>some nights I will just wake up in the middle of the night and won't be able to get back to sleep, then it's when I feel creatine helps

I suspect creatine is responsible for me not being able to get back to sleep easily, because once I'm awake, I'm awake.

You mentioned that you took up CrossFit after starting creatine. Did your previous fit phases include lifting heavy weights?

Going from minimal exercise to light-moderate exercise will do as much for you as creatine would. To me it's almost a no-brainer to try doing both.

For me, just creatine doesn’t seem to do a whole lot. But heavy workouts (with or without creatine), energize me enormously.

As it's relevant to the sport I practice and just came back from armwrestling training I'd like to randomly comment: Armwrestling clubs have a LOT of people with tendon pain and injuries. The general approach to recovery and building tendon strength (beside lifting heavy) is to do static holds of 10 seconds+ of light to medium weight. Often paired with very large sets (50+ reps) of _extremely light_ weight; lifting almost nothing, just to get the blood through the tendon. You should not feel sore at all in either movement. The idea being that blood gets into tendons through movement. As for static holds; tendons expand during these static holds, so the idea is that they can then absorb more nutrients... Or something like that; I'm no expert by any means!

In the bouldering community there has also been a bit of an uproar where Emil Abrahammsson (find it on Youtube) did very light static holds 2+ times per day for ~30 seconds if I recall correctly for great tendon strength, this also had some influence on how people train for armwrestling. This style was nicknamed "Abrahangs".

I doubt it, it's not the area where creatine is helpful. It'll influence energy provision which helps your muscles recover, and even be a bit stronger in general. I'm in my 45's but I don't experience tendon or joint pain while lifting (my numbers are not going to impress anybody though, but I do train pretty hard). Were I in your shoes I'd take a trip to the GP to try and find out what the source of your pain is. I am tempted to say I would also start taking creatine, but not if you're increasing your load as a result.

Isometric holds. Tendons grow slow and recover slow, generally not as much circulation as muscle.

Big heavy holds will help encourage blood flow without stretching them / stressing them as hard as big lifts.

It seems weird because it goes again ROM ideas, but it has definitely helped protect my arms for rock climbing as well as less fatigue in my legs for big lifts.

I'm going to get yelled at, but eat bacon. Fat is good for tendons. Obviously don't eat immense amounts, but if you're eating none, try eatong a couple of slices on workout days.

20g is a loading dose (typically for a week), then it's 3-5g daily for maintenance. But I've seen studies that 5g daily catches up to the 20g loading dose after about a month.

Your own link shows that what is considered toxic levels are far higher than most people would expect. Vitamin D toxicity is not that easy to accidentally hit.

Overdose has been observed at 1,925 μg/d (77,000 IU per day). Acute overdose requires between 15,000 μg/d (600,000 IU per day) and 42,000 μg/d (1,680,000 IU per day) over several days to months.

And, if you drink a glass of carrot juice a day, you'll receive toxic levels of vitamin A!

~40% of people don't get enough vitamin D [1]. It's not useful to categorize it as some trend, based on people just not following general recommended dosing (with more precise dosing depending entirely on personal sun exposure and skin color).

edit: As an office worker, I take 10k IU per day when I'm entirely indoors (most of the time), but vary it based on sun exposure. I based this on recent studies, and have my doctors approval with an exactly center-of-the-nominal-range vitamin D serum level.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9573946/

My doctor added vitamin D test to his patients recurring blood work since the start of COVID, and found out just about all his patients was deficient or near it.

If you don't have a primarily fish based diet or spend hours under direct overhead sunlight every day without a shirt on, you're probably deficient as well.

I've also heard about it 'hardening' in the bloodstream and that you should really be taking it with K2 as well. This is anecdotal so someone please do more research than basing anything from this comment

Yeah, of course I tried to drink more water. I also tried to ramp up the dose slower.

But the cramps are really debilitating, as in random back muscle locks up debilitating, so I thought it best to just give up on this.

How much water can 3g of creatine bind to? Is it like orbeez?

That would be an argument against trying a different source

Your body can synthesize creatine, so it's not essential, but meat is a source of exogenous creatine and eating it results in higher stored creatine levels, which is slightly good for muscle power endurance in the ~5-15 second effort range. Supplementing produces slightly higher relative improvements in creatine levels in vegetarians and vegans than it does in people who eat meat.

Nobody gets fired for supplementing vegans.

Because they lack all kinds of substances that meateaters get plenty of.

Because meat is the best source of creatine from diet.

Well, if vegetarians and those of the Vegan religion don't get enough creatine it is most likely related to them not partaking of an important source of the substance: meat.

Not vouching for creatine, but in general, humans get some vital nutrients from animal consumption. Vegans have to take some B-vitamins for best health due to what they don't get from meat. I assume creatine is the same.

Interesting, I wonder how that is related? Do you believe you are getting hearing loss because you are retaining more water, or because you are dehydrated from retaining more water elsewhere in the body with the same intake rate? Does this go away if you were taking creatine and drinking more water? Or does it come up if you simply drink more water?

That and everyone should be taking a statin.

Any reason someone at a healthy BMI should take GLP-1?