Creatine, Beta-Alanine & Your Athletes: New Research for Sports PTs
Oct 21, 2025
TLDR:
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A review of 7 randomized control trials found that creatine supplementation (5-10g/day, with some loading) increases muscular strength and power.
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Beta-alanine supplementation (3.2-4.6g/day) was shown to improve endurance and performance in short, high-intensity exercise.
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While both supplements offer benefits, the review found no significant interactive boost when creatine and beta-alanine were used together, and both have safe profiles for recommendation by physical therapists.
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Transcript:
Hey y'all, Dr. Wells here from St. Augustine Beach. Hope you're having a great one. It's a hot, sticky one here again today. And today we're going to do a nice little literature review. This one's for our sports and performance PTs and those that are working with athletes. And it's focused on creatine and beta alanine. So this one is published by Larkey et al.
[00:21-00:54]
And the publication is in Review Nutrients in June of 20 25. And the focus of this article is looking at a systematic review of 7 randomized control trials looking at creatine supplementation and beta-alanine. Overall, about 263 subjects, most of them male. And the focus was on supplementing with beta-alanine at 3.2 to 4.6 grams per day, or creatine at 5 to ten grams per day, with some of those athletes doing a one week loading period of 20 grams per day.
[00:54-01:48]
What do they find? Well, like we've seen before, many of our studies and our board approved continuing ed courses for physical therapists, creatine increases strength. No surprise there. We know that supplementing with creatine helps to boost muscular strength and power. well beta alanine they found also improved endurance they improved short high intensity exercise and when they looked at the interactions between the 2 they didn't have an impact on either of them so effectively if you supplement with creatine and beta alanine you didn't see a significant boost you know from both of them if you do beta alanine but you forget your creatine no significant difference there either you still see a boost so overall uh it looks like there might be a trend if you want to improve your strength focus on the creatine If you want to improve more like under 4 minutes short bursts of sprints, you might want to focus on beta alanine.
[01:48-02:03]
However, we've seen other studies like that too with power output being increased with creatine as well. So I don't know if there really is that much difference. In the end, I think PTs can safely recommend creatine. It has a very safe profile overall.
[02:03-02:19]
being alanine does as well there are some some interactions but very minimal on the safety profile that supplement is pretty solid as well so anyhow if you like this content check out more at nutritionalphysicaltherapy.com and sign up today and save some serious dollars have a good one.
