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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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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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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