The Most Common Mistakes Seen in Anabolic Steroid Cycles

Q: “What compounds are usually or always mistakes to include in a cycle? Or are common mistakes in some instances, but useful in others.”

A: Proviron is never useful during a cycle. The closest it could be to being useful is for slight anti-estrogenic effect, but there are better ways to do this. I would call Proviron a pure waste of money during a cycle.

It also certainly does not aid PCT and may hinder it. However, it can have some use a prosexual agent during that time, but I’d avoid using it continually.

I’m not a fan of Propecia/Proscar (finasteride) or Avodart (dutasteride) use during a cycle. Some hope that it will reduce progression of male pattern baldness, but a simpler approach is to not use testosterone, as the only positive effect of finasteride is to inhibit potentiation (increase in potency) of testosterone in the scalp by largely blocking conversion to DHT. Other anabolic steroids generally do not undergo such potentiation. It’s both true that finasteride is useless with them, and that they are no harder on the hair than the testosterone/finasteride combination.

I’m an agnostic on the finasteride and dutasteride horror stories; I don’t know if there really is the risk of long term libido impairment that some claim, but I also don’t know that it could not be true. But in any case, I don’t find a reason to recommend finasteride or dutasteroid use in steroid cycles.

I recommend against all but low dose Deca use, because other anabolic steroids will give as good or better anabolic results without the mood-depressive and recovery-impairing effects which so often result from such use of Deca. Where joint benefit from Deca use exists – this is not the case for all steroid users by any means – the benefit can be fully obtained from amounts such as 75-100 mg/week.

There really isn’t a point to adding any of the prohormone/prosteroid products to an anabolic steroid cycle: just use appropriate amounts of the anabolic steroids.

The same is true for SARMs.

An anti-prolactin (cabergoline, bromocriptine) is rarely if ever necessary during an anabolic steroid cycle if estradiol is kept under control with an anti-aromatase. In no personal consultation did I ever find a reason to include one, and never did a reason come up why I even possibly should have done so. Their inclusion is generally a waste, at least if estrogen is properly controlled.

Another example of a practice which is at best wasteful is combining a SERM with an antiaromatase.

So all of these things, I’d generally avoid doing.

About the author

Bill Roberts

Medicinal chemist

Bill Roberts is an internationally-recognized expert on anabolic steroids and performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). He received a bachelor degree in Microbiology and Cell Science and completed the educational and research requirements for a PhD in Medicinal Chemistry at a major American university.

Bill entered the nutritional supplement industry prior to completing his doctoral thesis but his education was invaluable so far as being able to design/improve nutritional supplement compounds, since it was in the field of designing drug molecules and secondarily some work in transdermal delivery.

His education was not specifically "geared" toward anabolic steroids other than expertise with pharmacological principles having broad applications. This has allowed Bill to provide unique insight into the field of anabolic pharmacology with knowledge of points which he would not have known otherwise.