If you've been working long and hard in the gym but find that it's weeks or months since you saw any appreciable gains in strength or muscularity, you may well get used to hearing that these sticking points are entirely normal and that there's no alternative to working ever harder until your body somehow miraculously trains its way through the problem.

But unfortunately when it comes to activities such as lifting weights, body-building, field athletics, sprinting or contact sports, the idea that "more is better" simply doesn't work. The problem is that the stronger you get, the more intensively you need to train to maintain your progress, placing huge demands on the energy reserves in your muscles and your body's powers of recovery.

So this can be an intensely frustrating time. Your progress has inevitably slowed, yet if you try to force the pace beyond your body's recovery ability you risk ceasing to progress altogether, and may even find yourself getting weaker.

Not surprisingly then, strength and power event athletes have searched desperately for anything that might help them get past this barrier – even turning in large numbers to the illegal and highly dangerous, but often extremely effective anabolic steroids. But those sensible enough on grounds of ethics or self-preservation not to go down this route needed something else.

The isolation of creatine, a 100% natural substance that seemed to mimic the effects of steroids therefore produced enormous excitement. While even now the science behind creatine remains to some extent in its infancy, the key to its importance seems to lie in its relationship with another compound in your body called adenosine-tri-phosphate (ATP), which is the vital source of energy your muscles need when engaged in an intensive, quick burst activity such as lifting weights or sprinting.

The problem is that in most people supplies of ATP are exhausted as quickly as within 10-15 seconds, to be replaced by the useless by-product, adenosine-bi-phosphate (ADP). Amazingly enough, it seems that the creatine stored within your muscles can then convert the ADP produced by this process back into ATP, producing more energy for your muscles, rather in the way that a car turbocharger works.

More energy in your muscles means the ability to perform longer, harder workouts, which can't help but dramatically accelerate your gains in greater strength and power – always provided of course that you allow adequate time for recovery. And although less well understood, there is evidence that creatine can enhance the process of protein synthesis by which your body repairs and strengthens muscle tissue, potentially reducing the necessary recovery time between workouts.

Creatine is produced in the liver by the synthesis of three essential amino acids – arginine, methionine and glycine and around 95-98% of your body's supply is stored in the muscles – typically in a concentration of around 3.5-4 grams per kilogram of bodyweight.

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