Meeting Daily Creatine Turnover Without Loading Protocols

Maintenance vs. Loading: Two Different Conversations

Most of what you've read about creatine dosing—the 20g loading phases, the 5g daily maintenance protocols—comes from the athletic performance literature. That research is studying a specific outcome: saturating muscle creatine stores to improve work capacity during repeated high-intensity efforts. It's a valid conversation, but it's not the conversation we're having here.

The daily-adequacy conversation is quieter and far less studied. We're not chasing performance gains. We're asking: what does the body need, on a rolling basis, to replace the creatine it degrades every day just by existing? Brosnan & Brosnan's foundational work on endogenous creatine turnover suggested ~2g/day for a 70kg adult. Ostojić's 2026 update to maintenance recommendations brought forward new data refining that baseline, particularly for individuals who don't eat animal products. Our 525mg dose is calibrated to this maintenance zone—meeting a daily baseline, not loading tissue stores.

You won't feel maintained creatine levels the way you might notice a performance protocol. That's the point. Adequacy isn't a felt intervention; it's the absence of a slow depletion you didn't know was happening. The loading studies are useful, but they're answering a different question than the one we're solving with Tortis Ritual.