I can second this, do NOT start at 25g of creatine. If you're too lazy to read the literature a friendly AI tool will summarize it.
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If your intention is to take creatine long term, skip the loading phase.
It might take longer to see full effects, but who cares if you’re intending to take it indefinitely.
Most guidance I’ve seen says to start with a loading phase of 25-30g per day for several days, then go down to 5g per day maintenance.
The loading phase frankly was designed for studies. Studies are often short-term, say 6 weeks. You've got to get everyone's creatine supplies "loaded up" quickly in an effort to make sure the bulk of the study is on folks with relatively comparable creatine stores. The easiest way to do this is to have everyone do a loading phase to reach max intramuscular creatine concentration. It is not for the benefit of the study participants; it's for the benefit of the study.
We humans not in studies are generally looking for a health benefit, not max intramuscular creatine concentration as fast as possible at the price of side effects. We are optimizing for something different than study authors. 5 g is fine.
This sounds intense... I'm a small female and I recently started at 5g a day and now I've dropped down to 2g a day because even at just 5g I was getting signs of dehydration, despite tripling my water intake. It does seem to make a difference in my physical performance so I'm overall happy with it.
Also the NIH fact sheet for creatine specifically recommends against higher starting doses.
I did the 25g a day loading phase and I could not tell any sort of effect at all one way or another. I do lift either more weight or do more reps pretty much every time I work out now. What was repping to failure a month or two ago is not even a working set now.
Per day being a key part of that. 30g at once is going to give a good chunk of people pretty severe cramping or a trip to the bathroom.
I don't think you can even do 30g at once in terms of mixing it. Even 5g in water it seems like theres some that will just stay crashed out of solution no matter what. I have done 25g over the course of a day though for a week long loading phase, and didn't notice any ill effects.
I think a lot of the anecdata on creatine is probably from people misplacing confounding issues to the creatine use. People in this thread are talking about heart palpitations or trouble sleeping. Stressful days at work are enough to trigger that.
Creatine isn't water soluble. I just take a 5g scoop daily and wash it down with water. I could do 6 scoops in a row without problem, but not sure what the point would be. The latest research fits with the 5g/day no need to load.
When I first started taking creatine in the late 90s (it had already been heavily studied then as one of the only supplements that improved athletic performance), I would mix it with juice. There were some studies that sugar would help the uptake.
If you're too lazy to read the literature, then just don't take it.
Going to something that frequently hallucinates or misstates things to the point where it's "trust, but verify by reading the source" means you may as well just read the literature you'd have to verify the summary against anyway.