Is Creatine Safe for Young Athletes?

Creatine is one of the most researched sports supplements available. In adults, decades of research support its ability to improve strength, power, repeated high intensity performance, training capacity, and lean mass. It also has an excellent overall safety record in healthy adults.

The conversation becomes a little more complicated when the athlete taking creatine is 14, 15, or 16 years old. Parents understandably have questions about kidney and liver health, hydration, growth, and whether we actually have enough research in adolescents to know that creatine is safe.

A new 2026 systematic review looked specifically at that question by examining the available safety data on creatine monohydrate in adolescents and physically active youth. Overall, the findings were reassuring. Across the studies researchers identified, creatine was generally well tolerated, with no consistent evidence of kidney, liver, hematologic, or cardiometabolic harm during the periods studied. No serious adverse events were attributed to creatine supplementation.

That does not mean we can say creatine has been proven completely safe for every teenager under every circumstance. The adolescent research is still much smaller than the enormous body of research we have in adults. What we can say is that the evidence we currently have looks reassuring, and there is little evidence supporting the idea that creatine monohydrate is inherently dangerous for healthy adolescent athletes.

TLDR: Is Creatine Safe for Teen Athletes?

Creatine has been studied far more extensively in adults than teenagers, so I don't think we should pretend every question has been answered. At the same time, the adolescent research we do have has not uncovered the kidney, liver, or cardiovascular problems that are often blamed on creatine.

• A 2026 systematic review identified five studies examining creatine safety in pediatric, adolescent, or young adult populations.
• Researchers found no consistent evidence of kidney damage during the supplementation periods studied.
• Available liver markers remained within normal ranges, with no evidence of creatine-related liver toxicity.
• No serious adverse events were attributed to creatine supplementation.
• Creatine doses ranged from approximately 2 to 10 grams per day, about 0.1 g/kg/day, or loading protocols using 20 grams per day followed by 5 grams per day.
• Intervention periods ranged from approximately 6 to 32 weeks, which is one reason we still need better long term research.
• One observational study followed participants for approximately seven years and did not find greater cardiometabolic risk associated with creatine-containing legal performance supplements.
• Product quality matters. Research on pure creatine monohydrate does not automatically establish the safety of every supplement sold online.
• For a young athlete considering creatine, nutrition, sleep, training, maturity, product quality, parental involvement, and medical history should all be part of the decision.

Why Are Parents So Worried About Creatine?

Some of the concern surrounding creatine comes from the fact that it is usually described as a "performance enhancing supplement." That phrase tends to lump creatine into the same mental category as anabolic steroids, prohormones, and other substances that have very different effects and risk profiles.

Creatine is nothing like an anabolic steroid. It is a naturally occurring compound synthesized from the amino acids arginine, glycine, and methionine. Your body already produces creatine, and you also consume it through foods such as meat and fish. Most of the body's creatine is stored in skeletal muscle, where it helps rapidly regenerate ATP during short duration, high intensity exercise. This is one of the primary reasons creatine supplementation can improve strength, sprinting, power, and repeated high intensity performance.

None of that automatically proves that supplementing with additional creatine is safe for teenagers. However, it is important context. We are not introducing a foreign drug into the body. We are increasing the availability of a compound the human body already makes, stores, and uses every day.

Creatine Use Among Young Athletes Is Already Pretty Common

Whether parents, coaches, or sports organizations approve of it or not, young athletes are already using creatine. The review cites prevalence estimates ranging from approximately 5% to more than 30% among adolescent and young adult athletes, depending on age, sex, sport, and level of competition.

This is one reason I don't think simply telling every teenager, "Don't take supplements," is particularly helpful. Some athletes are going to use them anyway, and pretending otherwise can leave them getting their information from teammates, social media influencers, or whoever happens to be selling the product.

A better approach is to teach young athletes and their parents how to evaluate supplements properly. What does the research actually show? What doses have been studied? What are the legitimate safety concerns? Is the product independently tested? Does the athlete even need the supplement? Those conversations are considerably more useful than treating every sports supplement as though it carries the same risk.

What Did the New Review Actually Examine?

Researchers conducted a systematic review of human studies published between 2015 and 2025 that examined the safety of creatine monohydrate in adolescents or physically active youth. After screening the available research, only five studies met the inclusion criteria. These included randomized controlled trials and observational studies involving both athletic and clinical populations.

That number is important because it immediately tells us one of the biggest limitations of the evidence. We do not have hundreds of long term randomized trials following healthy teenage athletes taking creatine for years. Five qualifying studies give us useful information, but they are nowhere near the amount of evidence available in adults.

The populations were also quite different. They included adolescent athletes, young female soccer players, adolescents with treatment-resistant depression, and children or adolescents with inflammatory muscle disorders. This diversity gives us evidence that creatine has been tolerated in several different populations, but it also means we should be careful about assuming every result applies perfectly to every healthy teenage football player, wrestler, runner, or basketball player.

Does Creatine Damage the Kidneys?

Kidney damage is probably the most common concern I hear about creatine, and it is also one of the longest running myths surrounding the supplement.

In the studies included in this review, researchers did not find clinically meaningful deterioration in kidney function. Measurements including serum creatinine, estimated glomerular filtration rate, and other renal markers generally remained stable, and youth athletes maintained kidney markers within normal reference ranges. No creatine-related kidney adverse events were reported.

That does not mean kidney health should simply be ignored. Someone with existing kidney disease or another medical condition that affects kidney function is a very different case from a healthy athlete. However, the current evidence does not support the common claim that standard creatine monohydrate supplementation damages healthy kidneys in adolescent athletes.

Creatinine Can Make This More Confusing Than It Needs to Be

There is an important wrinkle in the kidney discussion because creatine and creatinine are related.

Creatinine is a normal breakdown product of creatine, and serum creatinine is commonly measured during routine blood work because it can help doctors estimate kidney function. If serum creatinine rises, it can sometimes be interpreted as evidence that the kidneys are not filtering properly.

Creatine supplementation, however, can increase creatinine production simply because more creatine is available to be converted into creatinine. The review specifically points out that elevations in serum creatinine should therefore be interpreted carefully in people taking creatine because an increase does not automatically mean kidney function has declined.

This is a practical reason for young athletes to tell their healthcare provider if they are using creatine. If blood work is being evaluated, the person interpreting those results should know about the supplementation.

What About Liver Health?

The available liver data are smaller than the kidney data, but the findings were again reassuring. In an athletic cohort of youth and young adult female soccer players, liver enzymes including ALT and AST remained within established reference ranges, and researchers found no evidence of hepatotoxicity attributable to creatine.

That particular study is useful because the athletes were followed across a competitive season. Participants used a traditional creatine loading protocol of 20 grams per day for seven days, followed by 5 grams per day, with supplementation continuing for approximately 32 weeks. Researchers did not observe harmful changes in renal or hepatic function during that period.

Thirty-two weeks is a meaningful amount of time, but it is still not the same as following someone who begins taking creatine at 15 and continues taking it for years. That distinction matters when discussing what the research has and has not established.

Were There Any Serious Side Effects?

Across the studies included in the systematic review, researchers did not identify serious adverse events that were attributable to creatine monohydrate. Randomized trials also found no meaningful differences in adverse events or laboratory abnormalities between creatine and placebo groups.

This is reassuring because if creatine were regularly causing acute kidney injury, liver problems, dangerous blood pressure changes, or other serious health problems in adolescents, we would expect some signal to begin appearing in the research.

So far, that signal isn't there.

That doesn't allow us to say the risk is zero. Very rare adverse events can be difficult to identify in small trials, and longer studies are still needed. What we can say is that the safety problems frequently attributed to creatine have not consistently appeared in the adolescent research that currently exists.

What Creatine Doses Have Actually Been Studied?

The studies included in the review used several different dosing strategies. Depending on the study, participants received 2 grams per day, 4 grams per day, 10 grams per day, approximately 0.1 gram per kilogram of body weight per day, or a traditional loading protocol of 20 grams per day followed by 5 grams per day.

That does not mean a teenager needs to take 10 or 20 grams of creatine every day. It simply tells us that a range of doses has been studied without a consistent safety signal emerging.

For an athlete using creatine for sports performance, there is rarely a reason to make dosing complicated. Creatine does not work like a stimulant. You do not need to take a huge dose immediately before practice, and you do not need to "feel" it working. The goal is to gradually increase and maintain muscle creatine stores.

Does a Young Athlete Need to Load Creatine?

A loading phase is one way to increase muscle creatine stores quickly. A traditional adult loading protocol might involve taking around 20 grams per day, usually divided into several smaller doses, for five to seven days before transitioning to a lower daily maintenance dose.

Loading isn't necessary, though. Taking a smaller amount consistently can also increase muscle creatine stores. It simply takes longer.

For most young athletes, I think simplicity makes more sense. There is rarely an urgent reason a high school athlete needs to fully saturate muscle creatine stores within a week. Consistency with training, nutrition, sleep, and recovery over the next several years is going to matter far more than whether creatine saturation happens in seven days or several weeks.

The Biggest Question Is Long Term Safety

This is where I think both sides of the creatine debate can get carried away.

Someone skeptical of creatine might say that because we do not have decades of pediatric trials, creatine must be dangerous. That conclusion doesn't follow. A lack of long term evidence is not evidence of harm.

On the other side, someone selling creatine might point to the available adolescent studies and say the supplement has been proven completely safe for teenagers. I don't think the evidence allows us to go that far either.

The authors of the systematic review are clear that the evidence base remains limited. Most intervention trials were relatively short, the number of qualifying studies was small, and the populations varied considerably.

The more reasonable conclusion is that the evidence we currently have is reassuring, but larger and longer randomized trials involving healthy adolescent athletes would make the safety picture much stronger.

What About Long Term Heart and Metabolic Health?

One of the studies included in the review followed participants from adolescence into young adulthood for approximately seven years. Researchers examined outcomes including body mass index, blood pressure, HbA1c, blood lipids, diabetes, hypertension, and hyperlipidemia. They did not find significant prospective associations between the use of legal performance enhancing supplements, including creatine-containing products, and adverse cardiometabolic outcomes.

That's encouraging, but there is an important limitation. This wasn't seven years of controlled supplementation with pure creatine monohydrate. Supplement use was self reported and included legal performance enhancing supplements more broadly, so we should not treat it as though researchers gave teenagers creatine every day for seven years and monitored them in a laboratory. The review authors make this distinction as well.

It adds another reassuring piece to the safety picture, but it does not eliminate the need for better long term research.

Product Quality May Be a Bigger Concern Than Creatine Itself

This is one part of the conversation that doesn't get enough attention.

When researchers study creatine monohydrate in a controlled trial, they know what participants are taking. In the real world, a teenager may buy a supplement online, from a friend, or from a company they saw on social media. At that point, we have an entirely different set of questions.

Does the product actually contain the amount of creatine listed on the label? Is it pure creatine monohydrate? Is it contaminated with heavy metals? Does it contain undeclared stimulants or other ingredients? Has anyone independently tested the finished product?

The systematic review specifically points out that over-the-counter creatine products can vary in purity, dosing accuracy, and contamination, and that these factors complicate real world safety.

This distinction matters. A study demonstrating that pure creatine monohydrate is well tolerated does not automatically prove that every tub with the word "creatine" printed on the front is equally safe.

This Is Why We Independently Test Our Creatine

If a young athlete is going to use creatine, I think the product should be pretty boring. That's a compliment.

Our Simply Good Supplements Creatine Monohydrate provides 5 grams of creatine monohydrate per serving without proprietary blends, unnecessary stimulants, artificial sweeteners, or a laundry list of ingredients added to make the label look more impressive.

More importantly, we independently test our supplements. That matters because the safety of an ingredient and the quality of the finished product are two separate questions. You can start with an ingredient that has an excellent safety record and still end up with a poor quality supplement if manufacturing, purity, dosing accuracy, or contamination isn't properly controlled.

For a teenager, I would rather have a simple product where we know exactly what's in it than a "muscle building matrix" containing creatine plus a dozen other ingredients the athlete probably doesn't need.

Should Every Teenage Athlete Take Creatine?

No.

Finding that creatine appears safe in the available adolescent research is not the same thing as saying every 14-year-old athlete needs to start taking it.

There are much bigger priorities during adolescence. A young athlete needs enough total calories to support growth and training, adequate protein, plenty of carbohydrates, good hydration, sufficient sleep, a sensible training program, proper lifting technique, and enough recovery between hard sessions. Those fundamentals will have a much larger effect on athletic development than any supplement.

If a teenager is sleeping five hours per night, skipping breakfast, barely eating lunch, and then taking creatine before football practice, creatine isn't the problem we need to solve first.

Supplements should come after the fundamentals, not instead of them.

When Does Creatine Make More Sense for a Young Athlete?

I think creatine becomes a much more reasonable conversation when we're talking about a mature adolescent athlete who is training seriously, eating appropriately, sleeping reasonably well, and understands what the supplement does.

A high school athlete following a structured strength and conditioning program who wants to improve strength, power, sprinting ability, or repeated high intensity performance is very different from a 12-year-old buying random supplements because someone on TikTok said they'll get huge.

Age matters, but so do maturity, training history, nutrition, goals, and supervision.

Parents should also be part of that conversation. I don't think teenagers should be hiding supplement use from their parents, coaches, athletic trainers, or healthcare providers. If an athlete has kidney disease, liver disease, another medical condition, or takes prescription medications, getting individualized medical guidance becomes even more important.

So, Is Creatine Safe for Teenagers?

Based on the evidence we currently have, creatine monohydrate appears to be well tolerated in the adolescent populations that have been studied. The 2026 systematic review found no consistent evidence of clinically meaningful problems involving kidney function, liver function, blood markers, or cardiometabolic health during the available study periods. Researchers also found no serious adverse events attributable to creatine supplementation.

That's reassuring, and I think it should make us reconsider some of the fear surrounding creatine and young athletes.

At the same time, there is no reason to oversell the evidence. Only five studies met the review criteria, intervention periods were generally measured in weeks or months rather than years, and several of the studies involved clinical populations rather than healthy competitive athletes.

We know considerably more about creatine safety in adults than we do in adolescents. The research gap is real, even though the evidence available so far looks encouraging.

The Bottom Line

Creatine monohydrate isn't an anabolic steroid, and there isn't good evidence that it suddenly becomes dangerous because the person taking it is 17 instead of 18. It is a naturally occurring compound that the body already produces and uses, and the adolescent research conducted so far has not uncovered the kidney, liver, blood, or cardiometabolic problems that are commonly blamed on it.

At the same time, I wouldn't tell parents that there is nothing left to study. The adolescent research base is still relatively small, and we need larger trials following healthy young athletes for longer periods.

For parents and young athletes considering creatine, I think the practical approach is pretty simple. Get the fundamentals right first. Use plain creatine monohydrate rather than complicated supplement blends. Choose a company that independently tests its finished products. Use a sensible dose. Keep parents involved. And if there are medical concerns, talk with the athlete's healthcare provider before using it.

Creatine doesn't need to be treated like something scary.

It also doesn't need to be treated like something every teenager needs.

The evidence gives us plenty of room to be more reasonable than that.

Reference:

Rubinchuk A, Dulkoski Z, Persaud NA, Wallen M. Evaluating the Safety of Creatine Monohydrate in Adolescents: A Systematic Review of Renal, Hepatic, and Cardiometabolic Outcomes. Cureus. 2026;18(4):e106808.