You Cannot Sleep Before an Important Event? Take High Dose Creatine or Low Dose Caffeine to Battle Fatigue Induced Decrement in Skill Performance and Increase Testosterone.

Image 1: LG's Anadraulic State is only
one example for some of the 2nd generation
pre-workout products with deliberately lowered
amounts of caffeine and increased amounts of
creatine & other ergogenics in it.

You know it, you love it: Creatine Monohydrate - the godfather of dietary supplements; but did you know that Creatine supplementation at 50 or 100mg/kg body weight is as effective as low (1mg/kg) or high dose (5mg/kg) caffeine in preventing the decrease in athletic skill performance after sleep deprivation?

On ten separate occasions, Cook et al. (Cook. 2011) had ten elite rugby players complete 10 trials on a simple rugby passing skill test (20 repeats per trial). On five of these occasions the players had slept their usual 7-9h on the other five occasions, however, they only slept 3-5h before reporting to the laboratory. While the 2-6h of sleep they were lacking "resulted in a significant fall in skill performance accuracy on both the dominant and non-dominant passing sides (p < 0.001)" in the placebo supplemented players, the sleep deprived athletes who consumed either creatine (50 or 100mg/kg) or caffeine (1 or 5 mg/kg) 1.5h before the test performed just as well as they did in the non-sleep-deprived trials:

No fall in skill performance was seen with caffeine doses of 1 or 5 mg/kg, and the two doses were not significantly different in effect. Similarly, no deficit was seen with creatine administration at 50 or 100 mg/kg and the performance effects were not significantly different.

Interesting side-effects, the scientists observed was the increase in testosterone [roughly 32% in sleep deprived and roughly 22% in fresh athletes], the higher dose of creatine supplementation brought about and the increase in cortisol from high dose caffeine:

Salivary testosterone was not affected by sleep deprivation, but trended higher with the 100 mg/kg creatine dose, compared to the placebo treatment (p = 0.067). Salivary cortisol was elevated (p = 0.001) with the 5 mg/kg dose of caffeine (vs. placebo).

So, if you got to chose, you probably better use a higher dose of creatine and drink a small cup of coffee than taking one of the highly stimulating preworkout products with loads of caffeine and only small doses of creatine, to optimize athletic performance and your testosterone to cortisol ratio.