There are two tubs in my kitchen cupboard that cost me an embarrassing amount of money before I properly understood what either of them was for. One is protein powder. One is creatine. For about a year, they mostly sat there looking sporty and making me feel vaguely responsible.
The questions I get asked most often about them are all timing questions. Do I take it before or after? Does it matter that I ride at six in the evening? Will creatine keep me awake? How much is too much?
So let’s go through it properly — evening riders, morning riders, how much of each, and the honest good and bad of both. No supplement-company energy. Just what the research actually says and how it fits into a normal week.
First, the boring bit that matters most 🤍
Before we talk about clocks and windows, here is the thing almost every study lands on: your daily total matters far more than the exact minute you swallow it.
For protein, the old “you have thirty minutes after training, or it’s wasted” panic has been fairly thoroughly walked back. The window is much wider and much more forgiving than we were told. What actually moves the needle is hitting enough protein across the whole day, spread reasonably evenly, day after day.
For creatine, it’s even simpler. Creatine works by saturation — it slowly builds up in your muscles over weeks and then sits there working all day. It is not a stimulant. You will not feel it kick in thirty minutes after a scoop, the way you feel coffee. Studies comparing “before training” versus “after training” have found small trends at best, and those mostly wash out over longer timeframes.
The best time to take it is the time you’ll actually remember to take it. Consistency beats the clock — every single time.
That said, timing isn’t entirely irrelevant, and if you ride at a specific time of day, there are a few sensible ways to plan accordingly. So let’s do that.
A quick word before we go further ⚕️
I am not a doctor or a dietitian. I’m a cyclist and a runner who reads a lot and has made most of the mistakes personally. Everything below is general information, not personal advice.
Please talk to your doctor or a registered dietitian before starting either supplement — especially if you have any kidney or liver condition, are on chronic medication, are pregnant or breastfeeding, or have a history of disordered eating. If you’re managing a health condition, “it’s just a supplement” is not a good enough reason to skip that conversation.
If you ride in the evening 🌙
This is most of us, if we’re honest. Work, supper logistics, the school run, and then the trainer at half past six because that’s the only gap in the day.
Creatine: any time — genuinely
Because creatine works on saturation rather than an acute hit, an evening rider does not need to build their day around it. Take it whenever you’re most likely to remember. For a lot of evening riders, that’s with supper, or stirred into the post-ride shake while you’re still dripping on the kitchen floor.
Check the whole supplement label, including any caffeine or other ingredients in a blend. Caffeine can disturb sleep. If sleep changes after starting a product, review it with a healthcare professional rather than assuming either that the product caused it or that it cannot be involved. Sources: NIH ODS — Exercise and athletic performance supplements.
One small practical thing: if you take it right before a hard evening session on an empty stomach, some people get a bit of stomach grumbling. Taking it with food solves that.
Protein: the evening rider’s actual advantage
Here’s where evening riders have a genuinely useful option that morning riders don’t.
If you finish riding at 7:30 pm and supper is on the table at 8 pm, you don’t need a shake at all. Real food counts. A plate with chicken, eggs, mince, or beans serves the same purpose. Protein powder is a convenience tool, not a separate category of magic.
But if you finish late, or you’re one of those people whose appetite disappears completely after a hard effort, a shake is the easiest way to get 25–40g in without staring miserably at a plate you don’t want. That’s honestly the best use case for protein powder: the times real food isn’t happening.
The other option worth knowing about is a protein serving before bed — around 30–40g, usually casein or a slower-digesting blend, though Greek yogurt or cottage cheese does a similar job. There’s reasonable evidence that this supports overnight muscle repair, particularly after late training. Worth a fair caveat, though: most of that research is in strength-training athletes, and at least one study in cyclists suggested the benefit may come mostly from the extra protein rather than the bedtime timing specifically. So treat it as a useful way to top up a day you fell short on, not a magic trick.
A simple evening pattern
- Before the ride: nothing special needed. Eat normally throughout the day.
- After the ride: supper if it’s close, or a shake with 25–40g protein if it isn’t.
- Creatine: 3–5g with supper or in the post-ride shake. Same time every day.
- Before bed (optional): 30–40 g of slower protein if the day’s total came up short.
If you ride in the morning ☀️
Creatine: after the ride, with breakfast
For morning riders, I’d put creatine with breakfast after you’ve ridden. Not because the science demands it, but for two very practical reasons.
Choose a consistent time that fits your routine and is comfortable for your stomach. Creatine works through changes in muscle stores over time; week seven is not a universal starting point for its effects. Sources: AIS — Creatine: how and when.
If you ride so early that breakfast is basically lunch, just pick a fixed anchor — with your coffee, with your first meal, whatever. The specific hour is not the point. Every day is.
Protein: fix your breakfast first
Here’s the thing I see constantly with morning riders, and I was guilty of it for years: South African breakfasts are almost entirely carbohydrate. Toast. Rusks. Oats. A banana in the car. Then no real protein until one o’clock.
If you’ve just ridden for ninety minutes and then eaten two slices of toast, you’ve gone from a hard session straight into a long protein gap. That’s the actual problem — not the timing of a shake, but a whole morning with barely any protein in it.
So, after a morning ride, aim for a proper breakfast with 25–40g of protein alongside your carbs. Eggs, yogurt, a shake blended into your oats — whatever fits your morning. Carbs still matter here, especially after a long or hard ride; this isn’t about swapping them out; it’s about not leaving protein out entirely.
If you ride fasted and can’t stomach anything for an hour afterward, that’s fine too. Eat when you can. You have not ruined anything.
A simple morning pattern
- Before the ride: whatever normally sits well. Long or hard session? Carbs matter more than protein here.
- After the ride: breakfast with 25–40g protein plus carbs.
- Creatine: 3–5g with that breakfast. Every day, including rest days.
- Rest of the day: keep protein coming every 3–4 hours rather than dumping it all at supper.
How much should you actually use? 📏
Protein
Endurance athletes generally do well somewhere in the range of 1.4 to 2.0 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day — from all sources, not just powder. Head towards the upper end during heavy training blocks, when you’re doing regular strength work, or if you’re eating less than usual.
Per sitting, roughly 0.25–0.4g per kilogram works out to about 20–40 g every three to four hours. If you’re over 40, aim closer to the top of that per-meal range — research fairly consistently suggests we need a slightly larger dose per meal to get the same response as we age.
| Your weight | Daily protein target | Roughly per meal (4 meals) |
|---|---|---|
| 55 kg | 77–110 g | 20–28 g |
| 65 kg | 91–130 g | 23–33 g |
| 75 kg | 105–150 g | 26–38 g |
| 85 kg | 119–170 g | 30–43 g |
Most scoops give you around 20–25g. So for the average rider, one or two scoops a day is plenty — the rest should come off your plate. If you’re drinking four shakes a day to hit your number, the problem isn’t your supplement strategy; it’s your meals.
Creatine
Stick with creatine monohydrate. It’s the form with the most research behind it by a very wide margin, and it’s the cheapest. The fancier versions in prettier tubs are mostly selling you marketing.
You’ve got two options:
- The simple way (what I’d do): 3–5g every day. Your muscles reach full saturation in about three to four weeks. Slower, but no faff and much gentler on your stomach.
- The loading way: around 20g a day, split into four 5g doses, for 5–7 days — then drop to 3–5g daily to maintain. You get there in under a week, but this is where the bloating and stomach complaints mostly come from.
Both routes end up in exactly the same place. Loading just gets you there faster. Unless you’ve got a goal event in three weeks, there’s very little reason to bother.
The routine described here includes rest days to support muscle creatine stores. A missed dose does not instantly undo those stores; return to your usual routine rather than doubling up. Sources: AIS — Creatine: considerations.
Protein powder: the pros and the cons ⚖️
✅ The pros
- It’s convenient when nothing else is. After a late ride, when cooking is not happening, it’s the difference between hitting your protein and skipping it.
- It’s cheap per gram of protein. Compare a tub to the equivalent grams of chicken breast, and it usually holds up well.
- It’s precise. You know exactly what you’re getting, which makes hitting a daily target far less guesswork.
- It works when your appetite doesn’t. A lot of us can’t face solid food after a hard session. Drinking it is easier.
- It’s easy to add to things. Oats, yogurt, smoothies — it doesn’t have to be a shake.
❌ The cons
- It’s food, not a performance supplement. It doesn’t do anything a chicken breast doesn’t do. If you’re already hitting your protein, it adds nothing.
- Whey upsets some stomachs. If you’re lactose intolerant, whey concentrate can be rough. Whey isolate or a plant blend is usually kinder.
- Quality and labeling vary a lot. Look for reputable brands with a full amino acid breakdown and, ideally, some form of independent testing. Be suspicious of anything suspiciously cheap.
- Some are basically a milkshake. Check the sugar and total kilojoules — “mass gainer” tubs are a very different product and easy to grab by mistake.
- It can quietly replace real meals. Whole foods provide iron, calcium, fiber, and micronutrients that powders don’t. Two shakes instead of two meals is a downgrade.
- It won’t fix underfuelling. If you’re not eating enough overall — a genuinely common problem among women training while living full lives — extra protein won’t fix it.
Creatine: the pros and the cons ⚖️
✅ The pros
- It’s one of the most researched supplements. Hundreds of human studies. This isn’t a trend.
- It genuinely helps with repeated hard efforts. Sprints, attacks, the third climb of a Zwift race, the last set of squats. That’s where you’d notice it.
- It supports your strength work. Which matters enormously for endurance athletes over 40 — arguably more than anything it does for your riding directly.
- It’s cheap. A tub of monohydrate, at 3–5g a day, lasts for months.
- The safety record is strong. Long-term studies in healthy people have used substantial doses for years without significant problems.
- Women may have more to gain. We store considerably less creatine naturally than men do, so there’s more headroom to fill.
❌ The cons
- The scale goes up — usually 1–2kg early on. This is water pulled into your muscle cells, not fat. But if the number on the scale rattles you, know it’s coming so it doesn’t derail you.
- That weight is a real trade-off on climbs. An extra kilogram of water is an extra kilogram up the hill. For a climber chasing power-to-weight, it’s worth thinking about honestly.
- It does very little for steady aerobic riding. Creatine fuels short, hard, repeated efforts. It won’t make your three-hour endurance ride feel easier.
- Without a loading phase, muscle creatine stores build gradually over several weeks. There is no universal day when benefits begin, and not feeling a change by day ten does not prove that it is ineffective. Sources: AIS — Creatine: how and when.
- Loading can upset your stomach. Cramping and bloating during a loading phase are common. Easily avoided by skipping the loading phase.
- It demands consistency. Miss most of the week, and you’re wasting your money.
- It’s not for everyone. If you have kidney disease or any related condition, this is a conversation with your doctor, not a decision you make in the aisle at the shops.
A note for us in the 40-plus bracket 🩷
Creatine spent about thirty years being marketed exclusively at young men in vests, which is a large part of why so many of us never considered it. That’s shifting, and the reason is worth knowing.
Women naturally store meaningfully less creatine than men do. Combine that with the muscle and bone changes that come with the perimenopause transition, and there’s a reasonable argument that creatine — paired with actual strength training — is more relevant to a 47-year-old woman than to the bloke it was originally sold to.
There’s also early research looking at creatine and cognition, mood, and sleep in perimenopausal women, and some of it is genuinely interesting. But I want to be straight with you: those studies are small, short, and in some cases used a different form of creatine than the standard monohydrate. It’s promising. It is not settled. Anyone selling it to you as a menopause cure is getting ahead of the evidence.
The bit that is well established is the muscle and strength piece — and even that only shows up properly when you’re actually lifting. Creatine without resistance training does very little. The supplement supports the work. It doesn’t replace it.
The mistakes I’d save you from 🙈
- Buying both before your actual eating is sorted. If you’re skipping meals and living on coffee, supplements are the last thing that’ll help.
- Loading creatine because the tub says to. It’s optional, and it’s where most of the bloating stories come from.
- Quitting creatine at two weeks. You stopped right before it started working.
- Treating protein powder as a meal. It’s a top-up.
- Panicking about the thirty-minute window. It’s much wider than that. Eat when you can.
- A consistent routine supports maintaining muscle creatine stores. Missing a dose does not make the whole routine pointless. Sources: AIS — Creatine: considerations.
- Weighing yourself in week one of creatine and spiraling. The water weight is expected. It’s not fat.
🩷 Keep track of what’s actually working
The honest problem with supplements is that the effects are slow and quiet, so it’s almost impossible to tell what’s helping unless you’re writing things down. Energy, sleep, how your legs feel on the third hard effort — that’s the data that matters, and none of it lives on Strava.
The training trackers and planners in the shop are built for exactly this — real logs for real weeks, not another app you’ll abandon by Thursday.
So what would I actually tell a friend?
If you asked me over coffee, here’s the short version.
Protein powder: useful, unglamorous, and worth having in the cupboard for the days real food isn’t happening. One or two scoops. Don’t overthink the timing — think about your daily total instead.
Creatine: 3–5g of plain monohydrate, every single day, at whatever time you’ll remember. Skip the loading phase. Expect the scale to nudge up and don’t let it bother you. Give it a proper eight weeks before deciding anything. And pair it with strength work, or you’re mostly wasting it.
Neither of them will turn you into a different rider. But both of them, used properly alongside actual meals and actual training, quietly help you hold on to muscle and recover better while you’re training around a full and messy life. Which, for most of us, is exactly the job.
Supplements are the last 5%. They only ever work on top of sleep, food and showing up — never instead of them.
One last time, because it matters: this is general information from a rider who reads a lot, not medical or dietary advice. Please check with your doctor or a registered dietitian before starting either supplement — particularly if you have a kidney or liver condition, take chronic medication, are pregnant or breastfeeding, or have a history of disordered eating.
Are you using either of these, and have you noticed a difference? Or are you still staring at the tubs in the cupboard, wondering if you wasted your money? I’d genuinely love to hear — drop me a note at liz@theendurancediaries.co.za. 🩷
🩷The Endurance Diaries🩷
