Anyone who lifts knows how much it sucks to stay natty. Like for real I can bench press 100 kilos for 5 reps but it took me like 10 years of lifting weights on an off to get there. Feelsbadman when u compare urself to the tiktok sarm goblins and realize u could have a 405 bench by now if u just blasted off years ago. Oh well tho. I want to blast off so bad I just don’t have the money for it right now.
Taking steroids seems like a bad idea. It’s wild that so many guys take them now. Insane.
People out there taking steroids and years off of their lives just to be a shredded waiter or programmer, I don't understand it. Like you don't even compete in any sports
being shredded makes it easier to fuck. pretty easy to understand why somebody would use gear to achieve that
Death to America
in the age of tinder, it's probably the only way to set yourself apart
Are you trying to tell me that straight women in general find shredded men unattractive? Lol
Death to America
True I see but if they find out you juice it's a huge turn off I am told
I mean yeah I can imagine, but that's the easiest thing on earth to lie about. Not the way to start out a serious relationship but if you're just looking for casual sex it's hard to see that as a serious drawback compared to the upsides
Death to America
Fair and true. That being said absolutely not worth the long term effects though. Super fucked up that this is becoming widespread its fucking horrible for you
No, definitely not worth it. Imagine putting yourself at risk for all the issues listed here for vanity's sake. Cringe
Professional athletes are a different story but it really is sad that PEDs are so widespread at all levels of all the big sports. It just makes an already risky career even more dangerous, for the sake of entertainment. Awful
Death to America
But you can get shredded to a level that most people will find attractive without taking steroids. It involves some muscle definition + low bodyfat percentage. Sure it can involve a lot of time, especially if you're currently at a high bodyfat percentage, but it's not like it's impossible to have four/six/eight pack abs (that depends on your genetics) and some vascularity naturally.
And if all the people you want to date want you to look like the rock, Chris Hemsworth or some other roid abusing actor, maybe they're not worth dating.
Obviously it's possible to make yourself more attractive without steroids. But steroids are gonna make it a lot easier.
To be clear I'm not saying people should take steroids or that it's a good idea. I'm just saying it's not hard to understand the thought process of why someone would want to
Death to America
Yeah it's ridiculous how well steriods work, especially the ones that inhibit myostatin production. You gain muscle faster taking stuff like that while doing literally nothing, than you gain muscle while training naturally.
Us naturals just have creatine, quinoa and spinach (both are high in ecdysterone) lol. It's very unfair.
How much of a difference do you get from creatine vs protein powder? I haven't taken creatine yet but I've started to stall in terms of progress so I'm interested in your experience with it
Death to America
I find that it can help with getting an extra rep or two in, and it definitely helped when I was bedridden, it's actually why I started taking it back after I had back surgery, not for muscle gains.
Just be careful with hair loss, it's a very rare potential side effect of taking a ton of creatine. Very rare though.
With training programs, apparently some of the nucleus overload/deload stuff, or even drop sets and pump training, can help with plateaus in both size and strength. It's very bro sciencey, but trying it for a month won't hurt if you've been training for years.
Partial lifts with way over 1RM to train tendons and bone is another I’ve heard.
It really is how even high school kids are doing it for the aesthetics. Being shredded isn't worth the kidney failure you're going to get.
What in the fuck? High schoolers? Are steroids that commonplace now? Holy shit
When I was in high school decades ago, large numbers of the football team were using (quite badly too).. Nowadays, it's probably much more... The pressure to get a college scholarship (no free college for Norteamericanos!) means the incentive is super high to distinguish yourself..
A credit card and postal address is all you need to buy literal research chemicals (such as many of the SARMS you can get) on the internet, and fuck up all your organs while getting big.
Literally easier than buying weed
:yea:
Oh yes I'm aware, I used to buy 4-aco-dmt back In the day when it was super available online.
Yeah, the trade off is that you don't need to deal with the cool zone kek
Comparison is the thief of joy. Take pride in the work you've put in and the person it's made you.
Atleast you have been working out for 10 yrs mate, that's healthier than 90% population. I wish I started working out 10 years ago
try being mid 30s with a baby and not enough time to go to the gym as you'd like, any progress is positively glacial.
If you get a pull up bar, and maybe some dip bars if you really want, you can train very hard using advanced bodyweight skills just at home. Archer push ups and pike push ups for horizontal and overhead pressing, inverted/bodyweight rows and pull ups for horizontal and vertical pulling, and pistol squats with a calf raise at the top for the legs, with some nordic curls as well. If these are too hard (I can't even do half the exercises I just listed), you can always do easier or simpler variations like normal push ups, etc.
I haven't been to a gym in years, started training a few months ago, and am making good progress like this. And I'm not even doing anything more than basic/easy pull ups, push ups and split squats. Not even the stuff I listed.
Though time is still a major issue :yea:
:yea:
Getting stronger when natty is just painfully slow. Still decided not to juice (so far) because I don't think it's gonna make me a happier person in the long run. Definitely tempting though.
I've been doing "Add one rep each day" to each workout and it's been working well to increase my weight lifted. So first day, say I'm doing dumbbell curls, I do 3 sets of 8 @ 35 pounds. Next time I come back, I do 9 8 8, next it's 9 9 8, then 9 9 9 and so on, until I get to 12 12 12. Then I do a transition thing where I step up to the next weight with one set of 8. So I do 8 40 pounds, then 12 at 35 and another 12 at 35. Next time, it's 8 8 12. Then 8 8 8 at the next weight. I've moved up quite a bit of weight by doing this, I recommend it
As they say: "The day you start lifting is the day you make yourself forever small, for you will never be as big as you want to be."
I agree that anyone who's been lifting for multiple years has thought about it. I definitely have. In times like these I try to ask myself and remember why I started this in the first place and what I want out of this long term.
Maybe you'll never be as big as some of the TikTok or Instagram stars but unless your goal in life is to be one of those guys......at some point you've got to stop worrying about it. If you've been lifting 10 years naturally you're probably stronger and healthier by a country mile than the average person and there's huge diminishing returns anyway in either aesthetics or strength levels.
The only valid reason to take steroids and peds is if your career and livelihood depends on it. For everyone else: focus on being healthy mentally as well as physically.
Maybe peds could make you a bit stronger or more shredded...but like genuinely ask yourself....spiritually or materially: what are either of those things worth to you weighed against the potential consequences.
Stop using tik tok. Stop comparing yourself to these people. These people also aren't honest about how much excercise they're even doing. I have a social media workout girl in my gym and she goes around and does like 2 reps and makes it look like more. It's all fake just stick to your workout
Yeah, my progress has already slowed after only a few months of hard training (no more newbie gains), I can't even imagine what it must be like after 10 years.
Honestly might be worth looking into that nucleus overload or deload stuff if you've been training for years, it sounds super bro sciencey, but it's not like it's going to hurt anything.
But you should still be incredibly happy with your results, it sounds better than like 99% of people strength and fitness wise. Don't let some roided ego lifters rob you of the joy and progress you've made.
I mean from my personal experience it seems more like your programming sucks getting to 100kg for 5 shouldn't take you 10 years it took me 2 years of just being consistent and as far as natty goes, I'm natty and stronger than a few people that I know take PEDs but just suck at working out. I think you overestimate how much you can gain from test because the general rule for strength athletes is adding 10-15% to your performance which for those competitions is of course huge but it would 'only' mean 200kg squat vs 220kg
DNA and nature matters though, so I wouldn't put down the OP's experience.
For a 100kg bench for reps it really doesn't, unless they have a chronic illness or disability the speed of progression is abnormally slow, which leads me to believe that they didn't put in enough effort or that their programming just sucked, not being able to put in a lot of time in the gym or not knowing a good lifting program is nothing to be ashamed off, but I really want to push against the "I lift 100kg and this guy that must be on steroids bench twice as much as me" idea because I've had weirdos harass me in the gym asking me about steroids or accusing me of taking test just based on the fact that I'm a lot stronger than them and this post comes across in that same vein.
I'm gonna respectfully disagree here. 100 Kilo bench is stronger than 90% of all humans walking around.
https://www.muscleandstrength.com/articles/strong-strength-standards-raw-natural-lifters
This is a good article that puts strength levels into perspective. And people on PEDs gain more muscle just sitting on the couch, than natties actually working out... That 15% to strength performance is if the lean bodyweight remains the same. PEDs allow you to slap muscle on to your frame which means that 10-15% is now based on the extra muscle that they have.
So yeah, drugs increase hypertrophy more than strength, but each pound of muscle pushes that 10-15% further away from their natty counterparts..
Anything people engage in you'll be better than those that don't if you are the bloodiest of beginner rockclimbers you'll still be better than all the people that don't rockclimb so just by being able to go up a wall you'll be better than 99% of all people, but that's not how those things are measured whenever you engage in a thing it's better to compare yourself to those that also engage in that activity, that can be sports, hobbies etc.
As for the people on PEDs gaining muscle on the couch it's literally the placebo effect, there's literally a study from 1974 where they told some student athletes "Hey we are going to give you legal steroids" gave them placebos and they even so still saw increases in strength pretty massive increases as well.
In just 4 weeks, they put a combined total of ~100 pounds on those same four lifts. 100 pounds instead of 22, in 4 weeks instead of 7. Simply because they THOUGHT they were on steroids.
This is pretty well understood and and I can cite more stuff if you want but I'd rather watch GDQ than argue broscience if I'm being honest.
It's not broscience..
Placebo works on strength, sure. Mentally you can gain some by just being dialed in and we know this. But I'm talking about the study where they literally sat on their ass, got injected with exogenous hormones, and gained more muscle than naturals who actually trained.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199607043350101
No amount of placebo is going to gain you muscle with NO exercise whatsoever. But testosterone does that quite handily...
When boys go through puberty, they gain muscle size and bone JUST by hormones, whether they exercise or not...it's obvious that an increase in testosterone will grow muscle even if you do nothing else..
Drugs + Exercise > Drugs only > Natural + exercise > Natural and doing nothing....
No amount of placebo is going to get you within 85% of the muscle of Ronnie Coleman or Phil Heath or whoever is Mr. Olympia now. Sorry, drugs increase muscle growth to a large degree, and the more muscle you have, the more your potential strength and speed. That's why athletes and even non-athletes use them.
We randomly assigned 43 normal men to one of four groups:
i.e. the study we did was using untrained men, which surprise is almost always the root of broscience, guess what using untrained people is always useless you can literally tell people to sit on a couch thinking about working out and they'll gain muscle , again I plead to you stop spouting broscience stop just going on weird rants, stop trying to think I'm saying things I don't really say.
Guess what even with steroids you or me are not going to be a Ronnie Coleman or Phil Heath because their genetics for building muscle are just abnormal, even if I took steroids and an olympic weightlifter didn't they'd still be stronger than me, because those people are a .1% of the population.
My point and it's the same point still is that since we know that PEDs can cause an performance increase of 10-15% when comparing olypmic athletes we can reasonably guess that it's similar between gym guy #1 and gym guy #2 meaning taking steroids is not going to get you from benching 100kg to benching 180kg it's just not gonna happen.
Again this thread pisses me off because there's a lot of broscience being said and people just go for what sounds right and in turn encourage either not trying hard, ruining their body by going on test to achieve something that's easily achievable without any PEDs or ruining their body and not even getting anything out of it because they just think "yeah it's fine I just need the right stack" then doing even stupider shit like DBol because it didn't work the first time.
I don't wanna fuck up my natural testosterone production, doesn't seem worth it. Although I do have a chronic tendon injury that I believe I could heal with a dose anabolic steroids, so I'd probably do that but just once
