Steroids are not a magic potion to make your muscles grow. It amazes me that bodybuilders think that steroids are the sole reason for getting massive size gains is steroids. Steroids do not make your muscles grow!! The Steroid myth is possibly even worse among non users. They seem to think that anyone growing faster than them must be on steroids! What a cop out. Experienced steroids users know that even with the gear there is no substitute for lots of hard work and calorie overloading. Let's look at what steroids REALLY do.

The primary effect of a steroids is not to increase the growth of the muscles but to speed up muscle repair. Steroids cause an increase in RNA trascription (protein metabolism). The steroids make it easier for your body to use protein to repair damaged muscle tissue. This is the main advantage steroids give.

This smashes the steroid myth. If you were to take steroids and not train you would not get bigger muscles. This is one of the problems encountered by many inexperienced bodybuilders who start taking steroids. They keep training the same and eating the same and then say that steroids do not work! For the body to take advantage of the increase in RNA transcription it will need a large increase in protein consumed. It will also need a big calorie increase, showing two reasons why the steroid users getting the gains are the ones who eat everything in sight. Restricting calories or protein when on a cycle is downright stupid, you may as well be natural!

Obviously, as the technically superhuman steroid user can recover quicker and better than a normal human, he or she will need to train harder, lift more weight, do more total work sets, and more frequent workouts. This is where the Hyper-Kinetics training course comes into it's own, as the whole concept of Hyper-kinetics involves generating a larger work load. An Ideal traning concept for steroid users. If the steroid user does not increase his or her workload by a large amount , the improved recovery caused by the steroids will make continued growth almost impossible.

This improved ability to traqnscribe protein can be a bad side effect of steroids. Many people do not know this. If the bodybuilder does not consume enough protein and calories the body will have the ability to BREAK DOWN existing protein and calories at an incredible rate. As the damaged muscles still get repaired quickly the bodybuilder would probably not even suspect this was happening. In actual fact, the muscles that were not damaged will be BROKEN DOWN (shrunk) much faster as the body repairs the damged muscles. This explains why many steroid users do not get any size gains.

Without Huge incresases in protein and calorie intake the steroids could actually stop you from growing. Steroids will enable your body to catabolise protein at a much faster rate. This means that the steroids can make your muscles shrink at a much faster rate if you do not consume enough protein and calories. Only if you increase calorie and protein intake by a huge amount will the steroids enable you to gain more muscle than you already have.

Steroids also help muscle growth in a few other minor ways, namely by inccreasing water retention and improving glycogen and creatine phosphate synthesis and storage.

An increase in water retention is a big help to the bobdybuilder who wants mass. It will quickly increase size, bodyweight and strength. This growth shock to the body is a reason that steroids help to blast a bodybuilder through a sticking point.

It is another reason that the bodybuilders on high calorie diets get so much more size gains than those poor misguided bodybuilders tring to stay lean. A big increase in water retention is one of the main reasons that the androgeic steroids build more mass than the other safer steroids. Bodybuilders tring to avoid water retention at all costs may as well be natural.

Creatine phosphate is a chemical compound stored in the muscles that helps the muscles contract. An incresae in creatine phosphate causes an almost immediate increase in strength. the oral steroids seem to have the greatest effect in increasing creatine phosphate levels. Some of the most effective orals for this are Anapolon, Dianabol, Anaplex, Loavar and Primobolan.

All steroids help the body to store more glycogen, but the androgens do it best. Glucogen is used for energy by the muscle when training, and a glycogen increase will give the capability to do a bigger workload. All these effects mean that a bodybuilder on steroids has to work twice as hard than a natural bodybuilder in the gym. This ends another steroid myth made popular by the bodybuilding magazines. I have read in quite a few magazines where it says "Natural bodybuilders will not make the easy gains that steroid users do, it will be nescessary for a natural bodybuilder to work twice as hard in the gym." This is not true. It is the steroid user who will have to lift more weight do more sets, more reps, more total intensity and more work. The steroid user will have to make the whole process quicker not easier.

The steroid books have said a lot about receptor sites. Receptor sites are the places in the body's cells where the steroid molecules attach to do their thing. When the receptor sites become immune to a particular drug or group of drugs the steroids cannot attach as well and their effectiveness is reduced. Depending on the particular drug and dosage, it generally takes a few weeks for the receptors to start shutting down. Most experienced users agree that if the drug dosage is not constantly increased every 3 to 4 weeks that the steroid effectiveness is extremely reduced and an anabolic effect cannot be maintained. The experienced users all like to increase dossages almost every week, but by a small and steady amount.

To avoid receptor shutdown, most bodybuilders also cycle their drugs and change drugs regularly. They find that a drug might work great for them the first time they use it, but on the next cycle it may do almost nothing. For this reason, experienced steroid ussers try not to use the same drugs two cycles in a row. Other bodybuilders minimise this effect by shotgunning, (using up to 10 different drugs at one time). This multi drug approach does not have to be more dangerous, as the same total mg of drugs can be used, with the same safety factor if done correctly. As the receptor sites have to cope with so many drugs at one time, they take so much longer to shut down. Some bodybuilders use both techniques.

Steroids can attach to all sorts of receptors including muscle cells, hair cells, prostate and genital cells, the skin and so forth. This explains why a steroid user can continue to grow more hair weeks or months after the steroids have stopped working on the muscle cells. the steroids are not used by the receptor sites, after doing their thing they detach from the receptors and re-enter the bloodstream. The drugs are finally removed from the blood by the liver, and this determines the basic life-span of the steroid.

I hope this clears a few things up for a few people.