Ohio State’s Department of Sports and Exercise Science is conducting an experiment on the effects of creatine as a sports performance enhancement Spring Quarter.”Creatine is a widely used erogenic aid by athletes at virtually all levels, from junior high athletes all the way to the very highest Olympic caliber athletes,” said Steven Devor, assistant professor of sports and exercise science and member of the creatine experiment team.Creatine is found in some foods such as fish and red meat, but according to research, it is impossible to consume creatine through normal eating, said Robert DiSilvestro, a professor for human nutrition and food management. The amount of diet is not as high as required to gain enough energy to increase athletic performance. Today manufacturers are producing and selling creatine in a powder and pill form that they claim enhances athletic performance.”I did see results when using creatine,” said Jesse Leng, a freshman OSU wrestler and exercise science major. “I saw myself getting bigger and putting on more muscle mass.” According to DiSilvestro, previous studies on creatine show no sign of short-term side effects. He said only one study dealing with long term was done, in which no effects were found.Paul Santiago, divisional manager at Bally Total Fitness, also has used creatine.”I have been using creatine for a long time and the only side effect I noticed was a positive one. Creatine just helps to increase the body’s ability to perform better and keeps it from getting tired faster,” Santiago said.According to Santiago, creatine helps people who work out regularly, otherwise the creatine goes to waste. Santiago said people who work out at least three times will notice a difference in about two weeks in increased muscle stamina and endurance.Devor said the reason for doing the creatine research project at OSU was that there is a high interest in creatine supplementation. The participants will be chosen from the sports, fitness and health program classes, specifically the weight-training courses. Only male subjects who are trained weight-lifters and have been lifting for more than a year will be chosen to participate. “The experiment will be divided into five categories with 10 subjects in each group,” Devor said. The categories for the experiment are a placebo group, a creatine group, a magnesium supplement group, a magnesium and creatine group and a magnesium, creatine, chelate group.According to Devor, chelate is a compound that biochemically fuses the magnesium supplement to the creatine.”When you fuse magnesium and creatine it will enhance its availability to the cell, thus being up-taken more rapidly and it becomes a more effective aid then creatine alone,” Devor said.The experiment will last 11 days and the subjects will be evaluated on two weight-training exercises.The first exercise will be the bench press, which will work the large muscles of the pectoralis region. The second exercise will be the leg press, which will capture the lower body, the large muscles of the leg and the gluteal region, including hamstrings and quadriceps. “There will be a pre-post design where subjects will initially come in and do a repetition of the bench press and the leg press. They will then do a fatigue test where they will do repetitions at the bench press and leg press until they can’t do anymore,” Devor said. “Then we will give them the supplements for 10 days and they will be reevaluated on the same exercises.”The supplements will be taken in a capsule form,” Devor said. “The subjects will not know what groups they have been assigned to and neither will the investigators, thus being a double-blinded study.”The design and plan of the experiment was constructed by DiSilvestro, Joshua Selsby, a graduate student in sports and science exercise, and Devor. But the study was originally initiated by the Albion Laboratories, which had done a preliminary research of creatine on rats.”In testing with this compound they found it extremely effective,” Devor said. “Because the results were so promising on the rats we decided to do a study on humans.”Selsby said when he was an undergraduate student, he had done research on creatine and its effect on swimmers at the College of Wooster.”I looked at two doses, both a high and low dose of creatine supplementation on swimmers,” Selsby said. “Even though my expectation was that the supplementation would positively effect the performance on sprint swimmers, the findings of the study were that there was no real benefit with sprint swimming and creatine supplementation.”To see if creatine supplementation would have any effect on swimming performance, OSU did a four-week study on highly trained swimmers. One-half of the subjects received creatine supplementation and the other half consumed the placebo pill. The study revealed that Creatine supplementation had no influence on the performance of swimmers.Selsby said that even though there were no positive co-relations of creatine and swimming, they wanted to see if there was an effect on weight-lifters and designed this experiment.Devor said they have sent an expeditious review for the creatine project to the OSU Human Subjects Review Committee for the approval.The subjects will be chosen during the first two weeks of Spring Quarter on a volunteer basis. The experiment will begin Spring Quarter and last till the end of the quarter.