Science For Sport (00:01.675)
Well, Steve, I'm delighted to welcome you back onto the Science for Sport podcast for our regular listeners, viewers on our YouTube channel. They will be familiar with you, of course. You were our very first guest this year in 2026 discussing creatine and how it came to be in the professional sports world over three decades ago now when you helped to introduce it at the Barcelona games of 1992. So welcome back.

Steven Jennings (00:27.298)
Thank you Richard and it's great to be back on Science for Sport. It's the first time we've done a follow-up podcast so this is part two of what I think is actually going to be maybe a several podcast unfolding story because we've got so much that is still to be revealed but I'm really looking forward to the conversation and sharing with your audience where we are, where it's all going and yeah let's go, let's have a great conversation.

Science For Sport (00:56.063)
Absolutely and it would be remiss of me not to point out for those watching on YouTube they will notice a small amber pendant hanging over your right shoulder. It's been a good season for Hull City back in the Premier League now.

Steven Jennings (01:12.076)
Yep, back in the Premier League it was...

Quite nerve-racking watching or listening to the game on Saturday at Wembley when they scored five minutes into extra time. And there's a nice backstory to this pendant. This pendant has been part of my life since 1970. My dad first took me to Seahawks City Play in the Watney Cup against the great Man United of the time and all the big hitters were on the pitch. Charlton, Best, you name it, they were there. And that was the first football game I'd ever been to see.

and he took me to the souvenir shop before the game and I bought that pendant and I've had it ever since and we've moved all over the world and that has always managed to find a place in a box and I ceremonially put that up on the wall about one hour ago I thought I've got to have that there especially for this podcast because of the audience and I'm just hoping that nobody from Southampton is going to be watching and Middlesbrough!

Science For Sport (02:12.427)
We won't go there, Steve, we won't go there. But suffice to say, obviously, we look forward with interest to see how Whole City go in the Premier League on their return next season. Now, back down to business. When we last spoke to you, it was an intriguing tale you told us of how you were involved with Creatine, bringing it to market and its success when it burst onto the world stage at the Barcelona 92 Olympics.

Steven Jennings (02:14.199)
No.

Steven Jennings (02:21.315)
Yeah.

Thank you.

Science For Sport (02:41.501)
So for those that didn't listen to that conversation briefly give us your resume, your background when it comes to creatine and how it's evolved over time.

Steven Jennings (02:51.426)
Yeah, I'll keep this really really short and snappy so...

My entire background in sport nutrition really evolved out of my life as a professional racing cyclist, ridiculously demanding sport, huge hours on the bicycle, massive energy needs and energy demands as a budding pro cyclist with a lot of ambition. You just seem to be forever eating seven to 9,000 calories a day. From that, I connected with a cyclist that was

part of the British team preparing for Barcelona, quite well known in the UK. He introduced me to a nutrition that they were using that was not commercially available and from that I saw a commercial opportunity and launched a sport nutrition brand called Maxim, M-A-X-I-M, which still exists. It's now owned by a very big company in the Nordics and it's going from strength to strength so 30 years later the brand exists and it's still very strong. That company,

grew quite quickly and within six months of the company's existence because we were the official energy fuel of the British cycling federation the BCF we were approached by the BOA the British Olympic Association and they said there's a lot of athletes using your product we'd like to take some to Barcelona we want some in the Olympic Village would you be prepared to supply us and we agreed we have still got the original letters from the BOA with the Olympic rings on them about how this all was pulled together

So we became the official energy fuel for the British Olympic team in Barcelona. And that was wonderful. We're a new company and we've got the British Cycling Federation, we've got the BOA, it was all like dreamland really. That connection with the British Olympic Association attracted two scientists to want to speak with us. And in late February 1992, I received a telephone call at my office.

Steven Jennings (04:55.6)
shouldn't have been there, it was five days after my daughter was born, who's now my business partner by the way. I received a telephone call from a doctor called Dr Roger Harris, no internet so I didn't know who he was, I couldn't check anything out. He just basically said, I've got your telephone number, I know you're working with Olympic athletes, I'd like to meet with you to share something with you that could be a game changer for the team. That's as much as he revealed. Seven days later I met him and

his co-professor who had been working on this pioneering research paper that showed a 1-3 % performance improvement with creatine. This paper hadn't been published when we met and they walked me through the research, they explained to me what the potential opportunity was with elite athletes and they gave me a mission. Do you think you could introduce this product to some of the athletes preparing for the Barcelona games? At this moment in time creatine did not exist as a supplement. It was not a supplement.

You couldn't buy it, it wasn't available, nobody really knew what it was. It was discovered 150 years earlier but it was not part of that supplement stack back in the very early 90s. And they gave me a one kilo bag of creatine and set me off on this mission. I was very lucky that my cousin who...

was a shot putter representing GB or England at the Commonwealth Games. Had the real connections to the elite athletes. And we very quickly turned that powder into FFSing tablets. My cousin was the interface with the athletes, really big names actually, and they began using it in the run up to Barcelona. The coaching staff were just astonished at what was going on with stopwatches at training camp.

short, some of the athletes went on to win gold medals. All of this was secret, we couldn't reveal anything about what was happening until after the games. However, one journalist in the Olympic Village, an investigative journalist called Doug Gillan, who worked for the Glasgow Herald, he got wind that something was going on with the British team, he got a sample of the product which was in a box with all our branding and company name on it, Ergo Max C150, and he called me up from the Olympic Village.

Steven Jennings (07:17.976)
going on I need to know the exact story please tell me otherwise I'm going to break this as a potential drug story and in 48 hours we had to connect him with the right people the scientists, the sports council, the British Olympic team because we had all the documentation in place and he needed the evidence that this was a nutrition story and two days later this story broke from within the Olympic Village the news wire it was carried in a newspaper it was then picked up by other

broadcast the media companies and it literally exploded. We never did. Yeah, it was it was it was it was a huge, story. And we just never looked back. And from that moment on, you know, I was literally hanging on the wing of a jet as you know, the inquiries about creatine people wanted to buy creatine. It was like an overnight transformation.

Science For Sport (07:52.939)
As it would when something new comes onto the scene that people...

Science For Sport (08:10.609)
And what is creatine to the uninitiated?

Steven Jennings (08:12.066)
Yeah, it's a naturally occurring compound found in meat and fish. We produce small amounts in the body every day.

And creatine is not an amino acid but it's made up of three amino acids and creatine really is the key component when it comes to creating, generating cellular energy. So as an athlete you have a need for, it's called the Krebs cycle, ATP, ADP. So when you experience short bursts of energy, this is how it all began, in sprint events and sprint events could be sprinting in football.

rugby, ice hockey, track and field, cycling. Your body has a demand for short burst energy. You're not burning carbs and fat at that point. You're using ATP, ADP. So this cellular energy cycle is what enables you to produce high intensity bursts of effort and you can sustain them for a little bit longer with creatine. But where it gets really interesting,

is when you use creatine during training. Your workload increases, your ability to train at high intensity for longer, recover faster, improves, so your baseline fitness goes up to a new level. And that's how it... Yeah. Yeah.

Science For Sport (09:39.628)
And because of that, I think I'm right in saying that, originally at least, creatine was just seen as a strength supplement. Is that now changing?

Steven Jennings (09:46.37)
Yeah!

Yeah, it's changing massively. You know, it was originally strength power. It lived in that world of high performance athletes, teams, professional teams. It then transitioned to, you know, high achieving weekend warriors and people that work out at a really high level in the gym. And it sat in that world for the best part of almost three decades, really. And it's become creating in the world of elite sport and performance.

It's just a normal part of your nutrition stack. Just everybody takes it I mean, you know if I just give you an example of what happened between Barcelona and Atlanta Which was only four years later in Barcelona You can count on the fingers of two hands how many athletes were using creatine by Barcelona it's estimated that 92 % of all athletes across all disciplines had started to supplement with creatine in four years So it went from being it's just it's a

Science For Sport (10:45.843)
Which is astonishing, it? Huge growth.

Steven Jennings (10:47.64)
It's astonishing, it's truly astonishing, but then it's natural, it comes from a food source, it's not anabolic, it has no anabolic properties whatsoever, so it fits in that supplement snack.

The thing with creatine is that it's super bioavailable and it delivers demonstrable, measurable performance improvements. So that was the big breakthrough when this study came out. was literally, it's a one to three percent performance improvement. And for an athlete, I mean, we know with what the team, Team Sky did with David Brelsford of Marginal Games, at this elite level, you're looking for zero

0.01 percents and you compound them creatine comes along and it's one to three percent so there is It it it has yeah

Science For Sport (11:40.284)
It's changed the face of sport across the board without a doubt. I know when we last spoke, Steve, you were quite excited at the time because you offered us a tease as we finished that episode of the Science of Sport podcast by saying you were working on a product and you thought that the benefits of creatine could extend far beyond what were the accepted norms in elite sports. So six months on from that conversation, are we any further down that road?

Steven Jennings (11:50.957)
Yeah.

Steven Jennings (11:55.885)
Yeah.

Steven Jennings (12:03.232)
Yeah. Yeah.

Science For Sport (12:09.789)
Is it expanding and has there been a breakthrough?

Steven Jennings (12:12.534)
Yeah, I can answer yes to all of them. So I'll start with where creating is going.

just explain where it came from and where it is, but where is it going? So the really, the big excitement with creatine isn't really with a performance sport. It's proven, it's known. We are now with creatine and performance, but we are into marginal gains. Where can we find another 0.01 % with creatine? And those 0.01s in elite sport are still there to be discovered with creatine. We are not at the end of creatine's performance improvement journey.

But the big breakthroughs have been with everyday human health. So there's research now emerging.

and it's really indicating strong benefits for creatine when it comes to cognition, brain function and related conditions around that. And that is, if you think about the brain in the context of human performance, eye-hand coordination, huge. If you think about concussion in some sports, there's research indicating benefits of creatine and concussion injuries.

creatine and eye-hand coordination creatine and less fatigue more alert creatine and the role it plays in sleep deprivation England at the World Cup this summer they're going to do a lot of travel it's going to put very interesting demands on their body as they move across time zones so that creates new demands at a cellular level on the players okay so the research is emerging in terms of what can creatine do for some of these fatigue

Steven Jennings (14:05.136)
tiredness, cognition, related use cases, eye-hunt coordination. They're massive. When you apply that thinking to what I call human health, cognition is crucial. Aging population, young people that are studying hard, shift workers, that their circadian rhythm is all over the map, especially shift workers that are blue light workers, they're working for the emergency services.

We've been having some amazing conversations with a guy in Australia that's building the platform all around shift work and helping shift workers to understand how they adapt to work when their bodies say you should be sleeping now and here we are fighting a fire. It's huge. Yeah. Yeah.

Science For Sport (14:52.203)
And this is key, isn't it? Because we talk about elite level sport and we talk about recovery all the time. Well, this is the same field.

Steven Jennings (14:59.808)
It's exactly the same and even as somebody that's a business person or a young mum with two kids and she has a full time job, it's very similar in many instances to what you experience as an elite athlete. You feel fatigued, you feel tired, you start to kind of bridge your day with caffeine and energy drinks which throw your rhythm all over the map. You've got the half life of caffeine and you're still lying awake at 2am.

benefit of creatine in those instances is it's cellular energy, it's foundational, it plays a different role to drinking a coffee because you just need to feel some sharpness at three in the afternoon. With creatine it's a much deeper, more nuanced energy that it gives you, but it's a very real energy and it shifts an individual's perception of, wow, I wake up and I don't feel as fatigued, I'm tired. I have more energy to play with my grandkids.

You know, I'm travelling as a business person and I'm not feeling jet-lagged as much as I used to. You know, these are all real applications for creatine and the thinking around this and the abstraction for the researchers has come from how it's evolved in sport and what's possible outside of sport, new what-if questions.

Science For Sport (16:21.943)
Let's dig a bit deeper into that because as you say, Genesis is in the bedrock of elite level sport. You've mentioned that England, amongst other teams, will absolutely be using creatine across this summer's World Cup. As is always the case with elite level sport, the generation of tomorrow, the youngsters, the kids, copy what they see their idols, their favourite teams, players do. How important is education in all of this?

Steven Jennings (16:27.958)
Yeah, it is.

Steven Jennings (16:35.266)
Yeah, they will.

Steven Jennings (16:45.944)
Yeah, they do. Yeah.

Science For Sport (16:51.135)
You know, you mentioned energy drinks there. I will promise you a lot of young kids drink energy drinks because they see them being used at the World Cup, at the Premier League, wherever it might be.

Steven Jennings (17:01.708)
Yeah, and I think we mustn't discount the impact of influence from elite level sport. I think everything is about context.

If you understand the context, you're able to frame context, you're able to take the story of how anything is used in elite sport. mean, elite cycling today is starting to resemble F1. The bicycles are next generation, 20,000 pounds, 20,000 euros, dollars a pop. They're designed to be raced on. And everything is marginal gains down to the clothing fabrics for airflow and everything is

is kind of super expensive, super elite and for a young cyclist or a young athlete buying that equipment is just it's beyond the means of most parents to do that so you have to put it into context and with youth athletes and creatine in particular context is everything and as a company

we get probably more enquiries related to creatine and youth sport than any other enquiry that we get. To the point where we have a little webinar in June specific to creatine and youth sport. And it's really interesting because a lot of parents...

still think that creatine is a steroid. Is it a steroid? Is it safe? And this is after 30 years of information and content they're asking and these are important questions. Is it safe for my kid to take creatine? All the teams seem to be taking it. Is it a steroid? Are there side effects? So when it comes to creatine and education

Steven Jennings (18:54.25)
It's absolutely mission critical that for my company, Generize, we lead with education. We lead with white papers. We lead with providing content that enables people to understand creating in context. So we've got context of the youth sport athlete, which is crucial. We've got the context of aging population, longevity, health span. We've got the context of women's

health which is a huge huge growth now for creatine. Absolutely huge the numbers of women that have they understand the story around creatine and

from a woman's perspective and they understand it in context. So for youth sport in particular, what we're doing and we're being helped immensely by a nutritionist in the UK called Dan Richardson. He's working with elite sports teams. He's working with sport. Yeah, he's an amazing guy. He's like us. He's from the north of England. So that makes life really easy when we speak. We call it like our connective tissue. We believe that coming from the north of England is

Science For Sport (19:53.757)
He's well known to science for sport followers.

Steven Jennings (20:06.448)
bit of a superpower, we just have something.

Science For Sport (20:08.361)
You won't find an argument from me, Steve.

Steven Jennings (20:10.464)
No, thank you. But Dan has been pivotal in one, he educated myself and my co-founder, daughter partner Rachel in the inbound and questions that he gets around youth, sport and creativity. He's talking to schools, he's getting inbound himself from parents, he's talking to young kids. And Dan alerted us to, you will not believe the questions that are being asked. Steve, you're not going to believe any-

shared with us that it like I just said it's the questions that were being asked in 92 93 so from that we we literally built an education platform to edge yeah yeah

Science For Sport (20:50.603)
Okay, with that in mind Steve then, if I'm an athlete, a practitioner, a parent for example, flipping on his head, what are the questions we should be asking when it comes to using creatine?

Steven Jennings (21:01.39)
Yeah, and I think it really, it is all about context.

There's lots of people think you've got to take 20 grams a day to go on a loading phase and you need to take 10 grams a day or 20 grams a day to get performance benefits. I will say on this podcast, you do not. Okay. If you take three grams a day, three grams a day, you will start to feel a benefit after about 10 days and by day, certainly by day 21 and because people respond to creativity in different ways.

Certainly by day 21 and definitely by day 28 your muscles will be fully saturated But you have to take three grams a day every day and then you're fully saturated you've achieved the objective and then it is as simple as how do I Maintain this you keep taking three grams a day. How long do I keep taking it for forever? Even though you're a youth athlete now You need to take creativity through your entire Health span life journey. It's

because the benefits of become even more important as you age. With a youth athlete they're generating and producing naturally quite a high level of creatine in their body but it's still very small in terms of grams. As you age it's like it falls off a cliff. In your 30s you already start to produce less creatine naturally in the body and your 40s it's more, 50s it drops more and by your 60s it's literally you're producing about 70 % less creatine naturally.

than you were in your teens and twenties. the implications for aging population are truly profound. But yeah, the education is crucial, context is important, creating content that is understandable to a parent, creating content that is understandable to the school, and having that signed off by the school so the school can circulate that. Because they are

Steven Jennings (23:07.93)
comfortable with the document, the research.

It's language is the language that is understood by the kids themselves that are on the sports team. It's understood by their parents and the coach is able to use that document to talk to the parents and talk to the kids. it's all about, you know, it's taking the science and translating it into language that we all speak and understand. We don't speak the language of researchers and peer-reviewed papers. That's not our world.

You have to understand that world. I have to understand that world. But it's then how do you take that language and translate it into something that you and I on a flight, we could sit and talk about it for hours on end because you'd understand it. Like this conversation. It's, it's, you know.

Science For Sport (23:59.328)
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm conscious yet again, Steve, in our conversation, time is getting the better of us. moving forward, what's the next phase with creatine now? Because for many, many years, I think the perception was, like you said, it's a powder, three grams a day, whatever it might be. Is that changing? Will it be, we've mentioned energy drinks earlier, will it come in that fashion? Will it change tablets? What's the future hold for creatine?

Steven Jennings (24:05.57)
Yeah.

Steven Jennings (24:16.738)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean this is a great moment actually just to share what it is that we launched literally just a week as yesterday. So on the 18th of May, we launched our first product as a company. It's the first CreaTeen products.

I've launched since 1992, is astonishing. mean, this is this is a big deal, actually. And what we've done, we haven't launched a creatine product that you or I could buy. What we've built is a creatine ingredient technology. So our company is a creatine ingredient technology company. We're working with our manufacturing company and with

Steven Jennings (25:12.848)
other companies to develop creatine in forms that are designed and optimized for inclusion in different products. Creatine isn't stable in liquid so you have to really think about well how do we stabilize creatine as it comes from the factory in liquid, in moisture. It's very hygroscopic which means it absorbs humidity. It's just simply not stable. we're looking at creatine through the lens of innovation.

that pushes out the thinking about creatine specific to these new benefits for healthy populations so related to human health.

So we've launched this product, it's an ingredient technology. It's a little bit like you buy a jacket and it's got Gore-Tex fabric in it, or you buy a computer and it's got an Intel chip. We are an ingredient technology that other brands will include our Creote technology in their Creote product. So that's what we're building. you know, first... I would say we're building the infrastructure.

Science For Sport (26:17.951)
You're building the framework in essence.

Steven Jennings (26:23.534)
We're building the infrastructure that can be used by companies that are then developing finished products that are then you buy them in Holocon Barrett or the grocery store or online, you know, through websites. So we're a technology that can be used by companies that are innovating products for you and I. And it's a whole world of new products that are being developed. Beverages will come on stream once we've cracked the code on Liquid Stable, edibles, food,

will come on stream. Gummies have been a big success. There are some amazing manufacturers of gummies that are now developing technology that does make creatine more stable in a gummy. you're going to start to see creatine appear in other products fortified with functional nutrition with creatine as one of the ingredients. So we're in that world.

Science For Sport (27:20.299)
It's astonishing, isn't it? Because I mean, you look back, what are we, 34 years on now as we sit here recording this episode from Barcelona 92. And that was the big mushroom explosion, if you like, with creatine coming into the world consciousness. And now it strikes me from what you're saying with the evolution of technology, the greater understanding of substance such as creatine. There's another mushroom cloud explosion just around the corner again.

Steven Jennings (27:25.078)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yes it was.

Yeah.

Steven Jennings (27:40.322)
Yeah.

Steven Jennings (27:46.946)
I think so and even for Rachel and I to understand this ourselves, we've had to create new context about how do we even bring a new product to the market and how do we speak about it? How do we use language that appeals to my mum, my neighbours, like somebody that I meet on a long-haul flight and...

For us, context, story, how we frame everything is the key to everything that we're doing. Yeah, so I'm not sure if that answered your question.

Science For Sport (28:27.915)
It absolutely does. I am fascinated by it. It's the extent that I will insist on having you back on this podcast, maybe in six months time from now when we reflect on how things are progressing at pace. But as always, Steve, I thoroughly enjoy your company. It's been another fascinating conversation around creatine.

Steven Jennings (28:47.374)
Yeah, it's great Richard and yeah, thanks so much for having me on for part two and yeah, I'm for part three and let's make that the first one of 27. Let's seriously, let's agree that I'll be back on and it'll be the kickoff for your Science for Sport podcast in 27 with more news and more storytelling about where Creatine is as we head into next year. Thank you so much.

Science For Sport (29:13.971)
I certainly hope so. Thanks once again, Steve.