Blog – Weightlifting and Creatine on Brain Health

My last blog, on how sleep impacts brain health, sparked a lot of interest. Since then, more people have asked me about how different everyday lifestyle factors can influence brain health. So, my next few blogs will look at other lifestyle factors, what the evidence actually says about them, and what I think in my own scientific opinion as a dementia researcher.

This is one for gym goers and those who do resistance training and weightlifting. Whether resistance training and weightlifting benefits the brain, and if it can reduce the risk of developing dementia. Alongside weightlifting, many people use workout supplements to enhance their training. One example is creatine, which is the most popular supplement in the fitness community, used to boost training and recovery. As well as helping with strength and physical performance, creatine might also support brain health and protect against cognitive decline. This has caused a lot of controversy about whether it is good to take supplements like creatine on a regular basis, for the brain at least. It is important to remember I am not a dietician or clinician, and I am looking at research studies and my own scientific knowledge of the brain to form the basis of this discussion.

This part of the blog will focus on weightlifting and resistance training. Over the past decade, many studies have explored how lifting weights can influence cognitive function, reduce the risk of dementia, and support healthy brain ageing. Dementia has many risk factors and comorbidities that significantly enhance the disease progression. The lancet stated that addressing modifiable lifestyle risk factors can prevent or delay 45% of dementia cases worldwide. That is almost half of all dementia cases globally. These include diabetes, cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure. People living with these conditions are more likely to develop cognitive problems and dementia later in life, as they have been associated with increased inflammation, damage to blood vessels supplying energy the brain and greater build up of the toxic dementia causing proteins amyloid-beta and tau. Weight lifting and resistance training help to alleviate these risk factors, benefiting the brain in several ways.

One of the ways weightlifting may benefit the brain is by improving insulin sensitivity and metabolic health. The question is, how does weightlifting specifically target this insulin pathway. The obvious answer is that it increases muscle mass, which is the body’s main site for glucose uptake. The more muscle you have, the more glucose can be removed from the bloodstream and stored, keeping blood sugar levels stable. Resistance training also decreases visceral fat, which is the fat stored around vital organs. High levels of visceral fat are strongly linked to insulin resistance, inflammation, and cardiovascular disease.

Weightlifting can also mitigate dementia risk by reducing inflammation. Neuroinflammation creates a harmful environment in the brain, where the brain’s immune cells, called astrocytes and microglia, become overactive and release toxic proteins that destroy neurons. This creates major tissue damage, resulting in the cognitive decline seen in dementia. Evidence has shown that weight lifting lowers this chronic inflammation in the body, as your working muscles release anti-inflammatory chemicals called myokines. So people who regularly exercise and lift weights often have lower levels of inflammatory markers in their blood, creating a healthier environment for the brain and lowering the risk of dementia.

Another way weightlifting can improve brain health and reduce dementia risk is by increasing blood flow.

If I’m being honest, I am very biased on this point. My entire 4-year PhD has primarily focused on why blood flow is important in dementia, and how reduced blood flow may be a key marker in neurodegenerative disease. This is especially true in comorbidities like heart disease, hypertension and diabetes. If there has been evidence that weightlifting increases blood flow to the brain, I would subjectively agree that this is an amazing way to reduce dementia progression.

It so happens that evidence does show that weightlifting increases blood flow throughout the body, including the brain. This increased blood flow raises the energy supply to the brain, meaning that neurons are nourished with the oxygen, glucose and nutrients needed to function. To highlight this importance, the brain is only 2% of your body weight, but it constantly uses 80% of your total blood supply. I’ve actually covered this topic in much more detail in a previous blog, where I explain why healthy blood flow is important for brain function and how reduced blood flow can contribute to dementia.

Overall evidence has shown that regular resistance training can improve executive function, memory, and cognitive performance in older adults, and may even help slow cognitive decline. Rather than working through a single pathway, weightlifting appears to benefit the brain in several ways. It improves metabolic health, reduces inflammation, lowers blood sugar, reduces insulin resistance, increases muscle mass, reduces visceral fat and most importantly in my eyes, increases blood flow.

Let’s now move on to the effect of gym supplements such as creatine. Most gym goers out there will know exactly what creatine monohydrate is and most people I know who do weightlifting use this supplement, and have asked me how it may affect the brain. A popular BBC article was published last year on this topic which arose a lot of interest, linked in the blog.

Creatine monohydrate is the most heavily researched and legal supplement on the market.

Research into creatine began in the 1970s with Professor Harris at Aberystwyth University. Decades of research since then have proven its benefits in building muscle mass, boosting strength, and reducing physical fatigue. Our bodies naturally produce small amounts of creatine in organs like the liver and kidneys. We can also get it from foods like red meat and oily fish. The biology behind how creatine works in the body is important to understand, so let’s rewind a few years, or 10 years in my case, to some A-level biology.

During weight training, your muscles rapidly burn through their primary energy source, called ATP. Once the ATP has been used up, it breaks down into a temporary byproduct called ADP. This causes your muscles to become more fatigued and tired. This is where creatine acts as an energy reserve. It is stored in the body as phosphocreatine, and provides a molecule to turn that used up ADP back into usable ATP. This gives your muscles the rapid and immediate energy needed to lift that extra weight and to push harder in your workout. This is why people regularly take the supplement creatine monohydrate.

As we know, the brain relies so heavily on a constant energy supply; there is a genuine biological reason to think creatine could help our brains by instantly making more energy when it is depleted. Limited research has shown that using creatine to refill these emptied energy sources can actually provide cognitive benefits. A recent meta-analysis found modest improvements in memory, attention, and processing speed. It looks at a deeper mechanism called neurogenesis, which is the regeneration of new neurons. This means creatine can help the brain repair itself, which is useful as dementia and neurodegeneration is caused by the death of neurons.

Scientists are also now investigating whether creatine can help with mood disorders, by helping clear stress induced brain fog, fight fatigue, and sharpen memory.

However, we should not get carried away with these modest results. The effects of creatine on the brain are small, and the data is inconsistent. These cognitive improvements are short-term and are only noticeable when the brain is actively under stress, such as from sleep deprivation or age-related fatigue. Furthermore, although creatine has been proven to be incredibly safe, it still comes with mild side effects.

The Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation also mentioned that these benefits haven’t translated into real disease prevention in human trials. While preclinical experiments show that creatine can protect cells and boost cognitive function, the results in humans are small and highly variable. It just hasn’t been shown to reverse or prevent neurodegeneration.

In my opinion, creatine is best viewed as a potential tool for increasing short-term brain power, through increasing your body’s overall energy reserve, instead of directly affecting the brain. In short, weightlifting has strong evidence for helping long-term brain health and for reducing your dementia risk. For gym supplements like creatine, there is some hopeful evidence for improving cognition but the evidence that it reduces dementia risk is very minimal. Currently, it shouldn’t be considered as a cure or preventative supplement against dementia.

I should now take my own advice and finally start lifting some weights in the gym.

Rahul Sidhu

Author

Rahul Sidhu is a PhD student at The University of Sheffield, focusing on the effects of heart disease on dementia in preclinical models of Alzheimer’s disease. His research aims to uncover how cardiovascular health influences neurodegenerative conditions, potentially leading to novel therapeutic strategies.​

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