Since childhood, James McMillian has learned the value of slowly getting stronger.
McMillian said he was diagnosed with asthma when he was born, and doctors advised his parents against letting him play sports like youth tackle football. “It made me tell myself that I need to train harder,” McMillian told Business Insider.
Before and after practice, McMillian recalled running up the stadium steps six times. He’d also run to practice or run home with his sports equipment. Even though his asthma wasn’t induced by sports, he noticed that the extra training kept him from being as winded.
McMillian is now the president and a trainer at Tone House, a strength training and conditioning-focused training facility deemed by Business Insider as “the hardest workout in New York City.” He applies that same mentality from his upbringing to Tone House workouts that he coaches.
McMillian, who coaches classes at Tone House, believes in zooming in on your weaknesses.
James McMillian
“You’re going to be exposed for your weaknesses, but then you should always turn your weaknesses into your strengths,” he said.
McMillian believes progressively overloading — slowly adding weight, reps, or intensity — is the best way to build strength.
“I always tell people, ‘If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it,” he said, particularly since we lose muscle mass as we age. “You’re going to want to pick up your kid. You’re going to want to hold those groceries. You’re going to want to hold your Louis Vuitton bag a little bit longer at an event. You have to be strong to do that.”
McMillian shared a few of his favorite quick movements to build muscle, whether you’re a complete beginner, pressed for time at the gym, or wanting to speed up your progress.
Raise a glass to goblet squats
Goblet squats target both the upper and lower body, and are approachable for complete beginners.
gradyreese/Getty Images
McMillian’s favorite movement for beginners is the goblet squat, or squatting while holding a heavy kettlebell or dumbbell.
“When you’re going into that squat, as you allow those knees to go out, you’re working that lower body, your glutes, your hamstrings,” he said. At the same time, you’re also engaging your lats, triceps, forearms, and upper back from holding the weight.
To make the goblet squat more challenging, he said, you can elevate your heels to focus on building quad strength. McMillian also said it’s easy to start with a lighter weight, say 10 pounds, and gradually work your way up.
Save time with compound exercises
McMillian loves doing consecutive sets of arm movements, such as bent-over rows.
James McMillian
Some of the best time-savers are compound exercises, which target multiple parts of the body at once and “allow you to shorten your time at the gym,” McMillian said.
A favorite of McMillian’s is transitioning from a squat to an overhead press, thus targeting both the upper and lower body.
He also likes to string together multiple consecutive movements. He opts for two rounds of 20 shoulder presses, 20 hammer curls, and 20 bent-over rows, all right after each other to activate different parts of his upper body.
“It’s intense, it burns, but it’s something that people can do with a single dumbbell,” he said, thus also saving time on swapping out equipment.
It’s also customizable, he said: You can use lighter weights and do fewer reps, but increase the number of rounds, for example.
Play with tempo
Lowering slowly before exploding back up helps build control, McMillian said.
MoMo Productions/Getty Images
Explosive exercises — deliberately slowing down your tempo and “exploding” at the end of the movement — are also great for improving your strength, McMillian said.
He’s a fan of slowing down his back squats: lowering slowly for five seconds, pausing for another five at the bottom, and then quickly pushing up.
“When you do things a little bit slower, controlled, it builds strength,” he said, noting there’s more than one way to challenge yourself.
Mayer Mizrachi, the 38-year-old mayor of Panama City, wants Elon Musk to build him a pedestrian tunnel under the Panama Canal. And Musk’s Boring Company recently announced it just might.
Panama City this week was named one of 16 finalists — the only one outside the United States — in the company’s Tunnel Vision challenge, which offers the winning municipality a free tunnel that can be used for freight, pedestrians, water, utilities or Loop — the electric, underground system that uses Tesla vehicles to transport people.
Mizrachi’s idea is a 0.6 mile pedestrian tunnel under the Panama Canal, which would give city residents a chance to “live” its history and take advantage of the vital maritime trade route that is critical to the global economy. More recently, the canal has been the subject of geopolitical tensions as President Donald Trump threatened to take control of the waterway because, he said, the US was being ripped off by high fees and that it had come under Chinese influence. In February 2025, Panama withdrew from China’s Belt and Road initiative.
The winner will be announced on March 23. Of the 16 finalists, half were in Tennessee or Texas, where the Boring Company is headquartered and where Mizrachi recently went to make his pitch. The project, if chosen, has the potential to tie together Mizrachi, the former DOGE leader, and the Panama Canal that Trump once fixated on seizing.
Mizrachi, the youngest mayor in the city’s history, founded Criptext, a secure email platform, and, like Trump, has styled himself as an outsider. Like Musk, he came to office looking to cut government in the name of efficiency and insists he has succeeded.
In an interview with POLITICO, which is, along with Business Insider, part of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, Mizrachi said the tunnel proposal began as a last-minute response to a Boring Company social media post and ballooned from there.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did the tunnel idea begin, and what exactly was your pitch to The Boring Company?
Mizrachi: I merely just ran into a tweet by the Boring Company in January, and they had this tunnel vision challenge, and they were offering a free tunnel up to a mile long anywhere around the world to the best idea. I did a visit in January to the existing tunnel that’s being built for a subway station in Panama City, and I said, “What if we built a pedestrian tunnel crossing the canal with parks on either side? You can tell the story of how the canal was built and the history of the country, and the biodiversity.”
City planners started working on a proposal, and they kind of really brought the plane in for a landing with a beautiful proposal, and we submitted that on the last minute of the last day.
What did you learn in Texas about how The Boring Company would approach this project?
Mizrachi: We met with Jim Fitzgerald, the VP for global, and we kind of took a 101 on how a Boring Company project works. Tunnels are freaking expensive. But it turns out that the way that they do it makes it actually feasible, and it’s quite a wonder the way that they have put this together.
And as I told Jim, I said, “Listen, I know this is very preliminary, and here are many other projects that they’re considering, but you know, it would be quite a marvel that 100 years ago, you know, the US built the canal, and then 100 years later, that they would build a tunnel that crosses the canal in a modern marvel of engineering in the way that they do it.”
They reuse their tunneling machines. Whereas typically, the tunneling machines are built specifically for a given project, and then they get buried with the project.
The Boring Company’s headquarters in Texas.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images
What would this tunnel mean for Panama, especially at a moment when the canal is caught up in broader geopolitical tensions?
Mizrachi: First of all, Panamanians, we’re really proud of the canal, its management, its history, but we seldom get to live it. So it’s like the rest of the world uses the canal. But you know, Panamanians, we don’t live the canal. You could go to the Miraflores Locks, and you go to the tourist center. You can maybe see a ship, but we don’t really live it.
So the vision here is you create a public space where you integrate families, tourists, and they can cross the canal themselves with an underground tunnel that’s 0.6 miles, the distance. It’s quite short, and I can only imagine it being almost an educational experience, where you can have screens, very thin screens, because the space is not that big, but thin screens that are showing the story, the history of how the canal was built, the biodiversity of Panama, and then stats on the canal, the impact that it has on world trade, etc. It started as an idea, but it’s shaping up. And I think it goes above my pay grade. I spoke to the president [of Panama] about this. This needs to be handled by a task force designated by the president in representation with the entire country.
Why do you think Panama City could beat out American cities for this project?
Mizrachi: Well, there’s one very unique thing about this. They don’t have a canal. The Boring Company has never bored underwater, much less crossing a canal. And I think it’s part of the value proposition to show themselves as engineers, how far they can go with their mindset, with their methodology and their ingenuity.
Also it’s a pedestrian tunnel. So it’s not a loop tunnel that is managed and operated by the Boring Company. So if you think of Vegas, they operate the Loop itself. So, here, it’s a lot more hands off. They build a tunnel, and they don’t have to have an active operation.
The Boring Company-built tunnel at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images
You’ve drawn comparisons between your work and DOGE-style cost cutting in Washington. How do you describe your governing approach?
Mizrachi: I mean, honestly, I still consider myself an outsider. I am not subscribed to any political party, and I still very much employ the mindset of the tech entrepreneurial efficiency and try things before you scale things, which is uncommon in politics.
As soon as I came into office in July 2024, I realized people’s money was being wasted on a scale that I was just shocked to see. So we were able to reduce the size of City Hall personnel by 50% so it used to have 6,500 people. We reduced it to about 3,500 people. And by all counts, City Hall is operating faster and better with more impact, tangible, visible impact, with less people. And also, we reduced the budget by about 32%, so we did the biggest budget reduction in the history of the city as well.
This story originally ran in POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook and appears on Business Insider through the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network. The network publishes major stories from the Axel Springer network of publications, a worldwide group of news outlets that includes Business Insider.
This story is available exclusively to Business Insider
subscribers. Become an Insider
and start reading now. Have an account? .
Sam Altman says OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI.
OpenClaw is a viral AI agent launched last month.
Altman said Steinberger will build “next generation” AI agents at OpenAI.
OpenAI just scored a win in the AI talent wars.
Sam Altman said Sunday on X that Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw, the viral AI agent powering the agent-only social network Moltbook, is joining OpenAI.
Altman said Steinberger would build the “next generation” of personal AI agents at the company.
“He is a genius with a lot of amazing ideas about the future of very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people,” Altman said about Steinberger. “We expect this will quickly become core to our product offerings.”
Altman added that OpenClaw, which was for a brief moment in time known as Moltbot and then Clawdbot before Anthropic took notice, will live on as an open-source project supported by OpenAI.
“The future is going to be extremely multi-agent and it’s important to us to support open source as part of that,” he wrote.
Steinberger, previously best known for founding the PDF processing company PSPDFKit, came out of retirement to launch OpenClaw in late 2025.
He is likely to bring a new perspective to OpenAI’s race to develop artificial general intelligence. Steinberger said he believes AGI is best as a specialized form of intelligence rather than a generalized one.
“What can one human being actually achieve? Do you think one human being could make an iPhone or one human being could go to space?” Steinberger said on a Y Combinator podcast in February. “As a group we specialize, as a larger society we specialize even more.”
When I first found out I was pregnant, I frankly didn’t put much thought into long-term childcare plans. Living in New York City, my husband and I knew we wouldn’t have the traditional village available to us — my parents, while local and thrilled to get a first grandchild, are older and weren’t particularly eager to volunteer for solo babysitting, while his parents live thousands of miles away.
But we were in a uniquely lucky situation: We both happened to have flexible, largely remote jobs.
For the first few months of my surprisingly generous parental leave, my husband and I, cocooned in newborn bliss (and perhaps slightly delirious from sleep deprivation), didn’t stress about what would happen when I went back to work. I figured we could make it work through a combination of creative time management and strategically scheduled naps — at least until our daughter was eligible for 3-K, free schooling available in New York City for kids the year they turn 3.
My husband became the primary parent
Surprisingly, this plan ended up working, for the most part, and for just shy of a year, we managed a fairly even 50-50 split in parenting duties. As time went on and my own work ramped up and the baby potato turned into a sprinting toddler, it became clear that my husband would need to become the primary parent.
It wasn’t something either of us had considered before having a child, but it made the most sense: He found far greater fulfillment in being a father than he’d ever found in his career, whereas I had always defined myself by my work as a writer and editor. He kept his job but scaled back, working largely in the evenings and weekends so he could be free during the day for stay-at-home parenting.
As our daughter became a toddler, she blossomed under my husband’s full-time care, with constant adventuring and frequent playdates keeping her days busy. We didn’t need outside childcare — but as it turned out, she did.
I’d considered traditional childcare, but couldn’t stomach the cost
New York City has notoriously high childcare costs.
The author says traditional childcare was too expensive in New York City.
Courtesy of Michael Matassa
In the interim between our delicate balancing act and deciding my husband would drastically scale down his work, I considered a number of different options, from traditional daycares (upward of $2,500 a month in my neighborhood for full-time programs) to nanny-share arrangements with other local families (maybe slightly cheaper, but a pain to coordinate).
We were lucky in that we were able to avoid childcare costs, which would have effectively canceled out one of our salaries, though I still toyed with the idea of enrolling her somewhere part time to get her used to the idea in case our situation changed.
Enter Barnard College’s Center for Toddler Development.
I first heard about the program in a local moms’ book club I’d joined. One of our first reads was “How Toddlers Thrive” by Tovah P. Klein, a prominent child psychologist — and incidentally the then-director of the Toddler Center. Another mom in the book club with a daughter two years older than mine mentioned she was now applying.
I was frankly flabbergasted when she explained the details. It’s part research program, where the toddlers are minded by teachers and selected students from the college’s graduate program and observed for published research purposes from behind a one-way mirror, and part “school,” albeit an extremely part-time one, with each “class” of toddlers meeting only twice a week for two hours each day for the duration of the school year.
I was intrigued by the program’s unique “gentle separation period” and its said mission to help toddlers have a positive first school experience while supporting healthy social and emotional development through hands-on, child-guided play.
At that point, my daughter was only 18 months old (the halfway point to our 3-K end goal), but I’d already started to suspect that separation might be an eventual issue. With two working-from-home parents, she was used to having us around constantly — and had never had a babysitter.
The few times we’d tried to step out to grab a coffee and handed her to a grandparent, she would shriek like she was being abandoned. Over the next several months, she also grew more shy, coinciding with her stranger danger peaking.
We paid $7,500 for our 2-year-old
Convinced our future would be filled with school refusals and drop-off meltdowns, I hardcore pitched the Toddler Center to my husband for the coming school year. We didn’t need it for childcare, but I became convinced we did need it to help give our daughter the gentlest, most gradual introduction to being away from us. He was less convinced, sure she would grow out of it and be OK with separating by 3-K, but agreed in the end.
If the program details were mind-boggling, the price point was eye-watering. Though there isn’t a set, publicly announced tuition rate, the Toddler Center offers sliding-scale tuition and payment plans to make the program accessible to a broader range of the population. According to its website, a third of Toddler Center families pay tuition on a sliding scale (I assume the higher-profile alum parents like Amy Schumer, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Robert De Niro paid full sticker price for their kids to attend).
After submitting a sliding-scale tuition application, which required forking over the previous year’s tax returns to prove we were indeed not flush with cash, we landed on $7,500 as the final figure for our almost 2-year-old to take her first baby steps toward school.
At first, it was torturous
It did not go well.
The author says at first, her daughter wasn’t comfortable with either of her parents leaving.
Courtesy of Michael Matassa
The first few weeks of the program allowed the parents in the classroom, gradually moving us farther from it (a separate, no-toys-allowed room in the back, meant to be unappealing to the kids) to encourage the toddlers to ignore them and play in the main classroom area. That trick didn’t work on our daughter, who simply sat next to the chair of whichever of us had taken her in that day, chattering happily as we tried to gently encourage her to go away.
As I’d dreaded, the initial actual separation — when parents would bring their kids into the classroom and tell them they were leaving — was horrendous. The Toddler Center mandated that only one parent or caregiver drop off their child each morning.
For the first few weeks after separation, we could both sit in the observation room, where we were treated to a front-row show of our daughter sobbing hysterically and trying to reason with the grad students to open the door she was convinced we were right behind. It was excruciating, and plenty of tears were shed on our end as well.
There was virtually no improvement for months, which was far longer than I expected. And I felt an immense amount of guilt for having come up with this idea in the first place: Were we actually traumatizing her instead of helping her? Had I epically miscalculated this? Did I pay $7,500 to torture my toddler and myself?
I was wracked with doubt, and we debated withdrawing her from the program before the first semester had even finished. It was particularly hard on my husband, who, as the primary parent, was typically the one dropping her off and dealing with the meltdowns — and who also really missed her on school days.
Suddenly, though, and for no particular reason at all, it got better. A lot better.
Instead of sobbing by the door for a full hour and a half, she started interacting with the other kids. She found a favorite grad student she’d attach herself to. She played happily on the classroom slide. And eventually, she comforted the other toddlers during their hard separation days, assuring them their mommies or daddies would be back.
The Toddler Center was expensive, but extremely worth it for us
While it was difficult for my husband to be apart from his little buddy for the few hours a week she was at the program, they turned it into an opportunity for new adventures. In the spring semester, he began biking with her to school, stopping to pick up flowers on the way there and back. Another tradition became that he would bring her a blueberry muffin from a local café every day at pickup. These small rituals helped them bond even more.
The author says the $7,500 she spent was worth it.
Courtesy of Michael Matassa
I don’t pretend to have a handle on the intricacies of toddler psychology, and I can’t tell you what the flipped-switch moment was where it finally clicked for my kid that being left at school with her teachers didn’t mean we were gone forever. And yes, for the record, she still cried during drop-off the first few weeks of 3-K.
But I am convinced that completing the Toddler Center program drastically reduced her adjustment period for “real school.” Tossing her into the deep end for six hours a day, five days a week, was simply not the right option for our family.
In the end, I’m glad I listened to my gut, dug into our pockets, and toughed out the tears — and I’d like to think my daughter, somewhere deep down in her toddler brain, is too.
A community is a dedicated space where customers connect with each other for ongoing support, learning, and shared identity. For companies, it’s a way to build loyalty, gather real-time insight, and deliver deeper value beyond a product or service.
What sets a community apart from a static knowledge base is the personalized support members receive. While that level of service used to come at a high operational cost, AI makes it easier and more impactful for three solopreneurs who spoke with Business Insider about running their own membership communities.
Gabriela Fiorentino is the founder of Nest Earth.
Joel Arbaje for BI
“I can be even more present inside of my community,” said Gabriela Fiorentino, founder of Nest Earth, a community that helps parents integrate sustainable choices into family life. “It’s like having an assistant without having to pay for the assistant,” she added.
Here’s how three solopreneurs running communities use AI to reduce cognitive and operational load so they can create stronger member experiences.
This article is part of The AI-Powered Solopreneur series. Read more.
AI streamlines personalized offerings
Clara Ma, founder of Ask a Chief of Staff, a community serving executives in chief of staff roles, loves meeting with members one-on-one to answer their personal questions, but only has limited time to do so.
Before, she often found herself on calls repeating generic information that was already available within the community. Now, she asks members to share their questions ahead of calls, then uses the integrated AI in Slack—where her community connects and has conversations—to ask what resources already exist related to those questions.
Clara Ma is the founder of Ask a Chief of Staff.
Isa Zapata for BI
“I can pull up three to five resources immediately and say, ‘Let’s look at this first, and then if your question still isn’t answered or you want to personalize the chat a little bit more to you, I can do that better because we’re on the same page about what is already available to you,'” Ma said.
She also used Slack Workflows to help her build out an automated process for member onboarding. Based on whether they’re an aspiring chief of staff, a current chief of staff, or a mentor within the community, they get a slightly different and personalized message welcoming them into the community and giving them some next steps on how to engage. This creates a curated experience from day one without a heavy manual lift for Ma. Onboarding tasks now take about an hour per week as opposed to a couple of hours per day before AI, she said.
Lis Best is the founder of Girls Club Collective.
Michaela Vatcheva for BI
For Lis Best—founder of Girls Club Collective, a community for impact leaders and entrepreneurs—the biggest value in using AI has been more mental capacity to dedicate to what matters most to her.
“I can use my creative brainpower more on facilitation and on one-on-one member support and less on rewriting an email sequence for the 12th time,” she said.
For instance, she has recently used ChatGPT to help her improve the website positioning and suggest email sequences for potential new members, reducing her time spent on growing her community so she can spend more time engaging with it.
AI offers research-backed strategy suggestions
Beyond one-on-one interactions, community-based businesses also offer broader programming like workshops, expert sessions, and connection opportunities. Ideally, these offerings reflect what members actually want—and AI makes it far easier for solopreneurs to identify those needs at scale.
Before AI, Ma used to rely on intuition or hours of manual work to understand member preferences, reading months of community Slack conversations and trying to mentally catalog themes. Now, AI synthesizes data from member conversations, newsletter open rates, and workshop engagement to inform decisions about which events or member offerings to prioritize.
“It unlocks a lot more information a lot faster so that we can make better decisions,” Ma said. “I used to hem and haw about what programming we should do. Now I have the data, and I can have a conversation with AI to spitball different strategies and topics that I think our members are going to react well to instead of going off gut feeling.”
Clara Ma uses AI to help her spitball different strategies.
Isa Zapata for BI
Best loves that AI gives her the confidence to table ideas that have been on her “maybe” list or that a handful of members have requested. Uploading information from member surveys and member interviews transcribed with the Otter AI notetaker, she can ask ChatGPT to synthesize what offerings are most in demand—and which are not worth spending energy on from a data perspective.
“As a person, I think, ‘I know the four people who are asking for this, so should I do it anyway?'” Best said. AI’s more neutral perspective helps her put those personal feelings aside and choose programming that will benefit the most members.
Gabriela Florentino used AI to help her find new ways to monetize her community.
Joel Arbaje for BI
Fiorentino also uses AI to support broader strategy research. For instance, when trying to brainstorm new ways to monetize, she turned to AI, asking what options were available and what was working for other communities.
For example, she’s launched a new membership tier where service providers can access more visibility and potential clients through her community. She’s also planning to launch a marketplace of eco-friendly products later this year.
AI creates more time for human touchpoints
Lis Best values AI’s neutral perspective.
Michaela Vatcheva for BI
In case it’s not clear, the goal for these solopreneurs is to use AI to maximize human potential, not replace it.
“I always say AI is for automation, not to replace the human,” said Ma, who coaches her small team of contractors to try automating any task that they do more than five times with AI. This ensures she’s using her limited budget only on things that require human touch, not things that a machine can handle.
And with that extra time, they can work to maximize the potential of their members. “Any time we get back, we try to funnel back into the community in some sort of human touchpoint so that our members really feel taken care of and supported,” Ma shared. “AI is never going to replace the human aspect, which is what makes community so worth it in the first place.”
Years ago, we bought a geodesic climbing structure for my three kids, who were all under 5. We thought it would keep them entertained all year long without our supervision, but the reality could not be more different. The structure sat untouched through the seasons.
On Sunday, while preparing for the massive snowstorm that was headed toward Maine, Instagram fed me a reel of a couple building an igloo with the same climbing structure we have. I sent it to my husband, who came running from the room next door and said, “We have to do this!”
It turned out to be a hit with the kids, and it was surprisingly easy to pull off.
We used sheets to make it eco-friendly
The video I watched showed the first step to making the igloo is wrapping the perimeter of the climbing structure tightly with plastic wrap.
The author used bed sheets instead of serenwrap.
Courtesy of the author
We opted for a more eco-friendly option and decided to use king-size bed sheets. My husband had the idea to soak them in water first so they wouldn’t blow away in the strong wind as we were prepping the igloo. We soaked them in a tub and carried them outside quickly. The temps in Maine were in the teens, so we had to drag the sheets across the climbing dome quickly. I was actually surprised at how quickly the sheets hardened in the cold air. We just wrapped the ends of the sheet around a pole and didn’t need anything else to secure it in place.
We covered the entire structure, leaving one small triangle so the kids could crawl in and out of it, and had the rest of the dome totally covered.
I didn’t want to get my hopes up
We had tried something similar years earlier, and the sheets never hardened enough to stay on the dome. I didn’t want to get my hopes up this time around, so we left the sheets and walked over to a friends’ house to play before the snow.
The author had low expectations for the results.
Courtesy of the author
We were back home when the storm had already started, and we could see snow accumulating on the dome. I really wanted to check on it regularly because I was worried the weight of the snow would collapse the igloo’s roof. But I’m from Argentina, and I don’t do well in negative temperatures, so I let it be and decided to check it in the morning.
We woke up to tons of snow and a perfect igloo
We got absolutely dumped with snow overnight; it was the biggest snowstorm I’ve experienced since moving to Maine 6 years ago. And to my surprise, the igloo worked.
The igloo turned out to be great for everyone.
Courtesy of the author
Immediately, my kids were excited to climb inside, even exclaiming that it was way warmer in the igloo than outside it. They called over friends and neighbors, and they all played inside the igloo while I worked and my husband snowblowed around our house.
It’s the first time that I copied something from a viral reel or TikTok video, and it really paid off. And the best part is that it costs us nothing.
Next time we get a snowstorm warning, I at least know which sheets to pull out ASAP so we can start building quickly.
Stop wasting your time and money on subpar supplements.
One ingredient should be your first priority for building muscle, burning fat, and aging gracefully, according to exercise science pros.
Creatine is a combo of amino acids that provides energy to muscles and other tissues, like the brain. Our bodies produce it naturally, but growing research suggests supplementing with store-bought pills and powders is a smart idea.
It’s long been the uncontested king in the fitness supplement world for fueling gains, personal trainers, dietitians, and researchers told Business Insider. Now, even more studies suggest it has benefits beyond the gym, helping bolster the brain to support mental and cognitive health.
For less than 50 cents a serving, it’s the gold standard of evidence-based health hacks, with an impressive resume of potential perks.
Want to start taking creatine? Here’s how it works, and the best way to use it for peak performance, according to top researchers.
Creatine helps fuel more reps, leading to better gains
Long a staple of the sports world and bodybuilding community alike, creatine has been extensively studied as a fitness supplement for decades. It first caught on in the ’90s thanks to Olympians who swore by it for elite athletic competition.
Since then, researchers have consistently found that it’s safe to use and offers a small but significant boost to performance.
It works by providing extra fuel in the body’s energy cycle. That translates to better gains or faster fat burning if you’re working out, since you can power through more work that you might otherwise.
That makes it a standout performer in the supplement aisle. Creatine has much stronger evidence and broader benefits than products like pre-workouts, which can vary in ingredients and often don’t disclose what’s actually included.
It’s also distinct from protein shakes and powders, which offer the same nutritional benefits as food, but in a more convenient format. There is some creatine in foods like meat and fish, but it’s much harder to get than protein — you’d have to eat more than two pounds of steak to get the amount of creatine in a single scoop of supplement powder.
Other supplements are less evidence-based, less reliable, and can have more risks, particularly when bought online via grey-market websites.
The only supplement that comes close to challenging creatine in terms of wide-ranging benefit and extensive research is caffeine. While caffeine can boost workouts and is relatively safe in moderate doses, it can have serious side effects in large amounts, so you’re better off having a coffee than a concentrated supplement.
The best type of creatine to choose for muscle gains and fat loss
Not all creatine on the market is the same. The most well-researched form is creatine monohydrate, which sports nutritionists consider reliably effective and safe. If you’re worried it causes hair loss or kidney damage, don’t be: these are myths that have been debunked in reputable studies.
Creatine can have side effects like digestive upset, which is typically mild, temporary, and linked to higher doses.
It’s also safe for your wallet. Even with past shortages, creatine monohydrate tends to be the cheapest form, especially if you buy it pure instead of mixed into complicated pre- or post-workout blends.
To take creatine, researchers typically recommend a dose of between 3 to 5 grams a day (people with larger bodies need more). However, emerging studies suggest the brain can benefit from higher doses. Scott Forbes, a sports science researcher and professor at Brandon University, said he recommends around 10 grams a day for cognitive health.
Still, despite all the potential benefits of creatine, it’s not a panacea. No supplement, no matter how well-researched, can match the benefits of healthy lifestyle factors such as nutrition, sleep, and consistent exercise. Trainers recommend starting with high-value habits such as these first before trying supplements.
Once you’re nailing your workouts, diet, and recovery, creatine may be just the thing to give your routine an extra edge.
