Is Creatine Beneficial for Hypothalamic Amenorrhea Recovery?
Here at The HA Society, we don’t believe in supplementing your way out of hypothalamic amenorrhea, so don’t get it twisted. You absolutely must have the key fundamentals of recovery covered.
Now, sometimes it’s fun and even beneficial to add in a few helpful supplements for recovery. One that we don’t talk about too often though, is creatine.
In this article, I’ll discuss how creatine works, how it might theoretically help with hypothalamic amenorrhea recovery and then, who might benefit from it.
First, What Is Creatine
Creatine is heavily studied, especially compared to many other supplements on the market. These studies have shown increased strength gains, lean body mass, improved power performance/out and even helping with digestive issues.
Creatine is made of 3 amino acids: methionine, arginine, and glycine. These are found in red meat, fish, eggs and inside of our bodies. When it comes to off the shelf creatine supplementation, monohydrate is the most common form.(1)
It works by enhancing your body's ability to produce energy. Our bodies only produce a finite amount of this energy – called adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and does not store a significant amount of ATP in our energy stores, so we need a constant supply. That’s a lot of work to produce.
The more ATP your cells have in storage, the more energy your body has for, traditionally, your workout. However in our situation of hypothalamic amenorrhea recovery, we can utilize that even more so. I’ll get to this shortly.
In a gym setting, using creatine will improve your ability to do more work by enabling your body to regenerate ATP much faster. In practice, this allows weight lifting athletes to perform just an extra 1 or 2 reps. This pays off in the long run because the accumulated effect of performing those additional reps means more muscle growth and getting stronger.(2)
Creatine allows for increased muscle gains due to increased water content within the muscle cells, which is where the benefits for getting your missing period back or optimizing your cycle may come in. By pulling more water into the muscle cells, this effect helps to trigger protein synthesis, minimize protein breakdown, and increase glycogen synthesis3, allowing you to train or be active without as much impact on your energy stores. Getting your period back is all about decreasing energy output.
Benefits to Creatine
As mentioned above, there’s plenty of well known benefits to creatine when it comes to reaching strength and performance goals – but what about the other areas that it might be beneficial for?
Gut Heath
I have seen a number of women in recovery who have gut and digestive issues which makes it difficult to increase food intake or introduce certain food groups. There’s now some research to suggest, along with anecdotal evidence, that creatine can help with leaky gut related issues.
Creatine plays an important role in the digestive tract which is needed to maintain gut barrier function (i.e avoid leaky gut), support normal digestion, enzyme secretions and gut health (4 5 6 7)
When your gut health is in check, so is your brain health – which is where the root cause of hypothalamic amenorrhea is happening. This is why it all starts with food.
Creatine significantly enhances cognition and improves signs of mental fatigue, all chronic things we experience with HA.
Is It Helpful For Your Recovery
Using creatine will be most beneficial for hormonally restored women who are back to exercise and combining creatine use with good nutrition and a great training program. Creatine for training purposes is excellent.
Vegetarians may find creatine beneficial because our body doesn’t naturally create the required amount we need – we get it from animal proteins.
The reality is that HA recovery is no time to be doing intense training and truthfully, the impact that creatine will have on your recovery is probably splitting hairs, however, if you’re working towards HA recovery and you have an active job or lifestyle, you’re an athlete, you’re still incorporating exercise or movement into your recovery plan (with the help of a professional) or if you’re simply going through recovery but looking for the specific benefits that creative provides or want to be sure that you’re taking in enough to meet your daily needs, you could consider adding creatine into your diet.
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