22 Octhow long steroid use benefits you?

how long steroid use benefits you?

The short answer – basically forever.

When your muscles grow, your muscle fibers add new myonuclei – each nucleus can only “manage”a finite amount of real estate in a muscle fiber, so your fibers have to add more as they grow. If you stop training, you may lose muscle size, but those myonuclei stick around for much, much longer. That’s the main reason behind the phenomenon of “muscle memory.” If you take a few months off lifting, you can come back to the gym and get back to your old levels of strength and muscularity pretty quickly, because your body doesn’t have to fuse new myonuclei again. The old ones are still sticking around (unless the muscle fiber itself dies, as could happen with aging or severe injury), so your body just ramps up protein synthesis and voila! It takes you a month or two to gain back the muscle it initially took you years to build, because protein accretion can proceed at a quicker rate than gaining new myonuclei.
The blue lines represent years of hard training. The red line represents a couple weeks or months. From the University of Oslo.

Of course, the application for steroids is pretty obvious. You take steroids, you gain mass, you go off, and those myonuclei are still hanging around, keeping you more jacked than you would have been otherwise.

here are some takeaways:

1) Steroids, physiologically, work.  This much is not debateable.

2) On top of how well they work physiologically, a major factor is how well they workpsychologically – if you do something expecting to get a ton stronger, there’s a good chance you’ll get a ton stronger.  This applies to much more than steroids.

3) Steroids do provide a substantial advantage for sports that aren’t governed by weight classes.  However, taking too high of a dose right off the bat may actually decrease performance (increased strength and mass, but decreased relative strength), especially in sports with weight classes.  If you decide to use steroids, you’ll probably get the best bang for your buck, strength-wise, with very conservative doses initially.

4) If you take steroids and then come off of them, you’ll probably lose some of the size and strength you gained, but you’ll always be at an advantage relative to a lifetime drug-free athlete.