Ferris Coach Decided To Test It First-Hand

Call it the creatine craze.

Advertisements for the muscle-building supplement are everywhere. Everybody is using it.

Only part of that is true. It just seems like everybody is using it. But tired of the advertising blitz and being encouraged by distributors to provide it for his athletes, Ferris football coach Clarence Hough became one of the users.

“I gained 10 pounds in one week, just doing what I’d been doing,” Hough said of his January experiment. “I didn’t change my diet, I lifted the same way I had been lifting weights. My repetitions went up and I jumped my max on the bench press 20 pounds in two weeks.”

Hough was curious.

“The reason I did that is kids were buying it at the health store, and when they were at the health club, there were a lot of people who were pushing it,” he said. “I read the documentation on it and I wanted to see if it would really work.”

It did.

“I really did have the feeling if I would have been lifting hard, I could have gained like 20 pounds if I would have pushed that end of it,” Hough said. “Your lifts go up, your confidence level goes up, the whole thing.”

He didn’t notice any of the side effects - dehydration, diarrhea, cramps or muscle pulls - generally attributed to creatine use, but said he wasn’t doing any aerobic exercise at the time. He also said it took him several months to drop the 10 pounds he gained.

“I took what they told me to take at GNC (General Nutrition Center),” Hough said. “I went through about $80 worth. It took about six weeks to two months to go through a cycle. There is an initial load phase where you take a bunch of it for the first week, like four times a day. Then you take it once a day for five weeks.”

Still, he chose not to provide creatine to his players.

“There is no policy on creatine as near as I can tell,” he said. “If there was one, I would certainly go along with that. I don’t have an opinion on it one way or another. The only thing I know is all those people who contacted me so I would sell it out of my weight room, I said no to all of those people. I didn’t want to be in the drug business.”