About CreatineIQ
When I began using creatine, the stomach discomfort from rigid, one-size-fits-all loading regimens made it hard to stay consistent. Online calculators didn't allow customizing daily dose limits or loading duration to fit personal tolerance—so CreatineIQ was created to solve that problem.
Conventional dosing advice rarely accounts for personal variables such as lean body mass, dietary creatine intake, training, or how much you can comfortably take in a day. CreatineIQ is a calculator built on the published research that takes those into account, and is open about where that research is thin.
Our Calculation Frameworks
1. Musculoskeletal Performance
- Standard: Straightforward calculations based on overall body weight for standard loading and maintenance schedules.
- Tailored: Uses Lean Body Mass (or computes it from Body Fat %) and a daily dose limit you choose, to reduce GI discomfort, then calculates how many loading days that limit needs.
- Optimal: Adds diet (which shifts your starting creatine stores), training intensity (which raises muscle uptake) and optional sex (which shifts how much of your lean mass is muscle) to the Tailored model.
2. Brain Health & Cognitive Protocols
The brain also relies on creatine for energy. Each brain-health protocol uses the dose from its source studies and states how strong that evidence is:
- Cognition & Memory: Doses from trials that found small improvements in short-term memory, with mixed results on reasoning.
- Sleep Deprivation: The two single doses studied for reducing the drop in cognitive performance during a night without sleep.
- Other protocols: Healthy aging and sarcopenia (strongest alongside resistance training), menopause (limited and largely extrapolated evidence), and — for research reference only — the doses used in an early Alzheimer's pilot and in a trial adding creatine to antidepressant treatment. These last two are not treatments, and the calculator says so.
Science, Transparency & Privacy
We believe in full transparency. All calculation formulas are grounded in peer-reviewed clinical and sports nutrition research. You can explore the studies and mathematical models behind our algorithms on our Scientific Citations page.
How we choose and score the studies we cover — including the full weighted rubric — is documented on our Research Methodology page. Who writes CreatineIQ, where AI is used in producing it, and how to request a correction are covered in our Editorial Policy.
Your privacy is guaranteed by design. All calculations run 100% locally in your browser—your body composition and health parameters are never sent to or stored on external servers.
Have questions or feedback? We'd love to hear from you via our Contact Form.
Thank you for using CreatineIQ!