Mark Richardson

I spent 2 years feeling like an old man, and everything I bought to fix it did nothing. I'm 58. For a good couple of years I'd been telling myself the same thing every bloke my age does. That I was just getting old. The knees going up the stairs. Knackered by 9pm. Putting the bins out and feeling it the next morning. The strength I'd always taken for granted just quietly walking out the door. I'd made my peace with it. That's what you do, innit. You're 58, not 28. Get on with it. But I didn't like the man I was turning into. I'm 58, not 88. I wasn't ready to feel this old. I never went to the doctor about it. What's he going to say. You're getting older, mate. So I just moaned about it. To anyone who'd listen. Mostly my son. He's 29, practically lives in the gym, one of those lads who's read the science on everything. And every time I moaned, he said the same thing. "Dad, half of that's just muscle. You lose it as you get older. Creatine's the most proven thing for hanging onto it. Especially at your age." I told him to do one. I wasn't necking gym powder at 58. But he wouldn't let it go. Eventually he wore me down. He got me a tub of the powder, and I gave it a real go. And I'll be honest, even in those first couple of weeks, I started to feel a bit of a difference. A bit more in the legs. Recovered a bit quicker after a heavy day in the garden. Nothing dramatic. But enough that I thought, alright, maybe the lad's onto something. The trouble was the powder itself. Christ, what a faff. The scoop. The shaker. The clumps that never dissolve. That gritty bit at the bottom of the glass you know is the dear stuff you paid for, just sat there. Half the time I forgot it. The other half I couldn't be bothered. Two weeks in, doing something or not, the tub went to the back of the cupboard with the rest of my good intentions. I told my son it wasn't for me. He didn't even look up. "Why don't you take the gummies instead?" Turns out you can get creatine in a gummy now. Two a day, chewed like sweets. No shaker, no mess, no faff. Now that, I could do. So I bought a tub. And for the first time, I thought I'd cracked it. I took them every day. Religiously. A month went by. Nothing. Two months. Still nothing. Same knees. Same tiredness. Same old man in the mirror. So I figured that particular brand was rubbish. I tried another. Then another. Different label, same result. Nothing. I'd spent a few hundred quid by this point and had absolutely nothing to show for it. And it didn't make sense. The powder had started to do something. These were doing nothing. Part of me started to wonder if I'd imagined it. If maybe it really was just my age after all, and I should shut up and live with it. But it nagged at me. So one night I couldn't sleep, got my computer and started digging. And I found something that made my blood boil. A big supplement company had got fed up and sent a load of the popular creatine gummies off to a proper lab. More than half of them failed. And I don't mean a bit short. Brands promising 1 or 2 grams of creatine were turning up with 0.1, 0.2. Some had nothing in them at all. Turns out creatine doesn't survive well in a gummy. The way most of them are made, it breaks down into something useless before it ever gets to you. One brand promised 5 grams a serving. The lab found 0.005. You read that right. Basically nothing. I sat there at one in the morning, fuming. I hadn't failed. My body hadn't failed. The powder had worked because the powder actually had creatine in it. The gummies did nothing because there was nothing in them. I'd been handing over good money for fancy sweets. So now I had a different problem. If half of them are basically empty, how does a normal bloke tell the real ones from the rubbish? And the answer was, you can't. Not from the label. Not from the reviews. The only way to know is if the company actually tests what's in the gummy, every batch, and shows you. Most don't. Because most wouldn't like what they found. So I went looking for one that did. There was one that tested every single batch with an independent lab and put the results out for anyone to see. I checked them myself. The numbers were real. The creatine was actually in there. I'd been burned three times by then, so I wasn't holding my breath. I just wanted to see, for once, what the stuff actually did when it was actually in there. I gave it a proper go. Daily. No skipping. And this time was different. The first thing wasn't strength. It was recovery. A day in the garden stopped wiping me out for two days after. I'd get up the next morning and just feel normal. Then the energy. More in the tank of an evening. Less of that bone-tired feeling by nine. And then, slowly, the strength started coming back. Same as the powder had hinted at, only this time I actually stuck with it. I stopped dreading the stairs. I went back to the jobs round the house I'd been putting off because they wiped me out I picked up my grandson without doing my back in and paying for it all day. I'm not going to tell you I feel 25 again. I don't. I'm 58. But I feel like me again. Strong enough to keep up. Not an old man before his time. Now I'll be straight with you, because I've been on the wrong end of the overpromising. Creatine isn't magic. It won't make you young. It's just the most proven thing there is for holding onto your muscle and strength as you get older, and recovering better while you're at it. The catch is it only works if it's actually in the gummy. For two years, in my case, it wasn't. If you're where I was, feeling yourself going downhill and blaming it all on your age, here's the only thing I'd say. Some of it is age. But a lot of it is muscle, and that part you can do something about. And if you've tried creatine gummies and felt nothing, it's almost certainly not you. It's them. Don't write yourself off as past it. I nearly did. If you want to feel like yourself again, this brand I use is called Power Chews. Mine's the watermelon, you won't regret it. I'll leave you the link below. – Dave P.S. Don't take my word for any of it. The reason I trust Power Chews is every single batch is lab-tested by Eurofins, an independent lab, and they publish the results. So before you spend a penny you can see it's a proper 1.5g of real creatine per gummy, and that it's genuinely in there. That's the one thing the dodgy ones won't do. P.P.S. It couldn't be simpler. 3 gummies a day, chewed like sweets, no tub, no shaker, no faff. And they back it with a 60-day money-back guarantee. Take it for two months, and if you feel nothing, you get your money back. They can only offer that because they know what's in them. P.P.P.S. They've got a deal on at the minute that brings it down to pennies a day, less than I was wasting on the empty ones. UK based, comes next day. P.P.P.P.S. If you've got a dad or a husband who's gone quiet about getting older, this is the thing to put in front of him. Just know they make it in small batches and it does sell out, so if it's there, don't sit on it.