Okay, so I have a couple of questions regarding creatine and it's use..

First of all, is all that 'loading' everyone seems to be talking about really bull****?
Some of the guys I know take 4 servings a day for a week to LOAD up, and then continue another week with 1 serving per day. And than that's it, they quit taking it for a couple of months. Then they repeat the whole process.. Is that really enough and proper? Or the whole Loading thing is BS, and you should constantly take around 4-5g per day without taking any breaks?
Please clarify that for me...

Also, how much really can creatine help you out? It improves your recovery, or it alows you to actually workout a bit longer..? I know it's a pretty subjective thing, and that some people claim to have no benefits from creatine alone, but in general percentage, how much can creatine help you out with your performance/recovery efficiency? 5%? 10%? 20%?

In advance, tnx for your answers, and I must say that I'm looking forward to reading responses from Silent, malkore, mreik and the gang in particular

Cheers!

Question 1: no, that's not enough. your friends are loading up to saturation, maintaining it, then pissing it away. stupid approach to using creatine.

Loading just gets you saturated more quickly, vs. taking a single serving, every day. If you don't load, you'll reach saturation in approx. 3 weeks (per research). Loading isn't bad, its just not really necessary.

What creatine does, is allows your muscles to keep contracting over and over, for a longer duration. muscle creatine and calcium are the two primary chemicals responsible for contracting a muscle. if either dips too low, your workout suffers.

so really creatine is best defined as an endurance supplement. it helps recovery between reps, and sets...but not really between workouts (which is more about repair of damaged muscles)
but if you have the endurance to get in the 'best' workout you can, and your diet is good, that will result in better gains...both size and strength (again diet is really important here).

because of the water retention caused by creatine, your muscles sometimes look fuller...so people will mistake this as an actual mass gain, adn think that creatine has a direct effect on strength.

Ok first of all creatine is useless for endurance activities, it has only been proved to be beneficial for quick explosive actions.

If you dont understand this relationship its good to understand the quick accessible yet limited supply of ATP by Pc.

adp + pc = creatine + atp

The muscle has a very small amount of ATP for immediete access, PC is a high energy molecule that is able to replenish Adp with a phospahte group to produce ATP.

After about 10seconds all the PC has been converted to creatine resulting in ATP, therefore more pc (by consuming creatine phospahte in your diet) will prolong this quick access of energy for a second of so, which can be the difference between gold and failure in certain sports.

After this is used up, it transfers to energy from glycogen either with or without oxygen, if its without oxygen, working at a pace faster than the body can rid of lactate you fill fatigue, unlike oxygen where you will primaraly be fatigued by depleted energy stores.

I have a quick question about taking Creatine, is it alright to just take a scoop full and put it in your mouth and wash it down with water instead of mixing it?
Thanks

Why would you want to do that? lol

Nothing wrong with this method if you can tolerate it.

however the only creatine that I've seen with a scoop in it isn't pure creatine...so make sure you're using the right stuff.

I meant to say Tea Spoon, I didn't mean a scoop like what comes with Whey Protein, my bad.