The Ultimate Creatine Guide for Women Over 40

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Hey, JJ Virgin here, nutrition expert, Fitness Hall of Famer, and 4-time New York Times bestselling author. And today I'm gonna be talking about my creatine product, Shiattine. Creatine is so much more than a product to help you build muscle. It's really important for overall health. Here's why. Creatine is what we need to build energy, make energy in the body. So when you have good creatine stores, you're going to have better energy for your brain and for your muscles. You'll feel it all over your body. I created Shiattine because I really wanted women to understand that they need creatine. In fact, I believe that women need creatine more than men do. Here's why. We have less tissue stores of creatine because creatine is stored in our muscles and in our brain. Now, most of it is stored in our muscles, about 95%, only 5% in the brain, but we have less muscle mass than men, so we have less creatine stores. We should have about 120 to 140 grams of creatine in our body at any one time. We make about a gram a day from the amino acids methionine, arginine, and glycine, and then we need to get another gram or more in a day. Now, we're We're gonna get it from our diet if we're eating the right things in the right amounts. In order to get a gram of creatine, you're gonna need to eat a pound of raw or rare meat and fish or 2 pounds of cooked. And what I've seen with most women is they're not even getting close to that. So besides having less muscle tissue stores, we're also getting less from our diet. And the reality is this is such an important nutrient for us because it's gonna help us with energy, help us with fatigue, help us with muscle, help us with bone, help us with immune system. It's the ultimate energy performance nutrient. In this video, we are going to go over my ultimate creatine guide for women. Page 1: What is creatine and why do you need it? So what is creatine and why do you need it? So creatine is made from 3 amino acids: methionine, arginine, and glycine. And then we store it in our muscles as phosphocreatine. This is how we can make and regenerate ATP. ATP is our body's energy currency. We also have a little bit in our brain, so it helps with brain energy as well. Page 2, powerful ways that creatine boosts energy, muscle strength, and brain health. Creatine has a myriad of benefits in everyday life. Now, you might think of it as something that the bros use to go work out, and the reality is, yes, it's super important to help you work out harder and recover better, but it goes way beyond this. There's a bunch of research out now showing that it may be helpful for bone health, again at higher doses, that is helpful for brain health in a couple different ways. There was a recent study that showed that women who took creatine alongside an SSRI reduced their depression more than people who just took SSRIs alone. Creatine also can help with sleep deprivation and jet lag. I'm trying to think of a woman out there who's not a little sleep deprived. So it can help there. It can help your immune system. It actually can go after cancer cells, so it can boost your immune system. So fatigue, immune system, Mood, neurodegeneration, energy production. These are all the different things that creatine can help with. Page 3, creatine HCL versus creatine monohydrate. 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 And I'm looking at them all, 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 in 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 it 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 I gave it to my husband too. 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 what 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 had 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, blah blah blah. And I'm like— 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 carbohydrates only absorbed about 15%, and that's why 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 because I notice that, you know, I was trying to crank the dose with HCL 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 quadrupedum, 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, 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 creatinine, what would make it better? Well, it turns out that creatinine 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 creatinine. I also found a little research study on creatinine, taurine, and magnesium, but not a whole lot, but it just made sense. So I put creatinine, magnesium, and taurine together because we're all deficient in the other two. I put it together in a way that you could take take one dose a day up to 4 doses a day and be great. And what these two 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. Page 4: Creatine and the brain. So creatine has been studied now for its effect on the brain. I talked earlier about the fact that we have 95% in our muscles, 5% in our brain, but what we know is that it can have a dramatic effect on stress, on sleep deprivation, on neurodegeneration. It's now being studied for all sorts of cognitive issues, mood issues, brain function, but at higher doses. So here's a challenge: what we know is when you take the monohydrate form, you have to take a lot of it in order to start to get to those higher doses, but you have all the side effects as you do it. Well, with CL, since it's so much better absorbed, you need way less doses to get to those higher doses of creatine in the brain. Creatine, when you start to take it, it is one that you will actually feel. I used to sneak in a little coffee in the afternoons, I admit it, and I don't do that anymore. I just take a little creatine hit. I might be a little bit of a junkie here, but man, do I love this, because you can totally feel it when you start to get this up to those doses. So creatine at a higher dose, you'll start to feel it in the brain. A lot of this is hypothesis right now. This this is all new research where they're looking out for Alzheimer's, for Parkinson's, for neurocognitive decline, for mood, depression. But some of the thought processes, like, you need to have enough in your body in order to get enough into your brain so that that first dosing that you're doing is just filling your stores, your tissue stores, your muscle tissue stores. Then to get more, you really got to push it. So that's what I think is probably happening here, is we're all so low in our creatine that even if we take a little extra, we're, we're not even getting close to we need for it to get into the brain. So that's the other piece of it, and that's where if you're using it for brain, push it, push it a little bit. One of the other interesting places it's been studied is in long COVID and in cancer. And what actually— I've got a crazy video showing creatine HCL actually helping activate these natural killer cells that go after the cancers. So all of this is preliminary early research, but here's the reality: this is something that we already have in our body. We just don't have enough of it, and we're not getting enough from our diet. And when you start to give your body what it needs, you will actually feel this one. You'll be able to work out harder, you'll be able to deal with like a poor night's sleep better, you'll be able to have a better mood. So this is one that you will literally notice, and you'll kind of be able to tell how much you need as well. So make sure that you're using this alongside a bioimpedance scale so you can see that increase in total body water that will happen as you start to pull a little bit of water into your muscles. And again, the difference between monohydrate and HCL is you will pull a little into your muscles, but you won't have the extracellular fluid retention. So you might see a little change if you're lucky. I always say, if you get— if you're lucky enough to get a half pound of total body water increase, which will look like you just put on more muscle mass, good on you. You're so fortunate. Some people won't see it, but you might. So fingers crossed for you. Page 5, here's how to use chiatine. Again, you do not need the dosing that you would need of monohydrate. And let's go back to the math. If we have 122 140 grams of it on our body. We make a gram a day already, and so we need to add probably somewhere around a gram or more a day depending on what's going on. Foundational dose for this, if you are, you know, 120-pound, 140-pound woman, 750 milligrams of HCL is probably fine if you're eating a diet that's got, you know, some, some meat, and some animal protein in it. I also have in there taurine and magnesium to again augment the effects. If you're working out hard, if you're under stress, I would double the dose. Or if you're a larger person, I would double the dose. By the way, your husband or partner can take this too, or your son. Just cover the S— it's heatine. I just wanted to frame it for women because women have been so afraid of creatine, and I really women need creatine more than men, so that's why I made it for women. But the real thing, the reason women I know will like this more, is that you're not going to experience that bloaty feeling that you get from monohydrate. And again, not everyone gets that, but a lot of people do. But the reality is you can use less of this, so it is just as cost-effective. They always say that, uh, monohydrate's the cheapest form. Well, yeah, but you have to use a lot of it, so it all evens out. So again, 750 Think of that, that's a scoop of my powder, or 3 capsules is probably a foundational dose. A little bigger, you can double it up. Working out hard, stressed out, double it up. If you are sleep deprived or jet lagged or you've got stuff going on, a little neurodegenerative stuff or depression, I would quadruple it. And so what I do is if I'm doing a bunch of traveling, I will take a double, like a double So in the morning I take a dose, and then I put a dose in my water bottle that I go to the gym with. In my water bottle I take my Amino Acid Power powder, my ElectroReplenish electrolytes, and my chiatine powder. If I'm time zone adjusting, I will use it again in the afternoon, or if I really need to focus, I need the brain focus, or I didn't sleep well the night before, I'll use a dose or two in the afternoon. As well. So that's the easy way to use it. Now we have 3 forms. We have the capsules, makes it super convenient. I'll do that in my pill pack in the morning. We have the orange flavor, and I'm building all my products so that they taste good together— my aminos and my creatine and my Electro Replenish. And then we have the plain powder because we got asked for it. Here's the reality with the plain powder you need to know: it's HCL, it's tart. Tart. So just make sure you're aware that it's tart. Now, how will I use that? If I'm doing my morning Greek-style yogurt— and I like to do Greek-style yogurt where I will stir in my collagen and I'll stir in my myosfortetropin and I will stir in some protein powder— and then I'll add that in there too. You don't taste it, so just be aware of how you're using it. Like, I wouldn't put in a little water and chase it. It's a little bit, uh, tart, right? But you can throw it into Greek-style yogurt because that's tart anyway. You won't notice it. Or you can throw it into your smoothie, you won't notice it either. That's the easy way to use it. Again, one of the cool things is play around with the dosing. I'd start low and go up from there, but you'll start to feel it, so that's the good thing. Page 6, why I added taurine and magnesium to the formula. So I look at a lot of red blood cell magnesiums, and it is rare for me to see someone who isn't in need of some extra magnesium. And I find it can be anywhere from 300 to 1,000 milligrams of taurine's interesting. It's— you've probably heard of taurine because it's in things like Red Bull because it can help with performance. But we've also been looking at it, they've been doing like some rat studies on it for longevity. So taurine is one of those ones that it's an amino acid we could get from food, but it's not in a lot of the foods that you typically eat. When I was digging through the research going, if I'm putting together this creatine product, how do I make an even— like creatine HCL is a better creatine, but how do I make it even better? What are some other things that could go with it that could help it work better? And it turns out both creatine— both magnesium and taurine help creatine work better. They're going to help you work out harder, recover better. So when I think of creatine, the biggest thing I think of creatine for overall is energy production, and that's what both taurine and magnesium help it do. So it's better at energy production. So think of them as amplifiers for creatine. So page 7, creatine for women. Now I've talked about this and why women need creatine differently than men, and it really is because men have creatine stores in their muscles, their gonads, their brain, right? Women don't have gonads, so we have our muscles and our brain. But men have more muscle mass than women do, so men tend to be somewhere in the 10 to 20% body fat. So that means the rest of their body is fat-free mass, of which muscle is predominantly the biggest part of fat-free mass. And then we have— for women, we'll be somewhere in the 20 to 35% body fat, the rest of being fat-free mass. So we have less muscle tissue stores, so we have less tissue stores of creatine. I think we have a higher need for it too because of the level of stress that we're under, hormone cycling that we're under. So I think we have a little bigger need for it, and we also tend to get less from our diet because we are not eating— unless you're a carnivore, you're not getting what you need from diet. Because in order for you to get that supplemental gram or more a day, you'd have to eat a pound of raw or rare meat or fish, or 2 pounds of cooked animal protein. And I don't see most women getting even half of that. Page 8: How Chiatine is Changing Lives. So I shared earlier that when I started promoting creatine monohydrate, the feedback was not so good. For the first time ever, I was like, wow, 'Just power through this.' No way. It's been the exact reverse with Chia Teen Creatine HCL plus taurine and magnesium. Like, I have gotten such amazing positive feedback, and it literally is because people feel it right from the start where they're like, 'Oh my gosh,' you know, no GI issues. I would say maybe 20% of people notice a little bit of intramuscular fluid. Most people don't, which is— I wish they did because that's a bonus. Just so you know, that's why we do that. We do body composition testing. But people notice their energy levels so much that they're hooked with it, and it has literally been my fastest growing product that I've ever introduced into the market. So that says a lot. My bonus daughter started using it in her 20s, noticed a big difference in her cycling performance. Another gal who is a swimmer, it was like, I can't believe how much faster I'm swimming now, I feel so much more powerful in this pool. And then one of my other girlfriends who goes to this weight training workout place twice a week, a Bulgarian weight training where they do this very specific hard workout. She took me to it, and the trainer after 2 weeks was like, what are you doing? Was, was like, knew something was up, and she hadn't said a word because she was able to work out so much harder and recover better. So those are the big things. And again, one of the other things that I'm now hearing about is just that ability to handle jet lag and sleep deprivation. One of my buddies who is a really, really well-known personal development speaker. I said to him, I said, you know, this works with jet lag. And he goes, I've been in sleep deprivation. He goes, I've been sleep deprived for 30 years. And I'm like, well, I'll get you some. So I gave him some, and he was like, oh my gosh, I cannot believe the difference. So totally hooked. And that's really it. I mean, you know, so many times you take a supplement, and let's say vitamin D3 with K2, you're not going to go, wow, I feel amazing. Like, you won't notice anything. What's so exciting about this is you will notice shifts in your body composition and in your mood and in your energy levels. So it is a really easy supplement to fall in love with and stay on. Ready to feel a difference? You can find chiatine in a couple different places. Number one, my online store, reignitewellness.com, and then also you can find it on Amazon. Page 10, the FAQs. So here's some frequently asked questions I get, and one of them is, is it safe for everyday use? Not only is it safe for everyday use, I bet you're not going to want to give it up. So you'll want to use it every day, although because you want to keep those tissue stores up of your creatine dosing. So use it every day and then modify your dose based on how you're feeling. Didn't sleep so well? Add an extra dose. Under extra stress? Add an extra dose. Easy peasy day? Just do the foundational dose. I want to make sure you get this guide, so check out the description below for my Ultimate Creatine. I've also built a Facebook group. It's the JJ Virgin Lifestyle Community where we hang out, connect with each other, and I've got a great coach and my clone in there to answer questions. So be sure to check that out and join me in there. Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can use to look and feel your best and be built to to last. Would you prefer an ad-free experience? Join my VIP podcast at subscribe2jj.com for just $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year to unlock uninterrupted ad-free access to all the episodes and insights you love. Also, I'd love to connect with you and hear your thoughts on the podcast. Here's how. First, subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest review. Second, take a screenshot of your review. And third, text it to 813-565-2627. That's 813-565-2627. When you do, I'll reply using my brand new Virtual JJ Virgin. It's my on-demand virtual self built from my books, talks, and years of experience so I can interact with you directly. You'll make my day, and I can't wait to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in, and I'll catch you on the next episode. Hey, JJ here, and just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid, or delay obtaining medical or health-related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.

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