With Badly Sprained Ankle? Creatine OK? Heal Time?

[Kigorri]

Hi all,

I sprained my ankle really badly on Thursday arvo. It's sore, swollen and ultra purple... bruised as..

I've never had this happen before and am wondering if it's ok to still load up on creatine? It may be an obvious question to many of you but, I have no idea.

Also, how long do these things take to heal on average? I need to get busy... this is killing me.

I may have to go to the doctor on Monday.

On a side note, I had just dropped a pre workout 10min prior to this happening. It was not a nice experience

Thanks all.

[genetic freek]

Yes.

Recovery will depend on what you do now. Ice, strapping, physio etc

[vracula]

Your ankle is gonna be really weak after it heals as well and there is a high chance of resprain. Just rest, rehab and don not forget to wear some aort of ankle support or a little time after.

[Kigorri]

Thanks for your feedback guys. Much appreciated.

I had a friend look at it and its quite a severe sprain so it looks like it will be a little while. There was a sound/feeling that I can only describe as someone cracking their knuckles in my foot :cry:

gutted.

[Daz69]

Hi all,

I sprained my ankle really badly on Thursday arvo. It's sore, swollen and ultra purple... bruised as..

I've never had this happen before and am wondering if it's ok to still load up on creatine? It may be an obvious question to many of you but, I have no idea.

Also, how long do these things take to heal on average? I need to get busy... this is killing me.

I may have to go to the doctor on Monday.

On a side note, I had just dropped a pre workout 10min prior to this happening. It was not a nice experience

Thanks all.

You don't need to load up on creatine its all bullshit.... Take 5g Pre & Post workout with glucose.....

The elimination half-life of creatine is 3 hours so loading up is an expensive waste of time......

[Kigorri]

Cheers man.

My choice of words were off considering the subject matter. Not a traditional 'creatine load', just taking 5g daily as I have been advised that this is all that's needed. In fact from various sources, I gathered that I could take 5g any time of the day and this would maintain muscle saturation, but now you're saying that it has an elimination half life of 3hrs? That screws my game up a fair bit.

confooosed :doh:

[jimmybro1]

Creatine has a half life of 3 hours I didn't know this!

Yeah loading is more or less a waste of time only really due to speed up saturation of the muscles. Monohydrate is dirt cheap ($30/kg) so you won't be wasting much money at all by loading for 5 or so days IMO. Unless your a label brasher then it will cost you!

[Daz69]

Creatine has a half life of 3 hours I didn't know this!

Yeah loading is more or less a waste of time only really due to speed up saturation of the muscles. Monohydrate is dirt cheap ($30/kg) so you won't be wasting much money at all by loading for 5 or so days IMO. Unless your a label brasher then it will cost you!

Its my understanding you can't load/saturate with a elimination half-life of 3 hours.....

[Kigorri]

From what I can tell so far, 5g - 10g a daily maintenance is all good. Works just as you would expect. It does indeed have a an elimination half life of somewhere in the region of 2-3hrs but this is relates to higher plasma levels, not depletion of the supplement itself. I'm only in the early stages of researching this but from what I can tell, 5g is still going to take approx 3weeks to reach saturation and daily maintenance of 5g is still required.

[Flex]

I had a friend look at it and its quite a severe sprain so it looks like it will be a little while. There was a sound/feeling that I can only describe as someone cracking their knuckles in my foot

You haven't sprained your ankle, you've most likely torn the ligaments, - stop being dumb. Go see a physio and claim ACC otherwise you'll get 10 years down the track and your ankle will be fecked and you won't be able to get shit out of ACC for it as it will be an old injury.

You don't need to load up on creatine its all bullshit.... Take 5g Pre & Post workout with glucose.....

The elimination half-life of creatine is 3 hours so loading up is an expensive waste of time......

Mmmm sounds like you're reading wikipedia, which by most accounts is normally wrong. Half life doesn't really mean much with creatine as it is referring to blood creatine levels post ingestion, not muscle creatine phosphate levels which have got a washout time of anything up to 4 weeks from full saturation. The idea of using creatine pre or during training is flawed, your muscles don't use creatine monohydrate as a fuel source, it uses creatine phoshate to convert ADP back to ATP, so ideally you want creatine phosphate stored in the muscle. As you say you don't need to load however it will take about 3 or 4 weeks to reach the same point as a 5 day load so why waste 4 weeks of your time not getting the full benefit of creatine. And it has to be used everyday, not just 3 or 4 days a week.

As far as creatine pretraining, maybe you could use it two hours or so before - it takes about 1 hour to increase plasma levels however probably also takes an hour or so to transit through your gut, depending on fluid levels, so if you use it 15 mins pretraining you'll probably have finished working out before it gets to do anything. Research suggests the body actually absorbs creatine mono most effectively post training

"Interestingly however, exercise may provide a comparable benefit for increasing muscle TCr to using a creatine-carbohydrate supplementation strategy. Green (1996b) reported that creatine retention in the muscle was similar when exercise, prior to ingestion, was introduced, compared to creatine ingestion with simple carbohydrates."

"

On ingestion of 5g of monohydrate the plasma level of creatine has been shown to rise between five- and ten-fold after approximately 1 hour (Balsom 1994). This increase in plasma creatine content in turn increases the blood/muscle concentration gradient. Resultantly, more blood borne creatine is transported and trapped in the muscle cell. With a half-life of 1-1.5 hours, blood creatine levels remains elevated for a short time period (Havenetidis 2003). Repeating this dosage 4-5 times per day at ~4 hour intervals, therefore, keeps plasma creatine concentration constantly elevated and aids the movement of creatine from the blood into the muscle cell at a constant rate throughout the day.

While the greatest Cr uptake appears to occur within the first two to three days of supplementation with such a “loading” feeding protocol (Hultman 1996, Rossiter 1996, Flanagan 2004), administration periods shorter than 5 days have not been shown to effectively increase the muscle creatine pool. In a study by Odland (1996), subjects ingested 20g/day in 5g doses for just 3 days. Needle biopsies from the vastus lateralis revealed such a feeding strategy had no significant effect on the elevation of muscle PCr concentration.

Creatine supplementation, individualised to subjects’ body mass, has been shown to significantly increase the muscular TCr pool. Rossiter (1996) and Flanagan (2004) administered creatine dosages of 0.25g.kg bodymass-1 each day divided into four doses for five days. To elaborate, 2.2 kilograms= 1 pound. Therefore, a 200 pound man (90 kg) would be administrated approximately 22 grams of creatine per day in these experiments. In both studies, creatine uptake was calculated as the difference between the amount of creatine fed and the amount recovered in urine during each 24 hour period of supplementation. This protocol, in both studies, effectively raised muscle TCr.

This individualised feeding mechanism is largely similar to the 100g acute creatine loadings already detailed (Greenhaff 1994, Hultman 1996, Izquierdo 2002). For a standard 75kg (165 lb) male, the feeding pattern equals 18.75g in 4 doses for 5 days. However, the standardization to body mass allows for an increased supplementation for larger individuals or a reduced amount of supplementation for particularly small individuals and may be a logical improvement on the “one size fits all” administrations evidenced by Greenhaff (1994) and Izquierdo (2002), among others. At the very least, this would be a useful supplementation protocol to follow for particularly large or particularly small individuals.

Hultman (1996), demonstrated that continuous low dose creatine supplementation (3g/day, in one serving over 28 days) can, in the long term be as effective at increasing muscle TCr as the 100g acute creatine loading method.

Burke (2000) in a double blind study utilising a large subject base (n=41) detailed the ergogenic effects following a continuous low dose supplementation protocol of 7.7g/day for 21 days. Subjects performed more total work until fatigue, experienced significantly greater improvements in peak force and peak power and maintained elevated mean peak power for a longer period of time when exposed to low dose creatine supplementation in tandem with training as opposed to training alone.

Hultman (1996) rightly comments however that while the low-dose method will, over time, elevate TCr comparably to the acute method, the 100g acute method is a more rapid mechanism to increase the muscle TCr store than continuous low dose supplementation protocols and should be favoured.

It is important to note that there is considerable variability in the increase of muscle creatine content following supplementation. Some individuals are “non-responders” and experience little or no increase in muscle creatine content following usually effective loading protocols. Greenhaff (1994) found a dosage sufficient to elevate muscle TCr concentration in 5 of 8 subjects by ~25% had little effect on muscle TCr concentration in 3 non-responding subjects (see subjects 5, 6 and 8 in figure 1 below). Others individuals can be “high-responders” and creatine monohydrate supplementation can illicit a >30% increase in muscle TCr content (Rawson 2003). It is not entirely clear why there is such large inter-subject variability in muscle creatine content changes following supplementation. The strongest determinant of how much creatine is taken up into muscle appears to be the initial creatine content in that muscle (Greenhaff 1994, Rawson 2003). Published evidence demonstrates subjects with lower resting muscle creatine contents have the largest magnitude of increase following supplementation, while subjects with higher creatine contents will experience little or no increase (Greenhaff 1994, Rawson 2003, Casey 2000). Greenhaff (1995) comments that individuals with below average basal TCr contents (120 mmol.kg dry weight-1) can expect creatine supplementation to induce a >25% increase in the muscle creatine pool.

[Kigorri]

Awesome, thanks Flex!

yeah, need to go to the doctor, one week later and still swollen, heavily bruised and painful.. haha man, so much for 'harden up'

[Daz69]

Very interesting.. Thanks for that Flex......