Creatine Dose and Bodyweight: Does the Maths Change?

The short answer is that the authorised GB health claim for creatine is a flat 3g per day, with no adjustment for bodyweight. Whether you weigh 50kg or 100kg, the dose on the label is the same. That is not a simplification — it is the only dose Pump House can reference, and it is the dose backed by regulatory approval in Great Britain.

What follows is an honest look at why the question keeps coming up, what the research literature actually says, and where the uncertainty genuinely sits.

What the authorised claim says

The permitted claim under the GB Nutrition and Health Claims Regulation is this: creatine increases physical performance in successive bursts of short-term, high-intensity exercise. The beneficial effect is obtained with a daily intake of 3g of creatine.

That 3g figure is the intake at which the claim is authorised. It is not a minimum threshold below which nothing happens, nor a ceiling above which things improve. It is simply the dose the regulation names. Pump House does not recommend any dose above 3g, and nothing in this article should be read as doing so.

Where the per-kilogram idea comes from

Some research protocols, particularly older studies and work focused on muscle creatine saturation, have used weight-adjusted dosing — commonly cited figures in the literature are around 0.03g per kilogram of bodyweight for a maintenance dose. At 50kg that would be 1.5g; at 100kg it would be 3g.

A few things are worth holding in mind here. First, those protocols are not the same as the authorised intake for the health claim. Second, much of the weight-adjusted dosing appears in loading-phase designs, which are a separate question entirely. Third, the research base is not uniform — studies differ in population, training status, duration and outcome measure, and no clean consensus exists on whether larger people require proportionally more creatine to achieve the same physiological result.

The honest position is that the science is unsettled. There is a plausible rationale for weight-adjusted dosing — a 100kg person has a larger total muscle mass and therefore a larger creatine pool to saturate — but the evidence that scaling the dose produces meaningfully different outcomes in practice is not robust enough to build firm guidance on. If you want to explore how the research applies to your own situation, a registered sports dietitian is the right person to speak to.

What 3g looks like in practice

At a flat 3g per day, a 50kg person and a 100kg person are taking the same absolute amount. Whether that produces equivalent muscle creatine levels relative to their respective body mass is a question the current regulatory framework does not answer — and one the research has not settled cleanly either.

What 3g does do, consistently, is meet the criteria for the authorised claim. That is not nothing. It is a specific, evidence-reviewed threshold set through a formal process, not a number pulled from convention.

If you are thinking about whether a loading phase changes anything, that is a separate question with its own evidence base. Loading typically involves higher short-term intakes before dropping back to a maintenance dose, but no loading phase is required to benefit from creatine at 3g per day.

Powder or tablets at 3g

Getting to 3g is straightforward with either format. Pump House's micronised creatine powder comes in 5g scoops, so 3g is just over half a scoop. The creatine tablets are 1,000mg each; three tablets reach the 3g authorised intake exactly, which makes them straightforward if you prefer not to measure powder at all. There is more on the format choice in the powder versus tablets comparison.

The bottom line

Bodyweight does not change the authorised dose. The claim is 3g, flat, for everyone. The research literature raises the question of whether that scales proportionally with body mass, but it does not answer it cleanly, and it is not a question Pump House is in a position to resolve. If you are at either end of the bodyweight range and want a dose tailored to your physiology, speak to a sports dietitian — that is the right conversation to have, and it sits outside what any supplement brand can responsibly tell you.