VMI Sports Creatine +Hydration: Pürest Creatine Meets a Full Electrolyte Stack

Creatine only works as well as the cells holding it are hydrated. That's the idea behind VMI Sports Creatine +Hydration, which puts a full 5g of Pürest Creatine next to a chelated electrolyte complex and 1g of taurine. No stims, no artificial colors.

VMI Sports has expanded its creatine lineup with a dedicated stim-free option: VMI Sports Creatine +Hydration, a daily creatine and electrolyte powder now in Tropical Mango and PEZ Lemon. Rather than stacking creatine into a caffeinated pre-workout, VMI built a separate formula around a simple idea: creatine performs best when the muscle cells holding it are properly hydrated.

Each scoop pairs a full 5g dose of premier-quality creatine monohydrate with a TRAACS-chelated mineral complex, Aquamin sea minerals, L-taurine, and coconut water concentrate, all naturally flavored with zero artificial colors. This is how you do it right.

VMI's Creatine +Hydration Goes Permanent: A Successful 4th of July Launch

We first covered this formula in June, when VMI launched it alongside a separate, caffeinated Creatine Pre-Workout in a limited Patriot Pop flavor for America's 250th anniversary. Tropical Mango and Lemon PEZ are now the flavors most people will find on shelves, earning Creatine +Hydration its own dedicated breakdown today. VMI Sports president Tom Reilly touched on the brand's creatine push on Episode #226 of the PricePlow Podcast, recorded a few weeks after launch.

Using NNB Nutrition's Pürest Creatine: Top-Tier Pure Creatine Monohydrate

The anchor ingredient is Pürest Creatine™, NNB Nutrition's ultra-high-purity creatine monohydrate, dosed at a full 5g. Everything else in the formula supports that creatine with hydration: a Hydration Mineral / Electrolyte Complex built from TRAACS-chelated potassium, magnesium, and calcium alongside Aquamin sea minerals and pink Himalayan salt, plus 1g of L-taurine and a touch of coconut water concentrate. It's built for daily use, whether that's a training day or one of the rest days in between.

VMI's creatine catalog has grown quickly this year, adding a stim-based Creatine Pre-Workout and, more recently, Creatine Gummies for anyone who'd rather chew their daily dose. Creatine +Hydration fills the stim-free, hydration-forward slot in that lineup.

VMI Sports Creatine +Hydration Ingredients

Each single scoop (8.7g) serving provides the following:

• Pürest Creatine™ Creatine Monohydrate - 5g

  Creatine monohydrate is the most researched ergogenic aid in sports nutrition, and the evidence for it is about as settled as sports nutrition evidence gets.

  The International Society of Sports Nutrition's position stand concludes that creatine supplementation is safe and effective for increasing training capacity, strength, and lean mass across a wide range of populations.^[1] Mechanistically, creatine expands phosphocreatine stores in skeletal muscle, which speeds ATP resynthesis during high-intensity efforts and translates into more reps, more sets, and more total training volume over time.

  The 5g daily dose VMI uses here sits at the standard maintenance dose used throughout the research. In one 12-week trial, older women taking 5g of creatine daily alongside resistance training gained significantly more strength, fat-free mass, and functional performance than a placebo group on the same program,^[2] a useful data point on what a matched 5g dose can do even outside a young, competitive-athlete population.

  Creatine's benefits extend past strength, too. A 2024 study found a single dose of creatine improved cognitive performance during a night of sleep deprivation, alongside measurable changes in the brain's own high-energy phosphate stores.^[3] Don't expect a stimulant-like kick from this product. Expect steadier, saturated phosphocreatine stores that show up as better performance week after week.

  A focus on Pürest Creatine

  What sets this specific creatine apart is the source. Pürest Creatine™ is NNB Nutrition's ultra-high-purity creatine monohydrate, built to push below the "99.9% pure" marketing floor that most creatine on the market treats as a ceiling. NNB targets trace impurities like dihydrotriazine, creatinine (creatine's own breakdown byproduct), and dicyandiamide that accumulate during standard manufacturing, and the resulting product tests clean enough that testing labs had to adjust their own methods to measure it accurately. For a supplement meant to be used daily (and sometimes at rather high gram-level doses), that purity translates into more consistent mixability and less batch-to-batch variance than a standard creatine source.

• L-Taurine - 1g

  

  Taurine is a sulfur-containing amino acid found in high concentrations in skeletal muscle, the heart, and the brain. Unlike most amino acids, it isn't built into proteins. Instead, it circulates freely inside cells as an organic osmolyte, helping cells hold and regulate their own water content under stress.

  A 2021 review in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, covering doses from under 1g up to 6g, concluded that taurine shows its clearest ergogenic promise in aerobic and anaerobic exercise, alongside benefits for metabolic stress and recovery from muscle damage,^[4] with VMI's 1g dose falling squarely in that studied range. A systematic review focused specifically on dosing found taurine's aerobic and strength benefits appear consistently across that same 1g to 6g window.^[5]

  More recently, a 2025 meta-analysis pooling 23 randomized trials found that a single acute dose of taurine produced small-to-moderate improvements in overall exercise performance.^[6] In a hydration-focused formula, taurine's cell-volumizing role fits naturally alongside the electrolyte complex below.

• Coconut Water Concentrate (Cocos nucifera) - 100mg

  Coconut water concentrate is a naturally derived electrolyte source, prized mainly for its potassium content alongside smaller amounts of sodium, magnesium, and calcium.^[7] A study comparing coconut water directly against a standard carbohydrate-electrolyte sports drink found it held up well as a rehydration option following a dehydrating bout of treadmill exercise.^[8]

  At 100mg of concentrate, this isn't the formula's primary electrolyte source. That job belongs to the complex below, but it adds a natural-origin layer to the potassium total and fits the ingredient-quality theme running through the rest of the label.

• Hydration Mineral / Electrolyte Complex

  

  VMI groups the rest of the formula's minerals into a Hydration Mineral / Electrolyte Complex, six ingredients that together deliver the calcium (39mg, 3% DV), magnesium (28mg, 7% DV), chloride (145mg, 6% DV), sodium (98mg, 4% DV), and potassium (78mg, 2% DV) declared at the top of the supplement facts panel.

  • Potassium Glycinate Complex TRAACS® - 400mg

    Potassium is the body's primary intracellular electrolyte, and it's also one of the minerals athletes lose fastest through sweat. A study tracking sweat mineral losses across seven hours of exercise-heat stress found measurable potassium depletion alongside sodium losses, reinforcing why a hydration formula built for training needs to address more than sodium alone.^[9]

    Here, potassium arrives as a TRAACS® glycinate complex, Albion Minerals' amino acid chelation technology that bonds the mineral to glycine to help it move through intestinal transit more efficiently than a standard potassium salt. Combined with the coconut water concentrate above, this complex accounts for the label's full 78mg of elemental potassium.

  • Pink Himalayan Salt - 251mg

    Pink Himalayan salt supplies the sodium and chloride declared at the top of the label, the two primary electrolytes governing extracellular fluid balance. Sodium is the electrolyte most responsible for retaining the water you drink, and losses can be substantial during training. A review of dehydration and rehydration strategies in competitive sport notes that most athletes fail to fully replace sweat losses during exercise, with sodium among the electrolytes most commonly shorted.^[10]

    Sweat sodium concentrations also vary widely between individuals. One study of professional football players found sweat sodium losses that varied sharply by position and body size,^[11] which is why a fixed daily sodium dose works best as a reasonable baseline rather than a precise match for every athlete's sweat rate. Pink Himalayan salt also carries trace minerals alongside its sodium and chloride, though at 251mg those trace amounts are minor next to the electrolytes themselves.

  • Aquamin® S Sea Minerals (Lithothamnium sp.) (whole plant) - 250mg

    

    Stim or no stim? VMI Sports just launched both. A three-source caffeine Creatine Pre-Workout and a stim-free Creatine +Hydration, each with a full 5g creatine, all in Patriot Pop for America's 250th.

    Aquamin® is a trademarked marine-derived mineral complex, harvested from the calcified red algae Lithothamnion species. Rather than isolating a single mineral, Aquamin captures the algae's full mineral matrix, contributing to the label's calcium total alongside a naturally occurring blend of trace elements the algae accumulates from seawater over its lifespan.^[12]

    Most of Aquamin's own published research centers on bone mineral health rather than hydration specifically. Laboratory studies have found the complex supports mineralization in bone-forming cells more effectively than an equivalent amount of calcium carbonate alone,^[13] a distinction worth knowing even though this formula leans on Aquamin for its calcium and trace mineral contribution rather than a bone health claim.

  • Magnesium Bisglycinate Chelate TRAACS® - 100mg

    Magnesium is a cofactor in more than 300 enzymatic reactions in the body, including the ones that generate and use ATP.^[14] It's also a commonly under-consumed mineral, and training itself raises the demand for it.

    In professional cyclists competing in a multi-day stage race, magnesium supplementation was associated with reduced markers of exercise-induced muscle damage over the course of the event.^[15] This first of two magnesium forms in the complex uses Albion's bisglycinate chelation, pairing magnesium with glycine to support absorption through intestinal dipeptide transporters and improve GI tolerability compared to cheaper forms like magnesium oxide.

  • Magnesium Lysinate Glycinate Chelate TRAACS® - 100mg

    

    Tom Reilly, president of VMI Sports, returns to share the brand's newest grocery wins, a full creatine product lineup, and what's coming next in Episode #226 of the PricePlow Podcast.

    This second magnesium lysinate glycinate chelate swaps in a dual amino acid carrier, lysine plus glycine, instead of straight glycinate alone. The underlying mineral and its physiological roles are identical to the bisglycinate form above, but the different carrier may offer a somewhat different absorption pathway, giving the formula two routes toward the same 28mg elemental magnesium target instead of relying on a single chelate. Splitting the dose across two Albion chelates is a common approach among formulas built around ingredient quality rather than cost.

  • Calcium Bisglycinate Chelate TRAACS® - 50mg

    Calcium does more than support bone health. Inside muscle fibers, calcium release from the sarcoplasmic reticulum is the trigger for actomyosin cross-bridge formation, the actual mechanical event behind a muscle contraction.^[16] Exercise itself can disrupt that balance. Sportswomen performing an hour of strenuous exercise showed measurable dermal calcium losses through sweat, alongside shifts in calcium regulation that a pre-exercise calcium dose has been shown to help offset.^[17]

    Here, calcium bisglycinate chelate works alongside Aquamin above to reach the label's 39mg of elemental calcium, using Albion's glycinate chelation for a form that's gentler on digestion than calcium carbonate at equivalent doses.

Flavors Available

Creatine +Hydration launched in a limited Patriot Pop flavor tied to America's 250th anniversary, and Tropical Mango and PEZ Lemon are the flavored options taking over as the formula's ongoing flagship. VMI sweetens the line with sucralose and colors them naturally.

Here's an up-to-date list of all flavors of VMI Sports Creatine +Hydration:

How to Use

• When to take it: Before, during, or after your workout on training days, or anytime on rest days.
• With or without food: Either works. Mix it with 8oz to 12oz of water or another beverage.
• Other notes: VMI recommends not using this product for more than 8 consecutive weeks at a time.

Stacks Well With

• VMI Sports Creatine Pre-Workout: VMI's caffeinated, three-source-caffeine pre-workout launched alongside Creatine +Hydration. Run Creatine +Hydration on rest days and the Pre-Workout on training days for a stim and stim-free split, or use Creatine +Hydration as your daily baseline and add the Pre-Workout only when you want the extra kick.
• VMI Sports Protolyte: VMI's whey isolate protein, also built with TRAACS chelated minerals, pairs naturally as a post-workout companion.
• VMI Sports Aminogex Ultra: Adds a full amino acid and BCAA profile for a more complete recovery stack alongside the creatine and electrolytes here.

Who It's For

• Stim-free creatine users: Anyone who wants a full 5g daily creatine dose without pairing it to a caffeinated pre-workout, whether that's a rest-day routine or an evening session.
• Athletes training in heat or high sweat volumes: The electrolyte complex is built to address the sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium that heavy sweating pulls from the body.
• Daily creatine users who want more flavor: Combining creatine and electrolytes in a single naturally flavored powder simplifies a routine that would otherwise mean two separate products.

Conclusion: A Cleaner Way to Run Creatine Daily

Tom Reilly, president of VMI Sports, walks through a decade of building a bootstrapped supplement brand -- from Lone Star Distribution house brand to grocery chains, the PEZ collab, and two mystery canned beverages on the horizon, on Episode #205 of the PricePlow Podcast.

VMI Sports Creatine +Hydration takes a straightforward idea, that creatine works best when your muscle cells are properly hydrated, and builds a formula around it. The 5g dose of Pürest Creatine anchors things with the same well-established benefits creatine has shown for decades, while the TRAACS-chelated electrolyte complex, Aquamin sea minerals, taurine, and coconut water concentrate handle the hydration side without adding a single milligram of caffeine.

Tropical Mango gives the formula a flavor built to stick around as VMI's ongoing creatine and hydration option. For more on how VMI approaches its formulas and where the brand is headed next, Tom Reilly's conversation on Episode #205 of the PricePlow Podcast is worth a listen.

Sign up for VMI Sports alerts below to catch new flavors and formulas as they land, and check PricePlow for current pricing and availability on Creatine +Hydration.