Creatine Loading for Vegans: Stores Rise, Sprint Doesn’t

Plant-based athletes have a persuasive reason to consider creatine: they usually start with less of it in muscle. Meat and fish supply dietary creatine; vegan diets supply essentially none, while lower methionine availability can constrain the body's own production. That leaves more room for supplementation to raise muscle stores. The first double-blind trial designed for vegans and vegetarians confirms that those stores rise after a standard one-week loading phase. It did not, however, improve a single 15-second all-out cycling sprint.

That distinction matters. A fuller creatine pool is a biochemical result. Faster performance is a separate outcome that depends on the exercise test, training, timing, and plain old statistical noise. Creatine has a long record in high-intensity and resistance-training contexts, but this small trial does not show that seven days of loading turns plant-based athletes into instant sprinters.

Why a plant-based diet changes the starting point

About 95% of the body's creatine sits in skeletal muscle. At rest, it exists largely as free creatine and phosphocreatine (PCr), a rapid phosphate reserve that helps regenerate ATP during maximal efforts. A 2025 narrative review of creatine in vegans and other groups describes a typical resting pool as roughly 40% free creatine and 60% PCr.

Vegans and vegetarians generally have lower resting muscle creatine than omnivores because they consume little or no dietary creatine. Lower baseline stores make a larger fractional response plausible: adding creatine to a partly depleted pool should produce more room to fill than adding it to a pool already supported by regular meat or fish intake. But plausible is not the same as directly proven. No controlled study in this evidence base randomized both plant-based and omnivorous participants under the same protocol, so it cannot quantify the difference between their responses.

For context, a 2023 systematic review of creatine and endurance performance reports that supplementation raises resting total muscle creatine by about 20% in omnivorous populations. The available vegan-specific trial shows uptake, but it does not supply a clean head-to-head comparison with omnivores.

The seven-day trial: muscle creatine rose

The most relevant evidence comes from a 2025 double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial by Bonne et al. The researchers enrolled 15 young adult vegans and vegetarians and assigned seven to creatine monohydrate and eight to placebo. The creatine group included five women and two men. Participants took 0.3 grams per kilogram of body weight per day for seven days, the conventional loading dose.

The biochemical result went in the expected direction: muscle biopsies showed significant increases in total creatine and free creatine in the creatine group. Body weight increased by about 1.6 kg (p<0.01), and fat-free mass increased by about 1.2 kg (p<0.05). Over a week, that apparent lean-mass jump chiefly fits creatine-associated water retention inside muscle, not the sudden construction of 1.2 kg of new contractile tissue. Water weight is part of the loading response, not a reason to fire your scale.

Creatine loading refilled part of the muscle creatine pool in this plant-based sample. The study did not show that refilling translated into a faster 15-second sprint within seven days.

One detail complicates the tidy story. PCr itself did not rise significantly, despite the significant increases in total and free creatine. Since PCr is the form most immediately relevant to rapid ATP regeneration, the result offers a possible explanation for the performance finding. It also may reflect the study's limited precision: only seven participants received creatine, and muscle biopsy results vary from person to person.

A full muscle store did not produce a faster sprint

After loading, the creatine group showed no statistically significant improvement versus placebo in the 15-second all-out cycling sprint. This was not a hidden win obscured by wording; it was a null result for that endpoint, at that duration, after that follow-up.

The result does not overturn the broader creatine literature. The trial's own discussion notes mixed results from prior loading studies of single maximal sprints in omnivores. Creatine benefits often appear more reliably in repeated high-intensity efforts and alongside resistance training than in one short, solitary sprint. A 15-second effort relies heavily on PCr, but it also draws on glycolytic energy. More muscle creatine does not guarantee that any one sprint test can detect a meaningful performance change.

A 2026 narrative review by Kerksick et al. summarizes more than three decades of work linking creatine to high-intensity exercise performance, training adaptations, lean mass, strength, and power. That breadth supports creatine as a well-studied sports supplement, but narrative reviews do not provide a pooled vegan-specific effect estimate. The small Bonne trial deserves more weight for its direct population and randomized design, while its size limits what its null sprint result can settle.

Why the null result remains unresolved

Several features of the trial prevent a sweeping conclusion. First, the creatine arm had only seven people. A non-significant result in a group that small can mean no effect, but it can also mean the study could not separate a modest effect from normal variation. The publication does not let readers resolve that uncertainty with a reported confidence interval for the sprint finding.

Second, the researchers combined vegans and vegetarians without a subgroup analysis. Vegetarians who eat dairy or eggs may begin with different creatine-related nutrition than strict vegans. The creatine group also mixed five women and two men. A 2021 meta-analysis in older women doing resistance training found that creatine combined with training improved upper-body strength, but not lower-body strength or all muscle-mass measures. It also does not answer the young vegan sprint question. It does, however, illustrate why sex, age, training, and endpoint can change the observed result.

Third, the biopsies occurred 24 to 48 hours after exercise rather than under a standardized resting and fasted condition. Recent exercise can affect PCr turnover, so the null PCr measurement may not capture a fully settled resting value. Finally, the trial tested loading only. It did not test whether several weeks of maintenance supplementation, resistance training, or repeated-sprint work would produce a functional benefit.

What plant-based athletes can reasonably do

The evidence supports a restrained conclusion. Creatine monohydrate at 0.3 g/kg/day for seven days increased total and free muscle creatine in young vegans and vegetarians. Expect some early water-weight gain if you load. Do not expect this one study to guarantee a faster 15-second sprint after a week.

For people who want to use the standard sports-nutrition approach, the reviewed loading protocol is 0.3 g/kg/day for five to seven days, followed by 3 to 5 g/day as maintenance. Judge it over weeks, ideally in the activity you actually train for. Repeated sprint sessions and resistance training are more informative choices than one all-out 15-second test, because that is where the broader evidence base has found more consistent benefits.

The biological case for creatine in plant-based diets is strong: lower starting stores, confirmed uptake, and a familiar loading protocol. The performance claim needs a larger, longer vegan-specific trial with an omnivore comparison before it can match the confidence of the chemistry.