This review looked at creatine supplementation in endurance and mixed-sport settings, covering effects on aerobic performance, repeated sprint ability, recovery, body composition, glycogen storage, and muscle damage markers. Creatine consistently improved high-intensity repeat efforts, lean mass retention, and recovery between intense efforts, but improvements in pure endurance performance remained inconsistent. Sports involving repeated surges of power output, accelerations, sprinting, or mixed metabolic demands tended to benefit more than steady-state endurance exercise.

My thoughts: Creatine is all the rage right now, and it's great (but no surprise) to see a supplement's popularity actually aligning with the science, which is a rarity. But, marketing hype is already creeping into the narrative, like the trend toward 20g "brain optimization" doses even though you don’t need to megadose. The same goes for endurance claims. Let's be real: creatine is above all else an energy source. Muscles use it for high power output movements like weightlifting, sprinting, and jumping. It's a lot harder to link it to long-duration, low power output movements found in endurance events, and this review is testament to that. If you’re an endurance athlete adding intervals, sprints, and strength work into your routine, then creatine will help you.

Your Mouth Chemistry Could Be Reducing the Effectiveness of Beet Juice Supplements

This study looked at whether changing salivary pH could improve how effectively the body converts dietary nitrate from beetroot juice into nitric oxide. Fourteen healthy participants consumed beetroot juice on two occasions while chewing either acidic sugar-containing gum or non-acidic sugar-free gum, with researchers measuring salivary nitrite production, blood nitrite levels, and blood pressure changes. Lowering salivary pH significantly increased nitrite production in the mouth by 45%, increased plasma nitrite by 25%, and improved the blood pressure lowering effects of dietary nitrate.

My thoughts: This backs up some of the hidden factors we recently covered that affect how well your supplementation works. A lot of athletes still think supplements work in isolation, but dietary nitrates are a perfect example of how the body’s surrounding systems matter. Your oral bacteria are essential for converting nitrate into nitrite, which eventually drives nitric oxide production. This study adds another reminder that supplement effectiveness often depends just as much on how you take it as what you take.

Athletes Adapt to a Low-Carb Diets Easier Than Once Thought

This systematic review examined whether low-carbohydrate and ketogenic diets impair anaerobic performance in competitive athletes, analysing studies on peak power output, repeated sprint performance, strength, and other short-duration high-intensity markers after athletes adapted to carbohydrate restriction. Despite the assumption that reduced carbohydrate availability should hurt anaerobic exercise, the overall findings showed little evidence of meaningful performance decline. Some individual studies reported small reductions, but most athletes maintained performance despite significantly lower carbohydrate intake.

My thoughts: This one surprised me. Physiologically, it makes perfect sense to assume that reducing carbohydrate availability should hurt high-intensity performance because anaerobic exercise relies heavily on fast carbohydrate metabolism. I expected fairly obvious declines in performance. Instead, the data suggests the body adapts remarkably well. My interpretation is that this is less about low-carb diets somehow being optimal, and more a reminder of how incredibly adaptable human physiology is. That said, I still struggle to see a compelling reason for athletes training repeatedly at high intensity to deliberately restrict carbohydrate intake when carbs remain the most efficient fuel source for that type of work.