Why an exercise scientist says creatine is for your brain first, and your biceps a distant second.

Creatine recycles ATP, the energy your cells burn every second. Muscle spends it to contract. Your brain spends it to think, and it spends a lot. When stores are low, both run a little short, and the first place you notice is not the squat rack. It is the slow, foggy thinking on a tired day.

Your body makes about a gram of creatine a day and picks up a little more from red meat and fish. That leaves most people short of full stores, and nearly all women shorter still. Topping up is not adding something foreign. It is filling a tank that was never full in the first place.

The commonly researched dose is 3 to 5 grams of creatine monohydrate a day. Take it daily and stores saturate in about four weeks - no loading phase required. It works exactly the same whether your hardest effort is a deadlift, a hill sprint or a day on your feet with the kids.

Creatine does not drift into muscle on its own. It is carried across the cell membrane by a transporter that runs on sodium and chloride. Take it in plain water and you are asking it to get in without a key. Take it with the electrolytes it rides on and you are working with your body instead of against it.

Flip the pack. Many ready-to-drink creatine products carry 1 to 2 grams, buried under 20 to 30 grams of sugar and a paragraph of things you cannot pronounce. Hyro Perform is a full 5g of creatine monohydrate plus 500mg sodium, 250mg potassium and 100mg magnesium, no added sugar, nothing artificial. The doses are printed on the stick. Hold it next to your tub.

It is not a stimulant. You will not feel it on day one, and some people hold half a kilo of extra water in their muscles in the first fortnight, which is the tank filling, not fat. What it does is steadier and lasts: by week four stores are full, and most people notice more even energy and a clearer head on the days they slept badly. One Perform stick in your first bottle of water, every day. If it does nothing for you, the 30-day guarantee means you do not pay. Skip, pause, swap or cancel any time.