The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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I'm not claiming it as gospel truth, but steroids are a helluva drug. The comparison in question isn't a super buff guy, that almost certainly takes serious effort regardless of PED, but a comparison between two beginners, one simply using tren and not working out versus one remaining natty and hitting the gym.
I'd believe it. You're getting pushback but it's all in the form of "trust me bro".
I was watching a Youtube video from Jeff Nippard yesterday. He said it's possible for an untrained person to gain 15 pounds of lean muscle mass in a single MONTH using steroids.
So it's clear that the results of using steroids are simply miles above what you can get naturally.
Many people with good genetics will have decent (not elite) strength without working out. Steroids could take this to an even higher level. Low confidence but I would bet on a steroids user with 1 workout per month outperforming a non-steroids user with 3 workouts a week.
I'd take it more seriously if the people in question had tried tren themselves and then asked me to reconsider, but so far nobody has copped to it in public or DMs.
I'm even more perplexed that people thought I was advocating that you just take steroids and sit around, come on people, there's a use-mention distinction to be made there.
And look at the lucky bastards with myostatin knockout mutations, they're maximally buff without lifting an ounce in their lives! In the ancestral environment, that would have been a bad idea with a BMR of like 4000 calories, but a shortage of calories is not what ails the majority of humanity.
Sadly, this is about the best that can be expected, epistemic around topics like these are dubious in general.
This cow has never lifted a single weight in its life.
I really want to see data now. Steroids vs training, which works better? My money is on steroids, but low confidence. All the people saying that "steroids don't work unless you train" are just making assertions with zero data and can be ignored.
That link seems to be broken for me? But yeah, those cows can get beefy, pun intended.
Fixed the link.
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Look in the other comments, someone linked a paper:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199607043350101
And indeed, steroids make you gain muscle without exercise, though you obviously make more when you combine the two.
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I don't know how fruitful that comparison might be, but I do wonder if that would work at all. The effect of stimulus on muscle size and strength is really big. A totally immobilized muscle will lose size and strength at something like a rate of 1% per day (!!!). A guy sitting on the couch scratching his balls is not going to atrophy at that rate, but he will atrophy down to a fairly weak state. The role of stimulus in muscle development is really, really strong, in other words.
I think a more reasonable attempt to split the difference would be taking steroids and then just training moderately hard. Like, finding a simple 2x a week program, doing calisthenics, or even just doing some hard conditioning like WoDs or kettlebell complexes. Or if you don't want to do even that, look into just cruising on testosterone. Because I think that if you just took anabolics, you'd just be opening yourself up to very horrible side effects with very little prospect of any upside. And come on, you're supposed to be a doctor. You should know that even well-thought out attempts to control side effects don't always work. Sometimes it doesn't work, and sometimes you can end up playing whac-a-mole with using medication to control the side effects from the last medication you started. I'm interested in steroids, but I've been lifting for over five years, and I'm simply not satisfied with my results (which are very poor). And I wouldn't see them as a replacement for lifting.
I assure you I'm doing the sensible thing by asking here instead of immediately writing myself a prescription for tren, which no small number of reasonably legitimate pharmacies will fulfill.
My understanding of tren, from hanging around in places where it's occasionally discussed, is that the side effects take a while to kick in and can be ameliorated by cycling, or worst case, you taper off or stop. I have no intention of even getting to the point where my balls stop working, my hair falls out and I grow tits. I'm trying to consider the tradeoff as it ascertains to expected benefit and the dangers of side effects accounting for attempts to ameliorate them!
I appreciate your suggestions, which are to combine steroids with a reasonable intensity of exercise, my hypothetical comparison of a couch potato to a gym rat was just that, I'd certainly put in more than the bare minimum of effort, especially since the gains would be faster and more obvious. If it lets me get away with, say, two days at the gym instead of 4 or 5, then I'd see it as potentially worth it, after considering the associated risks of course!
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