Creatine Dosage Calculator: How Much You Should Take

*The Tool may take a few moments to load*

How Our Creatine Formula Works

Let’s start with the basics. If you’re taking creatine, you’re either in a loading phase or a maintenance phase. Loading phases are for when you’re first starting out, to build up your reserves. Maintenance phases are for after you’ve already built up a creatine reserve in your muscles.

When you’re in a loading phase, you typically take much more creatine than you do in the maintenance phase. I also have a more advanced creatine loading calculator, where you can find out how long your loading phase should be based on how much you want to take every day.

When you enter into the calculator how much you weigh, and what phase of creatine you’re doing, the calculator gets to work.

First, your weight in pounds is divided by 2.205. If you’re in a creatine loading phase, that number is multiplied by 0.3. If you’re in a creatine maintenance phase, that number is multiplied by 0.03.

If you’re doing things manually, ignore the 2.205 number and refer to the chart below.

If you want to read the study that helped us develop our formula, you can see it here! It can be pretty boring, but it’s important to understand the science behind these things.

Of course, we also factor in whether you’re weighing yourself with pounds or kilograms. Either way, your custom creatine dosage is given to you in grams/day.

Below, I’ve also created a table so you can find your creatine dosage without using the calculator. Check it out! The table works exactly the same as the calculator, you just do the math yourself.

Creatine Dosage Table

	Pounds	Kilograms
Loading Phase	0.14 X Bodyweight	0.3 X Bodyweight
Maintenance Phase	0.014 X Bodyweight	0.03 X Bodyweight

If you use pounds, take your body weight and multiply it either by .14 for loading, or .014 for maintenance. If you use kilograms, multiply your weight either by .3 or .03. After you’ve done this, you’ve gotten your daily creatine dose in grams!

Let’s do an example; say I weigh 204lbs, and I want to calculate my loading phase dose. I would multiply 0.14 by my weight in pounds of 204, to get my daily dose of 28 grams! It’s that easy.

This method isn’t quite as accurate compared to the calculator, mostly because the decimals would be too long to display on your screen. This being said, the inaccuracies are so small that they won’t have an impact on your dosing at all. On top of that, I usually round up my creatine dose to the nearest half gram anyway!

Does This Calculator Give Accurate Creatine Doses?

At the end of the day, while creatine isn’t known to be dangerous, there is such a thing as taking too much. This calculator scales up with your weight, so if you weighed 350lbs, it would tell you to take almost 50 grams of creatine every day! That’s just too much. It most likely wouldn’t hurt you, you’d just have an upset stomach.

On the other end of things, if you’re a small person, say a 100lb female, it would tell you to only take 1 gram/day, which wouldn’t be enough.

For both of these reasons, I have the calculator capped with minimums and maximums for the sake of not giving you too much or too little creatine. I’ll leave those caps at the bottom of the section if you use the chart because the chart won’t have the caps in place.

Like I mentioned before, too much creatine can give you an upset stomach, at any dose. If you find this happens to you, lower your dose until it goes away. That’s all you should have to do!

Either way, thankfully, taking too much creatine isn’t really bad for you. Whatever creatine your body can’t use/absorb is just released as waste. This way, it’s not causing you any harm inside your body.

So rest assured, even if you take too much creatine, it’ll just be expelled from your body without issue.

	Upper Limit (Grams/Day)	Lower Limit (Grams/Day)
Loading Phase	30	15
Maintenance Phase	10	2

Source

If Our Creatine Dosages Seem Low to You

If your dose seems at all low to you, this is probably because your creatine company has lied to you. Creatine manufacturers make more money by selling more creatine. What does this mean?

It means that some of these companies will do whatever it takes to sell more creatine, even if it means lying to their customers (you). You’ve probably seen at one that you “should” be taking 5 grams per day of creatine. While this is fine, and won’t hurt you, it’s a waste.

Depending on your body weight and composition, if you take 5 grams per day, you’re most likely excreting 2 or 3 of those grams before they ever get to your muscles. That’s a lot of waste! This means that almost 50% of the creatine that you’d be taking is going to waste, and you’re spending almost double the amount of money as necessary.

So, I decided to create this calculator. It’s based on evidence, not marketing. It’s meant to give you the actual correct information, and not sell you more creatine than you truly need.

Source

The Story Behind This Tool

It actually took me a few weeks to design an accurate creatine dosage tool. I had a few pages worth of scribblings and formulas, and you can check out one of them below (but you may not be able to make anything of them).

I read over a baker’s dozen of different studies and scholarly articles about creatine, dosages, water weight, and more, trying to make sense of all the data. Piece by piece, the formula started to work itself out in my head and I was able to put it all onto paper.

Then I had to go and actually make the tool. This was a bit easier, and once I found a suitable tool maker I needed to plug in all of my data points and bits of formula I had written into the online tool itself.

The result of all these scribblings is the calculator you can see at the top of the page!

My loading calculator’s notes get even crazier than this, and took me even longer, so do check that one out too.

Next, I’m going to refine my creatine loading calculator, as well as look for new tools that can be made.