How to choose between creatine Monohydrate vs Creatine HCl?

So a couple years ago I started looking at creatine monohydrate, and I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I hadn't been using this all along. So I'll go back to when I was in my 20s. I used to work out at a place called Gold's Gym in Venice, California, known as the mecca of bodybuilding. Well, all the bros down there were taking creatine monohydrate, and I'm looking at them all and I'm going— I kind of equated creatine with steroids, and I didn't want to look how they looked. So I stayed away from it. Fast forward to a couple years ago, I started looking at the research. I go, how have I missed this? First of all, creatine is something that we naturally have and make, right? And we should have 120 to 140 grams of it stored in our body anyway, and we're getting it from our diet, not as much as we need, however. So this is something that we need, and we need for energy. And as I'm unpacking all of the things that creatine does and also unpacking the fact that women tend to be deficient in it, I'm like, Oh, we gotta have this. So the first thing I did was try it on myself, and what I noticed was, yes, I got a little bloaty and my GI issues cranked up a bit, but I was like, I think it's worth it, and I powered through it. Turns out 76% of women who take creatine monohydrate will experience some kind of GI issues or extracellular fluid. Now the reality is creatine, one of the things that it does is draw more water into your muscles. That's intracellular fluid. That's Fantastic. We want that. Remember, your muscles are made up of a lot of water, so more water in the muscle is a good thing. But more water outside of the muscle, bloated, not a good thing. I was muscling through this, haha, no pun intended. And so then, as I saw results from it, I decided I should be offering this to all the women. I need to tell every woman out there about creatine monohydrate. And so I did. And I have been in the supplement industry for 30 years. I've never gotten the kind of blowback that I got from this supplement. I started getting women writing and going, I'm gaining weight, I'm feeling bloated, my stomach hurts. And I'm trying to tell them, hey, just power through it, it'll be fine. They're not having it. Fortunately, I was speaking at the Integrative Healthcare Symposium, and after the talk where I spoke about exercise, muscle, and creatine, someone pursued me and said, hey, you need to know about creatine HCL, it's a better creatine. Now, I was highly skeptical because all I'd ever heard was you should only take creatine monohydrate. It's the most studied form of creatine. It's been around the longest. Of course, when you think about it, just because something's been around the longest doesn't mean that it's the best. Like, none of that— the most studied means that it's the best. So this guy comes up and tells me about this, and I'm skeptical, but I'm critically open-minded too. And I also knew the problems I was seeing out there in the world that I'd seen personally. So he sends me HCL. Turns out that this guy created this supplement trying to solve that bloating problem and discovered creatine HCL, which is great because we also need more HCL as we age. So double, double bonus. And what he discovered was that he'd created a product that didn't have the bloating, that was 7 times more bioavailable, absorbed better than monohydrate, and that a lot of what we're hearing out there about monohydrate is just flat out not true. That when they did the research and they looked at the pharmacokinetics of these products, they found that monohydrates only absorbed 15%, and that's where you're getting all of that feelings. And that's why— and I always say the math doesn't math— that's why you're told to take 5 grams of creatine when you only need about a gram supplementally a day as your foundational. And then you would go up maybe a little higher depending on what you need it for, if it's immune, brain, bone, and we'll talk about that. So I already was questioning it because the math didn't math, it didn't make sense. And then I tried the HCL, and he said, you know, you only need to take about 750 milligrams because It's 85% or more absorbed. Cool. So I start taking the HCL, no side effects whatsoever. And then I start cranking the dose. You know, I was trying to crank the dose with a monohydrate, but it made me feel crappy. And I've seen the research on what it does for jet lag, for stress, for workouts, for brain function. I was like, well, I want a little bit more, especially because I was traveling and I was going back and forth to Europe and I had a lot of jet lag. I kicked my doses up, basically quadrupled them, no side effects. Except that I didn't have jet lag. For the first time ever in my life, I was able to go back and forth from Europe with zero jet lag. This has never happened to me in my life. I didn't think it was possible. Once I started to see this, and I went over to his manufacturing plant and lab in Nebraska— this is the only American-produced patented creatine HCL, only creatine produced in the United States— and what I realized was I had to make a product out of this product. So I also looked and I went, all right, if I was going to take creatine What would make it better? Well, turns out that creatine and magnesium have an amplification effect, meaning that when you take them together, they're more powerful than on their own. The same is true of taurine and creatine. I also found a little research study on creatine, taurine, and magnesium, but not a whole lot, but it just made sense. So I put creatine, magnesium, and taurine together because we're all deficient in the other two. I put it together in a way that you can take 1 dose a day up to 4 doses a day and be great. What these 2 things, adding them in, does is it helps you work out harder, recover better, and basically amplifies the effect of creatine. So that is shiitake, creatine HCL being a better form of creatine, and then the results of it augmented, amplified by adding in taurine and magnesium.