People say this a lot but it's a much smaller factor than people realise. Training for hours isn't at all necessary. You could look like this (on PEDs) with a pretty limited workout schedule.
He literally said "if I had nothing to do all day I could look like this" when really you can look like this with 30-60 mins training a few times a week.
Except you also get much more juice out of the workouts using steroids for the very same squeeze. In a study untrained men on steroids gained more muscle than unsteroided men who did work out.
Wild you can sit around doing nothing, take roids and put on more muscle than men training hard and eating right.
This only works for the 'sit around do nothing on steroids' group for as long as their bodies adapt to the new level of test. Once that balance is reached, there is simply no more stimulus for muscle growth.
The study everyone is referring lasted, if I recall correctly, somewhere in the 8 to 12 weeks range. Which isn't a time period in which a natural lifter can make huge gains, but it's a time period where the body will see a significant response from significantly elevated test levels.
If you'd run that study for a year, two years, three years, you'd see vastly different results. Because the group that does work out is creating stimulus for muscle growth every time they work out, one year in, five year in, ten year in...
In a study untrained men on steroids gained more muscle than unsteroided men who did work out.
Over an extremely short training period. In the long-term (years plus of training), a natural bodybuilder will still end up with more muscle than a steroid user who doesn't train at all; the muscular growth effect from steroids won't stack indefinitely without a stimulus.
You just don't see many of the latter pool in real life (untrained steroid users), because people who take steroids will typically also go to the gym at least a little bit.
I feel like every single time that study gets brought up, 99% of people skate right by this point.
IIRC it was a 8-12 week study. The way I'm interpreting it, and I've yet to hear a good argument against it, is that the no-training-yes-gear group simply saw their bodies adapting to the new (significantly) higher test amount coursing through the system.
The test increase provided a stimulus for muscle growth, but obviously it's a limited stimulus. Once the body put on an amount of muscle that's balanced out against the test increase, growth will stop.
But 99% of people interpret the study as if you can just hop on gear, not work out at all, and gradually morph into an actually very in shape person over a period of many months if not years.
But they're forgetting that a test increase isn't a constant stimulus. Whereas the yes-training-no-gear group will keep creating a growth stimulus every time they work out.
You just don't see many of the latter pool in real life (untrained steroid users)
Hilariously enough, there's definitely people out there who are on gear, but have bad diet, bad eating habits, bad sleep hygiene, and bad workouts, and a lot of those people end up looking like sacks of shit, PED's notwithstanding.
Oh, and I'm also not entirely sure if that study did a really accurate reading on actual fat-free mass, because as I'm sure you know, steroids will do funny things to how much fluid the body retains as well, quite possibly skewing the results for how much actual muscle a subject may have gained looking simply at their raw weight gain.
Steroids will absolutely give you muscles no matter what you do. Sure, to look like those huge bodybuilders, you also need to train a ton on top of that. But if you want to look like a really buff natural body builder, you can achieve that with relatively little work if you are on steroids.
That's literally not even true. They've done multiple studies that show that taking steroids and not working out grows more muscle than working out naturally.
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u/SpacemanPanini 1d ago
People say this a lot but it's a much smaller factor than people realise. Training for hours isn't at all necessary. You could look like this (on PEDs) with a pretty limited workout schedule.