Much muscle can you gain steroids

He explained that the drugs boost the number of cell nuclei in the muscle fibres. These nuclei are key to building strength in muscles when people exercise and the mouse study suggests that these extra nuclei gained through using testosterone remain in the long term.

Prof Gundersen believes the same holds true for humans. Despite the long held belief that steroid users lose the benefit of the drugs when they stop taking them, the Norwegian research suggests that even a brief exposure to steroids could have a long-lasting effect. I think it could last 10 years but I don't have the data to back that up. It would be my speculation yes," he said. The Norwegians believe that their research calls into question the current proposal from the World Anti Doping Agency Wada to raise the penalty for dopers from two years to four.

Those natural subjects in the study. According to Lyle McDonald, most males can gain 45 to 50 of muscle past their untrained state. Alan Aragon and Casey Butt also came to similar conclusions. Bryan Haycock has stated lbs of muscle. Women can gain half of this. That would mean those natural subjects on the low end of gains were not at their natural limit. I have no idea. For Lyle and Alan, those are just numbers pulled out of thin air.

Someone may only gain 15lbs, while someone else may gain The figures given by that formula look a lot more realistic and take into account wrist size, which is a huge factor, perhaps the single most important one. For a male of average height with 6. Of course, a larger bone structure brings with it more LBM in untrained state also, which is why there are no mass monsters out there without thick wrists and ankles.

Trainees with larger bone structures will smash right past that limit within a year of training naturally, whereas smaller individuals will barely reach it even with steroid use. Was that formula ever actually validated?

Or just pulled out of thin air? To my knowledge, that is the full extent of available evidence supporting its validity. The above implies top of the line genetics and a certain narrow range of wrist sizes 7.

For any other wrist size the formula was simply scaled up or down. The actual degree of achievable hypertrophy of course depends on a number of other factors. So while a very gifted smaller framed bodybuilder will be able to surpass the maximum potential of a somewhat structurally larger but less gifted one, when comparing two individuals of otherwise similar genetics for hypertrophy their frame size will be a solid predictor for who ends up gaining more muscle mass in a given time frame.

To validate an equation, you need a sample to develop the formula the champion bodybuilder database he has , and then you need another, independent sample to validate the formula does the formula that worked for the first sample also work for the second sample?

I think his formula has gone through the first step, but not the second. Greg: thanks for your superb site and the insightful research.

I would be super grateful if you sometime have a chance to cover this in depth also. With your approach to the subject, I think such an article would be very interesting reading and appreciated by many of your readers. If you feel this has already been covered well, I would appreciate a link. Keep up the good work! Best wishes, K. I am 54 now and have been working out steadily since I did notice the guys using had quick strength gains but tended to drop back down once they cycled off.

What I also noticed was their muscle thickness stayed intact even after the cycle. The key is to look at their chest and legs. I am lucky to have reasonably good genetics, but even with the good genes, the steroids allow for better, thicker mass development.

I still workout with one of those guys, and he is still thicker, in the chest and thighs, than I am even after not using for years. Is he any stronger no, but his muscle density in higher. I, for one, am glad I never used. I was happy with my physique and the level of density I achieved. Some guys were not and thought they needed a boost. I hope the long term effects are not severe for those guys. Any article discussing any type of enhancement needs also to address the risks.

For example, at my age, I no longer load up on high doses of extra protein. Bottom line guys find the body you are comfortable with and work to achieve it but be smart and weigh the risks. Good article. Regarding the first study mentioned where they gained 6. That sounds preposterous. Also, the training program is either described incorrectly or is also bullshit. Am I missing something?

I spend about 3 hours per day responding to questions people ask me. If it was the Bhasin study, the subjects started by detraining for a month, so their pre-training 1RMs were likely depressed, at least to some degree in which case, sets of 6 would have probably been pretty doable after a week or two due to retraining. It's impossible to know exactly how much muscle someone can build drug-free, so we approached this problem probabilistically, using published data and a fair amount of math to see how much extra muscle steroids help you build, and to estimate the probability that someone is drug-free based on their degree of muscularity.

Share on facebook. Share on twitter. Share on reddit. Share on email. Share on pocket. Share on whatsapp. Instead, we can estimate the likelihood that someone is drug-free or not based on their degree of muscularity. Not sure how to get the best results from your workouts? Gilbert Forbes, a pioneer in the study of body composition, showed that fat and lean tissue increase or decrease in relationship to each other. When a lean person overeats, 60 to 70 percent of the additional weight will be lean tissue.

Perhaps the greatest weight-gain experiment ever conducted began in the late s at Laval University in Quebec. The research team took 12 pairs of identical twins, all relatively lean but sedentary young males, and overfed them for days. The average increase was 18 pounds—about two-thirds lean tissue and one-third fat—but the range was from 9 to 29 pounds.

The number-one predictor of how much an individual gained was how much his twin gained. Genes also determined where they added the fat. In a study in the International Journal of Obesity , the researchers showed that those with the highest VO2 max a measure of aerobic fitness and the highest percentage of Type I muscle fibers the ones responsible for long-duration, low-intensity work gained the least weight, with the highest proportion of lean mass.

On the flip side, the men with the highest percentage of Type IIA muscle fibers—the ones that produce speed, strength, and power—gained the most weight, and the largest proportion of fat. For most of us, the glycolytic system is what we use for all-out efforts lasting 30 to 60 seconds although well-trained athletes can use it for up to two minutes. Thus, the men who were wired for long-distance sports gained the least weight when overfed, and gained the lowest percentage of fat.

And the men who were predisposed to be better at lifting or sprinting not only gained weight easily, they gained a higher proportion of fat.

How could these huge guys be so lean if their ability to put on weight also predisposed them to gain excess fat? The obvious answer is because they trained hard to gain muscle and then dieted hard to lose fat. The subjects in the Laval University study were all sedentary. The first studies linking synthetic testosterone to increased muscle and strength were published in the early s.

Americans dominated weightlifting in the early postwar years. But in , the Soviet Union won its first world championship, and in a doctor for the Soviet team admitted to his American counterpart that his athletes were injecting testosterone. The American doctor, John Ziegler, went on to develop Dianabol, the first oral steroid, and Winstrol, an injectable.

You know the rest of the story. By the s steroids were pervasive in strength and power sports, from the Olympics to the NFL. The body makes steroids naturally to support such functions as fighting stress and promoting growth and development. But some people use steroid pills, gels, creams, or injections because they think steroids can improve their sports performance or the way they look. Anabolic steroids are artificially produced hormones that are the same as, or similar to, androgens , the male-type sex hormones in the body.

There are more than variations of anabolic steroids. The most powerful androgen is testosterone pronounced: tess-TOSS-tuh-rone. Although testosterone is mainly a mature male hormone, girls' bodies produce smaller amounts. Testosterone helps build muscle and promotes the masculine traits that guys develop during puberty, such as deepening of the voice and growth of body hair.

Testosterone levels can also affect how aggressive a person is. For the most part, steroidal supplements, which used to be found at health food stores or gyms, are now illegal and require a prescription. DHEA is one of the few exceptions and can still be bought over the counter. Steroid supplements are weaker forms of androgen. Their effects aren't well known, but it's thought that, when taken in large doses, they cause effects similar to other androgens like testosterone.