Seizing the Years with Tim Moore
From international classrooms to city basketball leagues in Bogotá, Tim Moore’s story is one of quiet consistency. He first reached out through the CreatineOG Instagram account, sending a thoughtful voice message about how creatine had helped him. I listened once and then again. I knew immediately: we had to get him on the blog.
We spoke about everything from aging and injury. This is Tim’s story. It’s not just about creatine. It’s about coming home to your own energy.
"I had energy,” he told me from a Chilean beach town where he was vacationing. “But my body just wouldn't cooperate. I didn’t know why. I figured maybe that’s just getting older.”
Before Bogotá, before Bangkok, Tim was a basketball-loving teacher from Michigan. Like many of us, the pandemic cracked open the illusion of ‘I’ll just bounce back.’ For Tim, what followed was a years-long process of rebuilding, not just his physique, but his mindset, his lifestyle, and eventually, his relationship to something he had avoided for two decades: creatine.
After losing his fitness identity during lockdowns, he found himself staring at a body that didn’t feel like home. “I was in great shape before. I had a basketball team in Chile. We trained multiple times a week, competed in tournaments. Then post-COVID? I was sedentary, inflamed, exhausted.”
He talks about health not like a coach, but like a teacher; gently analytical, curious, rooted in context. After hiring a trainer and rebuilding his routines from the ground up, his progress was blocked again by a dual hit of plantar fasciitis and Achilles tendonitis. “I could only train in the pool for six months. That was all I could do.”
But he kept going. He had seen what feeling good looked like. He remembered the version of himself that could sprint, jump, hike, and recover like it was nothing. And he wanted that back, not for aesthetics, but for life force.
“I just thought, maybe this is it. Maybe I’m too old to get back to that level.” His trainer, a 25-year-old Colombian named Sergio, disagreed. “He believed in me more than I believed in me,” Tim says with a quiet smile. “He said I was his best student.”
Tim didn’t go looking for creatine. It found him via earbuds, on a Sunday walk.
“I listen to a lot of podcasts when I walk or run,” he says, “but this one just caught me off guard.” The episode was from The Art of Manliness, a show he tuned into often, and the guest? A calm, matter-of-fact Canadian professor named Dr. Darren Candow, talking about… creatine. Not biceps. Not bench presses. Just solid, unflinching science.
“He was so transparent, so rational,” Tim recalls. “He even addressed the hair loss thing, which was huge for me. I was literally planning a follicle transplant at the time.”
For decades, creatine had lived in Tim’s mind as a muscle-bound myth… something for gym rats and supplement junkies. But Dr. Candow’s breakdown of the data dismantled that narrative. The stigma? Based on a single, poorly controlled study. The risks? Virtually nonexistent. The potential? Vast, and wildly underappreciated.
By the end of the hour, Tim had replayed the episode, then brought it up with his doctor. “She had zero hesitation. She said, ‘You can take it.’ That was it.”
Having understood that a loading phase isn’t recommended these days as it has been in the past, he opted for five grams of plain creatine monohydrate a day. No fancy blends. No unnecessary additives. Just consistency.
And then it happened.
“I’ve done 100 push-ups a day for years, usually in four sets of 25,” he tells me, “and I know exactly what my muscles feel like. I’d always feel the burn around rep 16 or 17 in my first set. But two weeks after starting creatine? I got through all 25. No burn. It was surreal.”
He pauses, still a little in awe. “I still paused between sets (30 seconds to 1 minute), but I no longer feel a burn on my first two sets.”
To anyone who's spent years building a relationship with their body, these shifts aren’t small. They’re seismic. They speak not to some placebo surge of motivation, but to real, muscular adaptation and an upgrade in cellular capacity. It wasn’t just his push-ups that improved. It was everything: basketball, lifting, sprinting. He wasn’t just exercising. He was recovering better. He was living better.
“I feel younger,” he says, without irony.
Still, the stigma persists. Ask the average person what creatine is, and you’ll likely hear about steroids, bloating, or bulk. Which is why stories like Tim’s matter. Not because he’s an elite athlete. But because he’s not. He’s a teacher, a traveler, a middle-aged man who refused to accept that vitality had an expiration date.
For someone who once dismissed creatine outright, Tim Moore has become a careful observer of its role in his life, not as a magic fix, but as a steady partner in recovery. On a recent trip to the Chilean coast, he decided to run a quiet experiment: what happens when you stop?
“I’ve been taking five grams daily for months,” he says. “So I was curious, if I stop for ten days, will I notice anything? Will I still feel strong? Will I still hit 25 push-ups without the burn?”
Five days in, the answer was still unfolding. “So far, I haven’t lost it. Maybe that’s the residual effect. Maybe it’s still in my system.”
As we near the end of our conversation, I ask Tim one more thing. If you could get your daily dose of creatine in any form, what would you love that to be?
Tim doesn’t hesitate. “There are two places that would make my life easy,” he says. “First, in a drink like Zipfizz, something I already use daily, with vitamins. If creatine was built in, pre-measured, done. And second, in protein bars. Natural ones. Something I eat after a workout, already part of my routine. Just simple, clean, and clear about how much is inside.”
He pauses, then grins. “It’s not complicated. It’s just got to fit into real life.”
And here’s the part Tim didn’t know when he first sent that voice note through Instagram DMs: the scientist behind his creatine breakthrough (Dr. Darren Candow) is someone we know well at Jenerise. I had just interviewed Darren weeks earlier. He’s not only one of the world’s leading creatine researchers, but now also a scientific advisor on our team.
So when Tim’s story came through, I sent it straight to Darren.
These are the moments that remind us why we do what we do; when research meets real life, and the ripple effect of good science reaches exactly who it’s meant to.
Thank you so much, Tim, for sharing your story with us!
If you would like to be featured or know someone who would be great to feature, please don’t hesitate to email rachael@jenerise.com 😊
We all rise together,
Rachael Jennings | Co-Founder + CBO, Jenerise
