How Do You Make The Descision to Use Steroids or Not?

Alek sent in a very interesting question. He simply asked what are the real objective reasons for not using steroids.

This is a good question because there is much misinformation about steroids in the general media, and the side effects and potential negative effects are usually associated with massive doses.

What then are the objective reasons to avoid steroid use?

First of all any drug taken on a chronic basis will have some side effects to deal with. In the case of testosterone and it’s derivatives the side effects (no matter how mild the drug or dose) are as follows:

Aromatization of some testosterone to estrogen and then estrogen based side effects (development of breast tissue is the most obvious)

Hair Loss (not too many guys would trade a head of hair for slightly bigger muscles)

Raised blood lipids and cholesterol. This is one of the side effects that can directly increase risk of heart disease.

Potential increased risk of prostate cancer.

Acne (it’s person to person, not everyone gets this reaction)

And finally, there is likely a set of completely unknown side effects that the scientific community has yet to uncover or have a chance to study.

This list (while not complete) is a good starting point of ‘con’s’ to using steroids. If a guy wanted to use them he would have to weigh out these vs the ‘pro’s’.

Depending on the dose testosterone can be a benefit to many guys, it’s even prescribed as an anti-depressant and to elevate mood and well being.

It may also be of use for men who are beyond 50 years of age and want to replace some testosterone to restore their circulating levels back to those of a 30 year old. This may actually be beneficial for longevity and quality of life. This is analogous in some respects to hormone replacement therapy for post menopausal women.

In the end it should be up to each individual to decide what they want to do with their body. Collecting unbiased and objective information is the key to making an informed descision.

John

Have you ever wondered why some people react differently to the same workout. Some people gain more muscle than others, some seems to have greater gains in strength than others. The typical answer is simply ‘genetics’. But this is too simplistic of an answer and I think there is much more to it than this.

If you’ve been following the last two phi-life podcasts you’ve heard Brad Pilon and I talk about the anabolic continuum and the concepts of anabolic resistance and anabolic slow down.

The anabolic continuum is a range of sensitivities to weight training and anabolic signals for any given person, it ranges from highly sensitive, to resistant to complete anabolic exhaustion (where no amount of exercise seems to stimulate any growth or strength increase)

If you’re curious to find out where you are on the Anabolic Continuum we’ve got an assessment quiz you can download for free to determine where you land.

We’re also holding a live teleseminar this thurs June 10th at 9pm to explain the anabolic continuum, your score on the quiz, what it means and our new workout system that deals with Anabolic Slow Dow and restarting muscle growth for those of you who seem to have hit a big plateau in both muscle size and strength.

Go to this link to get your assessment guide and recieve the link for the teleseminar: Anabolic Assessment Guide

The Ripping Friends are at Peak Anabolic Sensitivity for Sure!

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who is currently using steroids and he said something very interesting. I was mentioning the difference between gaining muscle with and without steroids and how difficult it is to gain without steroids and he said “I’m giving up on trying to get any bigger as well”! And this guy uses steroids!

The point is that we all have an upper limit even with drugs. We simply cannot grow forever and part of it is due to our Anabolic Sensitivity.

When you first start working out your anabolic sensitivity has not been built up yet, workouts are difficult and gains seem to be non existent. After a few months of training your muscles and nervous system go through major adaptations and your anabolic sensitivity is high. This is when you will experience big time gains and consistent gains.

But at some point anabolic sensitivity eventually diminishes and a long plateau or stagnant period sets in, and this even happens to guys on steroids. In short there is another way of looking at your current muscle growth potential, it’s called the Anabolic Continuum.

On one end there is low or zero growth potential, and on the other end there is high growth potential, each one of us is somewhere on this continuum. (it’s not so black and white as marketers would have you believe)

Shifting yourself to the high growth potential side of the continuum should be the goal of any muscle building workout.

Brad and I discuss the concept of anabolic sensitivity and the Anabolic Continuum in todays PhiLife podcast.

Check out the podcast here: The Anabolic Continuum

John

Can you really turn this into Muscle?

If you walk into any health food store you’ll see a wall of supposed muscle building supplements. Each one with fantastic claims about protein synthesis, strength, power, weight gain, boosting hormons and enzymatic pathways and on and on.

There are muscle building supplements for pre workout, post workout, morning, night, morning AND night, testosterone boosters, nitric oxide stimulators, amino acid products of all kinds, plain creatine, mixed creatine, protein, meal replacements, weight gainers, GH boosters, prohormones etc.

With an unlimited supply of money it would appear that each one of these is worth taking (based on their claims). But most people have a limited supply of money.

If these things worked, even a bit, how much money would you realistically spend for a few extra pounds of muscle?

Leave you answer in the comments section.

note: I’m assuming no amount of supplements can produce steroid like gains

John

Muscle improves your proportions, but fat ruins them.

The shape of your body is largely determined by your muscle mass, however that is assuming that you don’t have an excess of body fat distorting you true shape. The point of working out with weights is to manipulate your muscle mass to augment your look. Having fat covering all of those muscles makes your effort in the gym seem pointless.

Part of the reason fat distorts your shape is because it is not evenly distributed over you body. For example men typically build up significantly more fat around their abdomen and women typically store more fat around their hips and thighs.

If we gained fat evenly over our whole body then fat gain would look exactly like gaining muscle (the only difference would be less definition, but proportions would always be good)…this however isn’t the case. As we gain more and more fat both men and women start to look more like blobs with most of the fat stored closer to the middle of our bodies (abdomen and hips thighs) and thus proportions look worse and worse the more fat we gain.

The point of both gaining muscle and losing fat (besides any health benefit) is to improve our proportions for the aesthetic appeal. This of course is also measurable with the Adoins Index for men and Venus Index for women. (waist to shoulder ratios and waist to shoulder to hip ratios respectively)

John