You know that week before your period when your brain feels like it's buffering? Your workout feels twice as hard, words go missing mid-sentence, and you're running on caffeine and willpower to get through a Tuesday. You've probably blamed stress, sleep, your diet or your mindset. Hormones are part of the story too, and researchers are starting to look at how they affect your body's energy systems, including creatine.
How do your hormones affect creatine and energy?
Creatine is the compound your cells use to regenerate ATP, your body's energy currency, quickly. Two reviews led by Smith-Ryan and colleagues bring together what's known about creatine in women:
- Creatine Supplementation in Women's Health: A Lifespan Perspective (Nutrients, 2021) describes hormone-related changes in how women's bodies handle creatine and resynthesize phosphocreatine, and suggests supplementation may be particularly relevant during menstruation, pregnancy, postpartum and around menopause.
- Creatine in Women's Health: Bridging the Gap from Menstruation Through Pregnancy to Menopause (Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 2025) concludes that creatine is a promising strategy for women's health across the lifespan, particularly with resistance training.
The common thread: women's creatine metabolism isn't the same as men's, and it shifts as estrogen and progesterone rise and fall. Much of the earlier creatine research didn't account for that.
What happens during your luteal phase?
Your cycle has four phases. The menstrual phase kicks it off, followed by the follicular phase through ovulation, when many women feel sharp and strong. Then ovulation, and then the luteal phase: the roughly two weeks before your next period, when progesterone rises and estrogen fluctuates. For a lot of women, everything feels harder in that window.
Research backs some of this up. In a randomized, placebo-controlled study of 39 active women, sprint performance and recovery were lower in the high-hormone (luteal) phase for everyone. In the women taking creatine, the data suggested creatine could help offset that dip, though the difference wasn't statistically significant. It's an early but encouraging sign, and a reason researchers want more studies that track the cycle.
What about perimenopause and menopause?
Zoom out and the same hormone-energy connection plays out on a longer timeline. During perimenopause, estrogen fluctuates more dramatically before declining for good. Brain-imaging research has found that brain energy metabolism shifts with sex and across the menopause transition. Maybe you're forgetting where you put things, or describing yourself as "not as sharp as I used to be."
Can creatine help? The evidence is still early. The 2025 review notes that creatine may improve mood and cognitive function, while data specifically in perimenopausal women remains limited. A meta-analysis in healthy people found creatine improved memory, with larger effects in older adults. And for muscle, which declines faster after menopause, creatine plus strength training has added lean mass and strength in older adults compared with training alone.
Why wasn't creatine part of this conversation?
For decades, creatine research focused mostly on young men. It got shelved in the sports aisle next to the pre-workout tubs with skulls on them, never framed as a supplement for women, because women were rarely centered in the research. That's changing. A growing body of work now looks at creatine through the lens of female physiology: hormonal fluctuations, life stages, and how women's needs differ. If you want the bigger picture first, start with creatine for brain, muscle and healthy aging.
What's inside Muscle Memory, and why?
We built Muscle Memory as a layered formula rather than a single ingredient.
5 g Creavitalis creatine monohydrate. 99.9% pure, made in Germany and micronized to mix easily: creatine monohydrate in its most studied form. (Why we chose it is in Part 2 of our creatine series.)
elevATP, ancient peat and apple extract (150 mg). In a 12-week trial in resistance-trained men, the same 150 mg daily dose of elevATP improved squat and deadlift strength gains compared with placebo. It hasn't been studied specifically in women.
D-ribose (1 g). A simple sugar that forms part of the ATP molecule. Creatine helps recycle ATP quickly; ribose is a raw material for rebuilding it. In a small study using higher doses, ribose sped the recovery of muscle ATP after a week of intense training, though performance wasn't different.
Taurine (500 mg). An amino acid-like compound found in high concentrations in heart and muscle, where it helps regulate calcium handling and oxidative stress; on its own, at 1 to 6 g, it has been linked to better endurance performance.
Together they're designed to support your cells' energy system from more than one direction, rather than a single-ingredient tub with low-quality creatine and a name like "Pump Master X."
How to start
One scoop a day, every day, paired with resistance training a few times a week. Muscle Memory is acai berry flavored and has no sugar. Our practical guide to taking creatine covers dosing, timing and what to expect. If you're pregnant, breastfeeding or have kidney disease, talk to your doctor before taking creatine. Your hormones are going to do what they do, and the luteal-phase slump is real, but you don't have to white-knuckle through it without understanding what's going on.
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This article is for education only and isn't medical advice. Talk to your healthcare provider before starting any new supplement, especially if you have kidney, liver or other medical conditions, are pregnant or breastfeeding, or take prescription medication. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
