption tempos can break your habits.

Creatine Gummies

This one is the most insidious. You pay a premium for something convenient and tasty, what’s the problem?

The problem is quality control. On priors, you would not be wrong to regard all creatine gummies as fraudulent. A number of fitness Youtubers (see here and here) have done purity tests on creatine gummies brands sold on Amazon and found that many contain half the amount of advertised creatine, or none at all. When caught, these fraudsters rebrand and relist on Amazon (Amazon’s supplement quality control has recently been disastrous — see here).

It is unlikely that you, the consumer, will be able to keep up. It is much better to buy simple powdered creatine monohydrate exclusively from widely tested brands like Thorne and Horbäach.

Creatine-supplemented Fitness Drinks

At my old Brazilian Jujitsu gym, the front desk would sell these drinks from the FitAid brand:

I drank them for a year. After three hours of classes, $3 for something cold and delicious felt luxurious, and it was a pleasant bonus that buying these drinks three times a week extended my creatine supply at home.

The issue is that creatine is not very stable in solution, especially in acidic solutions:

Creatine monohydrate powder is very stable showing no signs of degradation into creatinine over years, even at elevated storage temperatures [187]. However, creatine is not stable in solution due to intramolecular cyclization that converts creatine to creatinine especially at higher temperatures and lower pH [187, 198,199,200]. The degradation of creatine can be reduced or halted by lowering the pH under 2.5 or increasing the pH above 12.1 [187]. This is the reason that less than 1% of creatine monohydrate is degraded to creatinine during the digestive process and creatine is taken up by tissue or excreted in urine after ingestion [60, 185,186,187]. Moreover, since creatine is an ampholytic amino acid, it is not very soluble in water (e.g., creatine monohydrate dissolves at 14 g/L at 20°C with a neutral pH of 7) [187]. Mixing creatine in higher temperature solution increase solubility, which is the reason why initial studies administered creatine in hot tea [35, 60, 103, 104, 123, 182] but the solubility has no influence on tissue uptake [187]. The lack of solubility and stability of creatine in solution is the reason that creatine is primarily marketed in powder form and efforts to develop stable beverages containing physiologically effective doses of creatine (e.g., 3–5 g per serving) have been unsuccessful.

Another study claims 90% degradation after 45 days in solutions at 6.2 pH and room temperature.

Creatine effervescent powders were dissolved in deionized water (pH 6.2) and stored both at room temperature (RT) (25°C) and refrigerated condition (4°C) over a period of 45 days. Creatine concentration was determined using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). Intrinsic dissolution and saturated solubility of creatine, creatine monohydrate, and di-creatine citrate in water were determined and compared. Crystal growth was detected only in the refrigerated samples on the seventh day of storage. Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) and x-ray diffraction (XRD) studies revealed that the crystals formed were of creatine monohydrate. Ninety percent creatine degradation was observed within 45 days for RT samples. However, at refrigerated condition this degradation was 80% within the same time period.

It is likely that these creatine drinks have been sitting for months and that effectively all the creatine has broken down.

Troubleshooting Dry Scooping

Some miscellanea on dry scooping to wrap this up.

• I have had a friend resist dry scooping because he thought it would be messy. It isn’t. It is very easy. I am begging you on two knees to just try it.

• If you google “dry scooping creatine” you get a bunch of negative results (like this one, which in one part hilariously warns that dry scooping puts you at risk of choking). All of this is irrelevant because I’m using “dry scooping” a bit idiosyncratically. When I say “dry scoop” I mean “shoot the powder in your mouth and then swig some water”. Some people advocate consuming powdered supplements totally dry to improve absorption. This is goofy bro-science and can be ignored.

1. I argue this here.