Creatine and joint swelling from injury

sammoss88

Hey everyone,

I recently dislocated my knee (about 3 weeks ago) and it's still a little swollen from the injury. I was thinking about starting a muscle gain plan pretty soon, including daily creatine supplements. One of the side effects of creatine is water retention and bloating, so I was wondering if the use of creatine could exacerbate the swelling in my knee... I've been looking around for information about this, but unfortunately haven't had any luck :frown:

My thinking is that it probably would be a good idea to either hold off on the creatine or take only small doses until I recover most of the way.

I don't know if this is the right place to ask, but maybe someone will point me toward the right direction!

Thanks,
Sam

Egger29

I've used Creatine on and off in my strength training and I haven't seen any side effect that you speak of.

You only need 5mg/day which is relatively minor. Any more than that and you'll just excrete it in your urine.

As far as benefits, it's linked to being able to do slightly more work when maximal training. In other words...you'll theoretically have the energy stores to do one or two more reps in your workouts...thus recieving more gains.

It's not a magic potion...you need to do the work to get the gains.

Check the PubMed Database and you'll find some research studies done on it...but in my experience, I've never seen any water retention or bloating correlated to this supplement.

DanNoonan

I've used Kre-Alkalyn (PH buffered creatine) and I haven't had any troubles with bloating or water retention (muscles do seem a tiny bit bigger). From what I've read, Kre-Alk seems to have less reports of these problems, may wanna look into it.