Are gains lost when coming off creatine?
Short and sweet answer to this: no. What you may notice is that you cannot lift quite as much for quite as long after coming off creatine. You will also notice a slight loss in weight as the water retained gradually leaves. These cause a mental effect which makes it seem like you’re lifting less and less. But that’s all it is; something mental. You will still be stronger and more enduring than if you hadn’t cycled, so long as you pushed yourself and made use of the extra creatine in your system. A brief analogy (figures completely made up for example): if you can bench 50kgx5 normally to start. With creatine supplementation, within a week you can do 50kgx7. With the extra workload you can train for slightly longer and slightly more intensely each week, resulting in slightly faster muscle growth/strength gains than otherwise. So at the end of the cycle you can bench for example 60kgx7. When you stop taking creatine this decreases over the next couple of weeks to 60kgx5. But did you get
