Athletes sometimes use steroids to build muscle-mass. Steroid use is forbidden by most athletic governing bodies. Consequently, athletes continue to get busted for steroid use.
My question has always been, why not just use the steroids to build the muscle-mass, and then quit the steroids and maintain the muscles with the use of free weights, etc? I’ve asked this question of the steroid-users that I know, and they tell me that the steroid muscles disappear after you stop taking the steroids. How could this be? Are they not “real” muscles? They seem to have the strength of “real” muscles (or else why would runners bother taking using steroids?)
I don’t understand this. How can a steroid muscle have strength and yet not last once the steroid use stops? Also, what happens to the muscle? Does it turn into fat, or is it (as one fellow told me) “mostly water and just gets pissed away?”
Muscle comes and goes. If it’s not needed or being used, or if the person is starving, the body deconstructs the muscle protein for other use elsewhere. Anabolic steroids repress the body’s natural tendency to resorb the muscles, thereby enabling the “athlete” to maintain an amount of muscle the body wouldn’t normally permit, even if they did exercise to the max.
What would happen, then, if I was to use steroids to develop an amount of mucle that I could maintain through weight-training? Could I theoretically be on the steroids for how ever many days or weeks it would take, develop my pecs, biceps, etc., and then get off the steroids and keep my new body shape? Or are the steroid muscles somehow different than the non-steroid muscles?
Pipeliner: That is the goal most people strive for.
Unfortunately you are not able to maintaint the workout that gave you the muscles w/o the sterioids.
Kind of like being 20 pounds overweight all your life. You go on the Atkins diet and lose the 20 pounds in a month then figure if you just eat like you did before your weight will remain the 20 pound less.
But your body will restore its equilibrium.
Another quick way to look at the power of steriods it to look at Frank Zane. He was a bodybuilder from the 60s and considered the most perfect example of a body builder. He didn’t use steriods.
Now go look at your gym. I bet you can find A LOT of guys better buildt than him. Why? Steroid use.