Author: Nick Pelios
Creatine is probably one of the least exotic supplements in sport. It has been studied for decades, it is used across an enormous range of disciplines, and there is substantial evidence that creatine monohydrate can improve strength and performance during certain forms of repeated high-intensity exercise. More recently, researchers have also become interested in something that is particularly relevant to freedivers: creatine's role in the brain and what happens to cerebral energy metabolism when oxygen availability falls.
Put those two things together and an obvious question appears. Could creatine be useful for freediving?
It is a tempting question because, at first glance, the biology seems to fit. Freediving creates an unusual energetic situation. Oxygen availability progressively decreases during apnea, yet the brain and working muscles still require ATP to function. Creatine and phosphocreatine are directly involved in the rapid regeneration of ATP. If supplementation increases available creatine stores, it seems reasonable to wonder whether that could somehow help during a breath-hold.
There is just one problem. The direct research is not there yet.
As of 2026, there is no convincing published human trial showing that creatine supplementation allows freedivers to hold their breath longer, dive deeper, swim farther underwater or reduce their risk of hypoxic loss of consciousness. That does not make the subject uninteresting. Quite the opposite. There are several pieces of research that make the relationship between creatine, hypoxia and freediving worth examining. We simply have to be careful about where the evidence ends and speculation begins.
Creatine, Phosphocreatine And The Energy Problem
To understand why creatine is even relevant to this discussion, we need to begin with ATP.
ATP, or adenosine triphosphate, is essentially the immediately usable energy currency of cells. Muscles require it to contract. Neurons require energy to maintain electrical activity and cellular function. The problem is that the body stores relatively little ATP in a directly available form, so it must continually regenerate it.
One of the fastest ways of doing this is through the phosphocreatine system. Phosphocreatine can donate a phosphate group that helps regenerate ATP from ADP. This creates an extremely rapid energy-buffering system, particularly important when energy demand changes quickly.
This is one reason creatine supplementation has become so established in strength and power sports. Increasing muscular creatine stores can improve the ability to repeatedly produce high levels of muscular work, particularly during short, intense efforts. A large body of sports science supports this general effect, although the magnitude of the benefit depends heavily on the exercise being performed.
Freediving, however, is clearly not a conventional sprint or strength activity. A deep dive may last several minutes. Dynamic disciplines combine prolonged apnea with relatively low-intensity repetitive muscular work. Static apnea involves almost no external muscular work at all. At depth, changing pressure and buoyancy introduce additional demands that have no equivalent in most laboratory exercise tests.
This matters because a supplement being useful in one type of exercise tells us very little about another.
A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis examined creatine supplementation and endurance performance in trained populations. Thirteen studies met the inclusion criteria, and the pooled analysis found no significant improvement in endurance performance from creatine supplementation. That should immediately make us cautious about presenting creatine as some general-purpose method of extending physical performance.
Swimming research tells a similarly complicated story. Individual studies have occasionally reported improvements during repeated sprint swimming after creatine supplementation. One study involving elite male swimmers, for example, found an improvement across repeated 50-yard sprints after five days of supplementation, while single-sprint performance did not improve. Other trials have failed to find a meaningful improvement in swimming performance.
More importantly, a 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis pooled 17 studies involving 361 swimmers. It found no significant overall benefit of creatine for single-sprint swimming, repeated interval swimming, physiological responses or body composition compared with placebo.
So even before we introduce apnea, the answer is already more complicated than "creatine gives muscles more energy, therefore it should improve underwater swimming."
Freediving is not normal swimming. And it certainly is not repeated sprinting.
The Brain Changes The Question
The more interesting connection between creatine and freediving may actually have less to do with the fins and more to do with the brain.
During prolonged apnea, arterial oxygen saturation can fall dramatically. The human brain is extremely dependent on continuous energy availability and oxygen delivery, so the body responds aggressively as hypoxia develops. The diving response, peripheral vasoconstriction and changes in cerebral circulation all contribute to the extraordinary physiology seen during breath-holding.
A particularly interesting study examined 15 freedivers and 17 non-diving controls during extended breath-holds lasting between 2 minutes 32 seconds and 7 minutes. Researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to examine cerebral blood flow and oxygen metabolism, while magnetic resonance spectroscopy was used to measure several cerebral metabolites, including phosphocreatine plus creatine. During breath-holding, the freedivers increased global cerebral blood flow by approximately 107 percent, helping compensate for falling arterial oxygen saturation and sustain cerebral oxygen delivery.
That study is fascinating for freediving physiology, but there is an important distinction that should not be missed: the researchers were not supplementing the freedivers with creatine.
They were observing cerebral physiology during apnea.
This means the study cannot tell us whether taking creatine makes a freediver better at breath-holding. It does, however, show why cerebral energy metabolism deserves attention when discussing extreme apnea. During a long breath-hold, the body is not simply waiting for oxygen to run out. It is actively redistributing blood flow and attempting to preserve the function of organs that are particularly sensitive to hypoxia.
This is where another study becomes especially interesting.
Researchers in New Zealand gave 15 healthy adults creatine or placebo for seven days and then exposed them to a severe hypoxic environment containing 10 percent oxygen for 90 minutes. Creatine supplementation increased brain creatine by an average of 9.2 percent. During the hypoxic exposure, attention declined under the placebo condition, while creatine supplementation prevented some of that deterioration. The researchers also observed increased corticomotor excitability and proposed that greater cerebral energy availability could be contributing to the effect.
For a freediver reading that paper, the temptation is obvious.
Hypoxia impairs the brain. Creatine increased brain creatine. Cognitive performance during hypoxia was better after supplementation. Therefore, creatine might protect the brain during a deep freedive.
That final step is exactly where we have to stop.
Ninety minutes breathing a 10 percent oxygen gas mixture is not a breath-hold. The subjects were not freediving. They were still ventilating. Carbon dioxide dynamics were different. The cardiovascular response was different. There was no hydrostatic pressure, no descent, no ascent, no changing lung volume and no diving response occurring under the conditions of an actual deep dive.
The study tells us that creatine can influence cerebral energy metabolism and cognitive performance during a particular form of experimentally induced hypoxia. That is genuinely interesting.
It does not tell us that creatine delays blackout in freedivers.
It does not tell us that creatine increases static apnea.
It does not tell us that creatine allows someone to dive deeper.
And it absolutely should not be interpreted as evidence that taking creatine makes hypoxic freediving safer.
That distinction is important because supplement research becomes dangerous when a plausible mechanism is quietly transformed into a proven outcome.
Could Creatine Still Be Useful To A Freediver?
This is where the discussion becomes more practical.
The absence of evidence that creatine directly improves apnea does not mean creatine has no place in the training of a freediver. Freedivers do considerably more than hold their breath.
Many competitive freedivers strength train. They perform dry training, pool sessions, repeated dynamics, finning drills and general conditioning. Some athletes train several disciplines simultaneously. The physical preparation behind a competition dive can therefore include types of exercise for which creatine has considerably stronger evidence.
Creatine's best-established sporting benefits relate to strength, power and repeated high-intensity efforts. A 2026 network meta-analysis examining supplementation in trained athletes found beneficial effects of creatine on muscular strength, while effects differed when endurance and recovery outcomes were considered. More broadly, the literature around creatine consistently shows that its usefulness depends on the task. It is much easier to demonstrate a benefit during repeated high-intensity muscular work than during prolonged endurance activity.
That creates an important distinction for freedivers.
Creatine could potentially be useful to the athlete without necessarily being useful to the apnea itself.
Imagine a freediver undertaking a structured strength program to improve lower-body force production. Creatine may support the quality of that training. An athlete performing repeated high-intensity work may also benefit under some circumstances. Over months of training, improvements in strength and training capacity could indirectly contribute to the physical qualities used during freediving.
But that is very different from saying that taking creatine before a depth session will give you another five metres.
We currently do not have evidence for that.
There is also the question of dynamic apnea. Because dynamic disciplines involve swimming, it might seem reasonable to borrow evidence from competitive swimming. But once again, the comparison has limitations. Conventional swimming performance occurs while breathing and often at much higher muscular intensities. Dynamic apnea is deliberately economical. Good technique is built around minimizing unnecessary muscular work because every contraction has an oxygen cost.
A supplement that helps an athlete repeatedly produce more power does not automatically improve a discipline in which the athlete is intentionally trying to produce sufficient propulsion with minimal energetic expenditure.
This is one of the fundamental problems with extrapolating normal sports nutrition into freediving. Freediving performance is unusual because doing more work is rarely the objective.
Efficiency is.
The best freediver is not necessarily the athlete capable of producing the greatest muscular power. It is the athlete capable of producing the necessary movement at an exceptionally low physiological cost while tolerating progressive hypoxia and hypercapnia.
Creatine research conducted in conventional sport therefore has to be interpreted through that very different performance model.
There is another practical consideration: body mass.
Creatine supplementation can increase body mass, particularly during the early stages of supplementation, largely because of changes in body water associated with increased muscular creatine storage. In a repeated-sprint running study, for example, participants taking creatine gained approximately 0.7 kg, while another repeated-sprint experiment reported an increase close to 1 kg.
Whether a small increase in body mass matters to a freediver is another unanswered question. Freedivers already manipulate buoyancy through wetsuit thickness and neck weight, and a change in body composition or water distribution does not translate straightforwardly into a predictable performance effect underwater. It is simply another reason not to assume that the results from land-based sports transfer cleanly into freediving.
What We Know, What We Don't, And What We Should Study Next
Creatine is sometimes discussed as though its safety remains highly controversial, but the evidence in healthy adults is much more reassuring than popular mythology suggests. A 2025 review of common safety concerns found that controlled research does not support claims that creatine causes dehydration or muscle cramping, and it found no evidence of impaired renal function in healthy individuals, while still advising caution for people with pre-existing kidney conditions and populations for which evidence remains limited.
Two systematic reviews and meta-analyses published in 2026 provide useful additional context. One found a small increase in serum creatinine after supplementation without significant changes in urea or estimated glomerular filtration rate. Another analysis involving 26 studies found increased serum creatinine and lower creatinine-based estimates of kidney filtration, but no significant difference when filtration was assessed using Cr-EDTA, suggesting that the apparent change may reflect creatine and creatinine metabolism rather than actual kidney injury.
That distinction is particularly useful for athletes undergoing blood tests. Creatine supplementation can affect serum creatinine, which is commonly used when estimating kidney function. A higher creatinine result therefore needs to be interpreted in context rather than automatically being treated as evidence of renal damage. Anyone with kidney disease, relevant medical conditions or concerns about supplementation should discuss creatine with an appropriate medical professional rather than relying on sports-nutrition advice from the internet.
For freediving specifically, however, the most interesting conclusion is not about whether creatine is good or bad.
It is about how much we still do not know.
A proper freediving creatine study would not be particularly difficult to imagine. Trained freedivers could be randomized to creatine or placebo under controlled conditions. Researchers could measure static apnea duration, dynamic performance, peripheral oxygen saturation, heart rate, cerebral oxygenation, blood lactate, perceived effort and recovery between repeated apneas. Depth studies would be considerably more complicated, but pool and dry-apnea experiments could already answer many useful questions.
It would also be important to separate disciplines. Creatine could theoretically affect a dynamic apnea differently from a static apnea because muscular work is involved. Repeated apnea training might produce different results from a single maximum attempt. A strength-trained freediver could respond differently from someone doing almost exclusively apnea work.
The cerebral question is perhaps the most intriguing of all. We know that prolonged breath-holding produces major changes in cerebral circulation. We know the creatine-phosphocreatine system contributes to cellular energy buffering. We also have human evidence showing that creatine supplementation can increase brain creatine and influence cognitive performance during severe experimental hypoxia.
What we do not know is whether any of this translates into a meaningful effect during apnea.
And until someone actually performs that experiment, the scientifically responsible answer remains: we don't know.
That may sound less exciting than announcing a new supplement for freedivers, but it is far more useful.
Freediving already attracts plenty of physiological theories that sound convincing because they contain enough real science to feel plausible. A mechanism is identified, a few dots are connected, and suddenly a possibility is repeated as fact. Creatine provides a perfect example of why we should resist that process.
There is good evidence that creatine can improve particular forms of athletic performance. There is evidence that supplementation increases creatine availability in muscle and can increase creatine in the brain. There is fascinating evidence concerning cerebral metabolism during prolonged breath-holding. There is even human research suggesting that creatine can influence cognitive function during severe hypoxic exposure.
But none of those studies has yet demonstrated that creatine improves freediving performance.
For a freediver who also strength trains, creatine may still be a perfectly rational sports supplement based on its established benefits outside apnea. For someone expecting it to increase breath-hold time, extend dynamic distance or provide protection against hypoxic loss of consciousness, the evidence simply is not there.
That is where the subject stands today.
And perhaps that is what makes it interesting. Instead of another supplement story with an exaggerated conclusion, creatine gives freediving researchers a genuinely good unanswered question.
We already understand enough of the physiology to have a reason to investigate it.
Now somebody needs to do the study.
Creatine And Freediving: What The Science Actually Says
Author: Nick Pelios
Creatine is probably one of the least exotic supplements in sport. It has been studied for decades, it is used across an enormous range of disciplines, and there is substantial evidence that creatine monohydrate can improve strength and performance during certain forms of repeated high-intensity exercise. More recently, researchers have also become interested in something that is particularly relevant to freedivers: creatine's role in the brain and what happens to cerebral energy metabolism when oxygen availability falls.
Put those two things together and an obvious question appears. Could creatine be useful for freediving?
It is a tempting question because, at first glance, the biology seems to fit. Freediving creates an unusual energetic situation. Oxygen availability progressively decreases during apnea, yet the brain and working muscles still require ATP to function. Creatine and phosphocreatine are directly involved in the rapid regeneration of ATP. If supplementation increases available creatine stores, it seems reasonable to wonder whether that could somehow help during a breath-hold.
There is just one problem. The direct research is not there yet.
As of 2026, there is no convincing published human trial showing that creatine supplementation allows freedivers to hold their breath longer, dive deeper, swim farther underwater or reduce their risk of hypoxic loss of consciousness. That does not make the subject uninteresting. Quite the opposite. There are several pieces of research that make the relationship between creatine, hypoxia and freediving worth examining. We simply have to be careful about where the evidence ends and speculation begins.
Creatine, Phosphocreatine And The Energy Problem
To understand why creatine is even relevant to this discussion, we need to begin with ATP.
ATP, or adenosine triphosphate, is essentially the immediately usable energy currency of cells. Muscles require it to contract. Neurons require energy to maintain electrical activity and cellular function. The problem is that the body stores relatively little ATP in a directly available form, so it must continually regenerate it.
One of the fastest ways of doing this is through the phosphocreatine system. Phosphocreatine can donate a phosphate group that helps regenerate ATP from ADP. This creates an extremely rapid energy-buffering system, particularly important when energy demand changes quickly.
This is one reason creatine supplementation has become so established in strength and power sports. Increasing muscular creatine stores can improve the ability to repeatedly produce high levels of muscular work, particularly during short, intense efforts. A large body of sports science supports this general effect, although the magnitude of the benefit depends heavily on the exercise being performed.
Freediving, however, is clearly not a conventional sprint or strength activity. A deep dive may last several minutes. Dynamic disciplines combine prolonged apnea with relatively low-intensity repetitive muscular work. Static apnea involves almost no external muscular work at all. At depth, changing pressure and buoyancy introduce additional demands that have no equivalent in most laboratory exercise tests.
This matters because a supplement being useful in one type of exercise tells us very little about another.
A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis examined creatine supplementation and endurance performance in trained populations. Thirteen studies met the inclusion criteria, and the pooled analysis found no significant improvement in endurance performance from creatine supplementation. That should immediately make us cautious about presenting creatine as some general-purpose method of extending physical performance.
Swimming research tells a similarly complicated story. Individual studies have occasionally reported improvements during repeated sprint swimming after creatine supplementation. One study involving elite male swimmers, for example, found an improvement across repeated 50-yard sprints after five days of supplementation, while single-sprint performance did not improve. Other trials have failed to find a meaningful improvement in swimming performance.
More importantly, a 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis pooled 17 studies involving 361 swimmers. It found no significant overall benefit of creatine for single-sprint swimming, repeated interval swimming, physiological responses or body composition compared with placebo.
So even before we introduce apnea, the answer is already more complicated than "creatine gives muscles more energy, therefore it should improve underwater swimming."
Freediving is not normal swimming. And it certainly is not repeated sprinting.
The Brain Changes The Question
The more interesting connection between creatine and freediving may actually have less to do with the fins and more to do with the brain.
During prolonged apnea, arterial oxygen saturation can fall dramatically. The human brain is extremely dependent on continuous energy availability and oxygen delivery, so the body responds aggressively as hypoxia develops. The diving response, peripheral vasoconstriction and changes in cerebral circulation all contribute to the extraordinary physiology seen during breath-holding.
A particularly interesting study examined 15 freedivers and 17 non-diving controls during extended breath-holds lasting between 2 minutes 32 seconds and 7 minutes. Researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to examine cerebral blood flow and oxygen metabolism, while magnetic resonance spectroscopy was used to measure several cerebral metabolites, including phosphocreatine plus creatine. During breath-holding, the freedivers increased global cerebral blood flow by approximately 107 percent, helping compensate for falling arterial oxygen saturation and sustain cerebral oxygen delivery.
That study is fascinating for freediving physiology, but there is an important distinction that should not be missed: the researchers were not supplementing the freedivers with creatine.
They were observing cerebral physiology during apnea.
This means the study cannot tell us whether taking creatine makes a freediver better at breath-holding. It does, however, show why cerebral energy metabolism deserves attention when discussing extreme apnea. During a long breath-hold, the body is not simply waiting for oxygen to run out. It is actively redistributing blood flow and attempting to preserve the function of organs that are particularly sensitive to hypoxia.
This is where another study becomes especially interesting.
Researchers in New Zealand gave 15 healthy adults creatine or placebo for seven days and then exposed them to a severe hypoxic environment containing 10 percent oxygen for 90 minutes. Creatine supplementation increased brain creatine by an average of 9.2 percent. During the hypoxic exposure, attention declined under the placebo condition, while creatine supplementation prevented some of that deterioration. The researchers also observed increased corticomotor excitability and proposed that greater cerebral energy availability could be contributing to the effect.
For a freediver reading that paper, the temptation is obvious.
Hypoxia impairs the brain. Creatine increased brain creatine. Cognitive performance during hypoxia was better after supplementation. Therefore, creatine might protect the brain during a deep freedive.
That final step is exactly where we have to stop.
Ninety minutes breathing a 10 percent oxygen gas mixture is not a breath-hold. The subjects were not freediving. They were still ventilating. Carbon dioxide dynamics were different. The cardiovascular response was different. There was no hydrostatic pressure, no descent, no ascent, no changing lung volume and no diving response occurring under the conditions of an actual deep dive.
The study tells us that creatine can influence cerebral energy metabolism and cognitive performance during a particular form of experimentally induced hypoxia. That is genuinely interesting.
It does not tell us that creatine delays blackout in freedivers.
It does not tell us that creatine increases static apnea.
It does not tell us that creatine allows someone to dive deeper.
And it absolutely should not be interpreted as evidence that taking creatine makes hypoxic freediving safer.
That distinction is important because supplement research becomes dangerous when a plausible mechanism is quietly transformed into a proven outcome.
Could Creatine Still Be Useful To A Freediver?
This is where the discussion becomes more practical.
The absence of evidence that creatine directly improves apnea does not mean creatine has no place in the training of a freediver. Freedivers do considerably more than hold their breath.
Many competitive freedivers strength train. They perform dry training, pool sessions, repeated dynamics, finning drills and general conditioning. Some athletes train several disciplines simultaneously. The physical preparation behind a competition dive can therefore include types of exercise for which creatine has considerably stronger evidence.
Creatine's best-established sporting benefits relate to strength, power and repeated high-intensity efforts. A 2026 network meta-analysis examining supplementation in trained athletes found beneficial effects of creatine on muscular strength, while effects differed when endurance and recovery outcomes were considered. More broadly, the literature around creatine consistently shows that its usefulness depends on the task. It is much easier to demonstrate a benefit during repeated high-intensity muscular work than during prolonged endurance activity.
That creates an important distinction for freedivers.
Creatine could potentially be useful to the athlete without necessarily being useful to the apnea itself.
Imagine a freediver undertaking a structured strength program to improve lower-body force production. Creatine may support the quality of that training. An athlete performing repeated high-intensity work may also benefit under some circumstances. Over months of training, improvements in strength and training capacity could indirectly contribute to the physical qualities used during freediving.
But that is very different from saying that taking creatine before a depth session will give you another five metres.
We currently do not have evidence for that.
There is also the question of dynamic apnea. Because dynamic disciplines involve swimming, it might seem reasonable to borrow evidence from competitive swimming. But once again, the comparison has limitations. Conventional swimming performance occurs while breathing and often at much higher muscular intensities. Dynamic apnea is deliberately economical. Good technique is built around minimizing unnecessary muscular work because every contraction has an oxygen cost.
A supplement that helps an athlete repeatedly produce more power does not automatically improve a discipline in which the athlete is intentionally trying to produce sufficient propulsion with minimal energetic expenditure.
This is one of the fundamental problems with extrapolating normal sports nutrition into freediving. Freediving performance is unusual because doing more work is rarely the objective.
Efficiency is.
The best freediver is not necessarily the athlete capable of producing the greatest muscular power. It is the athlete capable of producing the necessary movement at an exceptionally low physiological cost while tolerating progressive hypoxia and hypercapnia.
Creatine research conducted in conventional sport therefore has to be interpreted through that very different performance model.
There is another practical consideration: body mass.
Creatine supplementation can increase body mass, particularly during the early stages of supplementation, largely because of changes in body water associated with increased muscular creatine storage. In a repeated-sprint running study, for example, participants taking creatine gained approximately 0.7 kg, while another repeated-sprint experiment reported an increase close to 1 kg.
Whether a small increase in body mass matters to a freediver is another unanswered question. Freedivers already manipulate buoyancy through wetsuit thickness and neck weight, and a change in body composition or water distribution does not translate straightforwardly into a predictable performance effect underwater. It is simply another reason not to assume that the results from land-based sports transfer cleanly into freediving.
What We Know, What We Don't, And What We Should Study Next
Creatine is sometimes discussed as though its safety remains highly controversial, but the evidence in healthy adults is much more reassuring than popular mythology suggests. A 2025 review of common safety concerns found that controlled research does not support claims that creatine causes dehydration or muscle cramping, and it found no evidence of impaired renal function in healthy individuals, while still advising caution for people with pre-existing kidney conditions and populations for which evidence remains limited.
Two systematic reviews and meta-analyses published in 2026 provide useful additional context. One found a small increase in serum creatinine after supplementation without significant changes in urea or estimated glomerular filtration rate. Another analysis involving 26 studies found increased serum creatinine and lower creatinine-based estimates of kidney filtration, but no significant difference when filtration was assessed using Cr-EDTA, suggesting that the apparent change may reflect creatine and creatinine metabolism rather than actual kidney injury.
That distinction is particularly useful for athletes undergoing blood tests. Creatine supplementation can affect serum creatinine, which is commonly used when estimating kidney function. A higher creatinine result therefore needs to be interpreted in context rather than automatically being treated as evidence of renal damage. Anyone with kidney disease, relevant medical conditions or concerns about supplementation should discuss creatine with an appropriate medical professional rather than relying on sports-nutrition advice from the internet.
For freediving specifically, however, the most interesting conclusion is not about whether creatine is good or bad.
It is about how much we still do not know.
A proper freediving creatine study would not be particularly difficult to imagine. Trained freedivers could be randomized to creatine or placebo under controlled conditions. Researchers could measure static apnea duration, dynamic performance, peripheral oxygen saturation, heart rate, cerebral oxygenation, blood lactate, perceived effort and recovery between repeated apneas. Depth studies would be considerably more complicated, but pool and dry-apnea experiments could already answer many useful questions.
It would also be important to separate disciplines. Creatine could theoretically affect a dynamic apnea differently from a static apnea because muscular work is involved. Repeated apnea training might produce different results from a single maximum attempt. A strength-trained freediver could respond differently from someone doing almost exclusively apnea work.
The cerebral question is perhaps the most intriguing of all. We know that prolonged breath-holding produces major changes in cerebral circulation. We know the creatine-phosphocreatine system contributes to cellular energy buffering. We also have human evidence showing that creatine supplementation can increase brain creatine and influence cognitive performance during severe experimental hypoxia.
What we do not know is whether any of this translates into a meaningful effect during apnea.
And until someone actually performs that experiment, the scientifically responsible answer remains: we don't know.
That may sound less exciting than announcing a new supplement for freedivers, but it is far more useful.
Freediving already attracts plenty of physiological theories that sound convincing because they contain enough real science to feel plausible. A mechanism is identified, a few dots are connected, and suddenly a possibility is repeated as fact. Creatine provides a perfect example of why we should resist that process.
There is good evidence that creatine can improve particular forms of athletic performance. There is evidence that supplementation increases creatine availability in muscle and can increase creatine in the brain. There is fascinating evidence concerning cerebral metabolism during prolonged breath-holding. There is even human research suggesting that creatine can influence cognitive function during severe hypoxic exposure.
But none of those studies has yet demonstrated that creatine improves freediving performance.
For a freediver who also strength trains, creatine may still be a perfectly rational sports supplement based on its established benefits outside apnea. For someone expecting it to increase breath-hold time, extend dynamic distance or provide protection against hypoxic loss of consciousness, the evidence simply is not there.
That is where the subject stands today.
And perhaps that is what makes it interesting. Instead of another supplement story with an exaggerated conclusion, creatine gives freediving researchers a genuinely good unanswered question.
We already understand enough of the physiology to have a reason to investigate it.
Now somebody needs to do the study.