Beyond muscle: Recent studies highlight creatine health benefits for women

Creatine is one of the most popular supplements in the sports genre today. It has been proven to help build muscle, improve strength, and even boost speed. 
Due to it's well-earned reputation for building muscle mass, it has long been thought of only as a "men's supplement." For this reason most of the research on creatine’s benefits has been conducted on men, with about 90% of the existing studies being exclusively male subjects.

This is unfortunate because it has caused many women to avoid creatine, even as a growing body of evidence suggests the nutrient's benefits may be even greater for women than men. 

Decades of research has already made it clear that creatine doesn't make women look like Arnold Schwarzenegger—instead it helps build lean muscle, reduces fatigue during exercise, and helps maintain bone health.

And more recent research has changed the dynamic for women even further. It is now recognized that creatine's benefits for women include cognitive support, sleep quality, memory and mood enhancement.
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Two studies in 2025 greatly solidified this thinking, and offered insights as to why the benefits are so striking for women. 

Study 1 - Energy for women 
A narrative review published in January 2025 explicitly broke down why women have a 20-30% lower dietary intake of creatine than men and how that affects energy metabolism during different phases of the menstrual cycle.

The review was published in Nutrients and was appropriately titled Creatine Supplementation Beyond Athletics.

The 21-page review cited more than 100 sources to draw the conclusion that it was time for people to stop thinking of creatine as a "gym supplement" and to start looking at it more as a "metabolic primer" for the female body.

The researchers first point to a biological "starting line" difference: Women generally have about 70–80% lower dietary intake of creatine compared to men, primarily due to lower consumption of meat. Because of this, the study argues that women are actually "primed" to respond better to creatine supplementation than men because their baseline is lower to begin with.

Next, the researchers document how the menstrual cycle affects energy: During the second half of the cycle, when progesterone is high, the body’s energy expenditure actually increases (metabolism speeds up).

This increased energy demand, in turn, increases the depletion of the body's natural creatine stores. The researchers noted that supplementation during this phase helps bridge that gap, reducing the specific fatigue and "brain fog" many women report during their cycle.

Finally, the researchers documented that creatine is highly effective at maintaining cognitive function during periods of poor sleep—a common issue for women during perimenopause or postpartum. The researchers further noted that creatine supports the brain's energy metabolism in ways that may help stabilize mood.

Study 2 - support for women mid-life
A study published in Journal of the American Nutrition Association in August 2025, is another example of "benefits beyond muscles." The study documented how creatine supports the brain and lipid profiles of women navigating the hormonal shifts of mid-life.
To draw their conclusions researchers conducted a randomized controlled trial on 36 perimenopausal and menopausal women. The researchers then documented brain creatine levels and measured cognitive reaction times.

They found that even "medium-dose" creatine supplementation significantly improved reaction times of test subjects. It also increased frontal brain creatine levels compared to the placebo.

"Our findings suggest that (creatine) supplementation protocol may be a promising, safe, effective, and practical dietary strategy for improving clinical outcomes and elevating brain creatine concentrations in perimenopausal and menopausal women," the researchers wrote in the study summary.

Find creatine in the following Optimal Health Systems products:
• Optimal Creatine
• Optimal Muscle Rx
• Optimal BFF
• NOS Performance Paks
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Sources for this article include: Nutrients, Journal of American Nutrition Association.