the problem with steroids is that they work like really work that's probably irresponsible for me to say but if we're going to talk about the steroid epidemic we need to do it honestly here's a 3-we trend cycle update for you guys buying Trend in Thailand steroids build muscle way faster than something like creatine it's not even close if you started taking 5 gr of creatine every day for a year straight you'd add about 2 lbs of extra muscle if you started taking steroids at a normal bodybuilding dose you probably add about 20 lb of extra
muscle that year but it could be more depending on your genetics and how much you take I'm a lifetime natural bodybuilder and these are my testosterone levels right now 485 nanog per deciliter that's right around the middle of the normal range for someone my age this is bodybuilder Chase irons the world's most honest enhanced bodybuilder he also had blood work done this month where do you think his testosterone levels are maybe double mine or triple mine nope his levels are literally off the charts the test Max is out at 10,000 nanograms per deciliter and his
testosterone was higher than that he openly admits to taking a lot of gear and this shows just how big the gap between natural and enhanced can get more people are taking steroids now than ever before why is that well I think it's because more and more Fitness influencers are opening up about their anabolic use in theory this honesty is a good thing that's because anyone watching would be able to adjust their own expectations for their goals if they're natural and they know their favorite Fitness influencer isn't they they'd be able to lower their own standards
and say okay well now I know that result isn't achievable for me but this kind of backfired a lot of people didn't lower their expectations they just started taking steroids and the bigger problem is a lot of Fitness influencers are only ever partially transparent they say they're on steroids and they show their gains but they rarely if ever show any of the bad stuff so the only logical conclusion is that steroids are amazing but that's misleading so to help you understand exactly what happens to your body when you take steroids let's inject some juice together
and see what happens next good and bad this is testosterone in anthe it's one of the most common forms of steroids that people take it's basically just a testosterone molecule with a carboxy group attached and dissolved in a vegetable oil so you can inject it there's also some kind of aromatic compound like benzo benzoate in here which prevents bacterial growth and helps the testosterone dissolve better when you inject the needle into your muscle a bubble of oil is squeezed in between the individual muscle fibers which spreads out and forms this elongated shape the testosterone molecules
then slowly make their way into the bloodstream over the course of several hours there enzymes called esterases cleave off that carboxy group and then the testosterone is carried by molecules called binding proteins to the muscle where it enters a single muscle cell now its job is to make that muscle cell bigger and if that's all that steroids did that'd be sweet and I'd be on them but there's a lot more that happens for one your heart is also a muscle so of course the same thing happens there the testosterone enters your your heart cells and
tells your DNA to make your heart bigger having a big heart sounds like a good thing but it's really not when your heart grows especially one compartment called the left ventricle the extra bulk actually makes it harder for your heart to squeeze and relax this means your heart won't be able to pump blood as effectively which increases your risk of Hur failure now I want to say I'm not the health police you can do whatever you want with your own body and I've got no problem with people who enhance but I want people to at
least be aware of exactly what you're doing and the full effect it has good and bad for example not many people realize that steroids affect your brain to explain this I wanted to find someone with scientific education and firsthand experience with [Music] steroids [Music] hey can you hear me okay Mike yeah yeah yeah steroids can cause in many people really high levels of anxiety it's dose dependent it's also compound dependent things like Trend cause way more anxiety than other milder compounds like Primo so this is fun I haven't admitted this yet but it's not a
particularly crazy admission uh I recently took a a validated empirically validated scientifically based scale for anxiety and actually currently right now um I have severe anxiety disorder probably the most severe type of anxiety disorder short of like panic disorder and uh that's actually right now as I as I talk that's what I have and uh another one also another psychological side effect some types of your intelligence degrade over time with steroid use this is tested in people currently using steroids and people who used to use steroids most people this is totally unaware that steroids have
that potential effect on IQ reduction and since IQ or just intelligence is such a global quality that you IA want to hang out and to most of it as much as he have it's real serious thing to trade off that tracks with the science this 2020 one study took 3D MRI scans of the brains of over 200 weightlifters about half of them were Natty the other half enhanced the scans revealed that the lifters who took steroids had a significantly bigger brain age Gap that means when they looked at the natural brains their brain age matched
their actual age but the brains of the enhanced lifters looked much older than they should look for some of their age their brains were aging faster than they should be and the psychology of steroids is fascinating most people take steroids because they want to look bigger and feel better about the way they look and I get it I want to look bigger and feel better too and steroids will make you look bigger but they might not help you feel any better about the way you look they actually could make your body dysmorphia worse that's because
a lot of people think if they just start enhancing then they'll look how they want but just because you take gear doesn't mean you're going to look like seum and then when you eventually come off you'll quickly lose a good chunk of the size that you put on and feel smaller than ever at that point it becomes near impossible not to go back on take even more steroids and the cycle continues again that wouldn't really be a problem if steroids didn't impact pretty much every system in your body but they do after you inject some
of that testosterone is converted into a hormone called DHT which causes hair follicles to shrink faster this is why so many bodybuilders are bald in their 20s some testosterone is also converted into estrogen which can increase breast tissue formation in men leading to soft puffy nipples also known as gyno the most reliable way to get rid of gyno is surgery and while most people will take other drugs to prevent that conversion to estrogen almost every bodybuilder you know has had to deal with gyno at some point injecting testosterone also lets your testicles know that there's
more than enough testosterone to go around so they shrink to about 1/ half of their usual size the shrinkage quickly shuts down your body's natural ability to make its own testosterone which is why some people will need to inject testosterone for the rest of their life steroids also make sebaceous glands on your skin grow bigger which causes them to overproduce a sticky oily substance called a seun seun moisturizes and protects your skin in normal amounts but causes acne when overproduced steroid users will try to combat this by taking other drugs for acne treatment but then
they have their own side effects what would be a side effect that um most people like wouldn't be aware of until you've kind of done it yeah that's a good question there are a few of those I can think of because anabolic steroids are mostly gotten in at least United States uh in Canada through underground Laboratories some of the gear you get is like Dam near farmer grade it goes in smooth as butter never does anything no inflammation some of the gear goes in there and uh boy does it uh does it mess you up
and I have been personally hospitalized at least once for um a non infectant but insanely immune responsive abscess my quad was like half a foot out to one side I've had friends get hospitalized for abscesses the doctors have to cut your skin open they have to drain it and lastly the term Roid Rage but it's really aggression and it it very infrequently displays itself as actual violent acts but the thoughts you get on steroids are disturbing you might like warm movies and stuff but if there's a warm movie playing in your head every single second
you're awake and asleep it gets a little old after a while but you have big muscles so I guess that's cool so that's tell the cookie crumbles let me get a second opinion on [Music] that hello hello yo yo a pretty common reported anecdote is feeling like you just hit puberty again for the first like 6 to 8 weeks it literally feels like you're 16 years old again is that a good thing or a bad thing it's probably not a good thing overall because you're now an adult with the like libido of a raging 16-year-old
and you have responsibilities and things to keep up with and all you can think about is your perpetually erect penis basically which is not ideal um increased probability of injury this is sometimes talked about when your strength is skyrocketing your connective tissue cannot maintain the pace of your muscular strength and often this will lead to unnecessary injury in the gym because you know if your bench goes up 50 lbs in 6 weeks like you're not typically you're not going to like hold back you're going to keep pushing because this weight feels like a feather now
you're going to you know go as far as it can take you but your connective tissue is not keeping up with that pace and this you'll see often bodybuilders that end up with uh brutal injuries it's to say how much steroids shorten your lifespan but they definitely do one 2024 paper followed over a th000 steroid users for 11 years with an average age of 27 during the same time frame they also followed 60,000 people of the same age but not on steroids 2.8% of the steroid users had died by the follow-up while only 1% of
the non-steroid users had died that's a lot of excess deaths which led the authors to note that the excess death rate in this young adult population is striking of course this depends on the dose that you're taking I think what a lot of people think is I'm not going to go crazy with the juice like I'm just going to do a little like sports trt or whatever like 1502 200 milligrams uh a week how do you feel about that I think the word trt is very conflated with like baby cycle essentially at this point when
you're on trt even if it looks on paper like a normal total testosterone it is not representative of what you could do naturally so even if you're on like you know lowdose trt on paper you could Define it as such but it's certainly like you're essentially on Mini enhancement territory perpetually which I'm not to say that that's bad cuz that that's almost like the boat I fall into myself essentially it's just a matter of managing the risk of reward on it and if you feel it is worthwhile for yourself considerate of all of the factors
that underly it would you say there is a healthy way to use steroids uh there so everything is the Spectrum in this case so they're healthier and less healthy ways and if he you want to use steroids in a healthier way then what you're going to do is start with very small amounts of them check your blood work do various heart scans and and procedures consult with a professional coach who does this for a living have a medical doctor on on retainer to make sure that you're getting uh every several months or twice a year
blood work you check your blood pressure all the time you cycle properly coming on and off you take as little gear as will accomplish the effect you're interested in if you do that you can definitely do it healthier than not but you know there are ways to race a car and design a race car and design the suit and the crumble zones that make it safer but as soon as you pass 200 miles an hour safer is the term it's not safe it was never safe and so steroid use is less safe almost always than
not taking steroids but you can make it very very safe or you can make it pretty roll the dice risky the real big decision is on how you approach it I notic people at like a really young age coming up to me and being like hey like I might hop on like you know I've been training for a while now like I teenagers do you have like a age in mind where it's like this is where you know you're old enough to even like consider it and before that just figure out your training and diet
yeah there's a couple things that go into that one is sometimes of steroids CL uh close your growth plates early and uh that means they'll provide you for reaching an adul height some men don't stop growing until they're 22 years old and uh if you start taking it when you're 16 you're probably going to be a short King for much longer than you in well actually a shorter King than you ended up uh should have be become with your genetics and um you know to almost the same group of people to whom jacked uh lifestyle
is important being as tall as possible is also important seemingly another thing is the brain develops and very very high level ways uh well into your late 20s and then subtle ways through your entire lifespan and so until about your mid 20s I would say there's a high probability that uh steroids will stunk your brain development to a significant extent and so I would say my cut off age generally as the conversation for responsible medically supervised steroid use for serious goals by serious individual begins at age 25 the answer I usually give is like get
at least 10 years of natural training under your belt because you'll have figured out what works for your body and then from there you know you'll also by default be at least in your like mid 20s you know most people don't start lifting until they're at least you know in their mid teens so you know it kind of ticks both of those boxes and so yeah I I always encourage people it's like have you been training hard and smart for 10 years if not then I don't think it's decision time for you yet and I'll
be honest there have been several moments in my own bodybuilding career when enhancing has been very tempting even now especially with the fitness standards increasing rapidly and more and more Fitness influencers juicing and I think the standards have shifted so much since you know we started out like 6 years ago like I was in The Natty or not conversation as a physique that's like almost too good and now six years later it's like it's like you're you're the guy who doesn't lift but knows you know but instead of enhancing I've decided to do something different
I keep thinking maybe I've reached my natural limit for muscle growth but have I actually am I actually at my Natty limit or have I just not been training as hard and smart as I could be I wasn't going to reveal this but this year I'm doing an experiment with McMaster University here in Canada to see how much muscle it's possible for me to build naturally this deep into my lifting Journey if I do everything perfectly can I still make gains naturally so for this entire year I've been doing everything 100% perfectly in the gym
I'm tracking every single set taking the last set of every exercise to True technical failure I'm not skipping any sets or any workouts I'm also committing 100% to my diet I haven't missed a single day tracking in macro factor and I've hit my calorie and protein goal every single day now I'll be sharing my full results at the end of this year but I can say that I've definitely made some solid gains already this doesn't always show up as well on camera but I've gotten more compliments about having put on some solid size at my
local gym than I've gotten in years but similar to me what happens to a lot of guys is that they think they're at their Natty limit and only steroids will help when in reality they're probably just not being as diligent with their training and their nutrition as they could be why not dial that up to 100% first then you can make that decision that's how I feel anyway and if you want to commit and join me on a year-long journey to truly dedicated lifting and eating consider downloading my nutrition app weeks for free to see
if you like it first and it's really like having me as your own personal nutrition coach but for a tiny tiny fraction of the cost we're about to hit 15,000 monthly users which is pretty crazy and we've gathered some incredible Transformations from users of the app unlike other diet apps Maca uses science-based algorithms to tailor your calories and macros to your metabolism specifically all you need to do is track your food and your weight and the app will automatically update your nutrition each week so I'll put a link to the free trial in the description
box down below if you guys want to get started with me and that's it for this one guys don't forget to leave me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see you guys all here in the next one
