Creatine for Cutting & Fat Loss Goals
Creatine is primarily associated with gaining weight and building muscle. Surprisingly, creatine is also equally effective when it comes to losing fat and cutting.
Let us read how you can use creatine to stay in top shape during your cutting cycles.
Benefits of Creatine While Dieting
The primary objective of fitness enthusiasts during cutting cycles is to lose fat while retaining the hard-earned muscles to look lean. In this fitness quest, diet, supplementation, and training protocols are the primary rudiments.
If your goal is to lose weight while cutting, it's best to try out micronized creatine or creatine ethyl ester along with simple sugars, preferably after a workout.
The sugar will bring a spike in the level of insulin in your body and this will shuttle more of the creatine into your tiring muscles. This, in turn, will ensure that more of the creatine gets used up instead of going to waste and causing water retention or bloating.
Creatine improves the levels of Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) in the body that further translates to muscle hypertrophy and training intensity gains.
This allows you to conquer more sets and reps, especially when it comes to big power movements such as deadlifts.
By doing this, creatine leads to a higher daily energy expenditure in the short term and significantly increase the possibility of a calorie deficit that is one of the basic factors when you want to strip body fat.
In the long term, the health and performance benefits of creatine supplements on resistance exercise can go a long way to enhance the aesthetics of your physique while you are on a cutting cycle.
Does creatine burn fat?
The answer is a yes! According to a report in the Journal of Midlife Health, increasing your muscle mass is an excellent way to burn fat as muscle tissues burn more calories naturally than fatty tissues.
In other words, creatine helps your body burn more calories because of the increase in lean muscle mass.
However, it's important that you follow the right diet and training program. It is also important for you to exercise at least thrice a week for up to 45-60 minutes per session while targeting the major muscle groups (chest, abdominals, back, arms, legs, and shoulders) at least once a week.
Studies have demonstrated that creatine supplementation can play a vital role in adipose tissue bioenergetics and energy expenditure. The combination of resistance training and creatine supplementation can reduce fat mass more than resistance training alone.
In addition to these advantages, creatine supplementation is also beneficial for aging muscles as creatine significantly influences muscle protein kinetics, inflammation, high-energy phosphate metabolism, satellite cell activity, fat bioenergetics, oxidative stress, and the expression of growth factors.
Increased body mass along with significant reductions in the levels of body fat percentage and fat mass can be indirectly related to and explained by greater muscle accretion associated with resistance training and creatine supplementation.
Greater lean tissue mass that is associated with gains in resting metabolic rate and total daily energy expenditure can be attributed to the primary contributors to the decreases in fat mass and body fat percentage.