Q: I was talking with a friend of mine at the gym today who is a very experienced bodybuilder and trainer. He basically informed that the more “juice” you do over time, the more steroids you will require in the future. Do you have to “continually” up the dosage amount to keep or gain more muscle?
A: I don’t myself agree with a principle of needed dose being related to past usage, though things can work out where it can appear that way.
Rather, for any given hormonal status and a given individual, there is only so much that the body can attain with let’s-say near-optimal training and nutrition. Another slightly different way of looking at it is, only so much the body can attain in a given time frame such as say 6 months of further dedicated training.
If where you are now is far from that point, then your gains to to near that point can be fast. The farther away you are, the faster your gains can be, or alternately the less-extreme the hormonal envirornment will need to be for you to still have fast gains.
Another way of putting it: If you’re stagnant at X pounds in lean condition despite great training and nutrition and your use has been say 1 gram per week of steroids and no peptides, then if you want fast further gains you are going to have to step it up. Not really because of past use, but because X pounds is where your body reaches a homeostasis point with that amount of drugs and good training.
But if X pounds is where you would wind up at that usage level, or did wind up in the past but have since backslid, however you are now thirty lb less than that in lean condition, then you could make fast gains even with say 750 mg/week. Regardless that you might have used any higher amount in the past.
Does this have anything to do with your article written in 1998 about androgen receptor upregulation?
Not so much, it’s more a matter of there being no “record,” so to speak, kept in the body of what drugs have been used before and how much, and more importantly that rate of growth does wind up being very much related to how far away one is from what would be the experienced “set-point” for the drugs being used.
By set-point, I mean a muscular size where the body tends to settle into a homeostasis and neither lose muscle nor readily gain more.
When well under that point, gains are fast… when very near it, gains will not be fast or at least not for any extended period of time. (There could be a brief burst.)
For most this is very important when having already made a lot of gains past a very solid naturally-build base — or a huge amount of gains if having gone straight to steroids or nearly so — and having used only modest doses such as say 500 mg/week. In that case, absolutely having reached or nearly reached an apparent limit for that amount of drugs will mean that using more steroids can give very considerably more drugs.
Less so, but still true, at say 750 mg/wee; still less so but still true at say 1000 mg/week. If really having put in the time and quality work and nutrition at 1000 mg/week and having plateau’d, doubling up can make a further difference though not so great a difference.
Where the article is relevant is that it used to be believed in bodybuilding that receptors were damaged or permanently downregulated by high dose use, and that is not the case.
So let’s say a steroid novice goes and does a 2000 mg/week cycle and doesn’t build himself to anything like what he could with time achieve with even 750 mg/week.
Some would be concerned, and the article explains why not, that his 2000 mg/week usage ruined him and now he couldn’t respond to anything less than that. Not so: he can still achieve on say 750 mg/week just as much as he ever could on that dosage.
About the author
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.
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