"hey kid, come back to me after 15 solid years of never missing a workout, meal, or microsecond of sleep. THEN tell me dedication and hard work aren't better than steroids." 
To any dipshit who actually believes this: it doesn't take that long to "max out." Most honest and knowledgeable people will tell you that it shouldn't take more than three years of training to get all the muscle you're realistically ever going to have. I think it takes even less -- possibly even less than ONE YEAR of perfect training.
If you are the typical "aspiring bodybuilder," you probably played sports and started lifting in late middleschool/highschool. There's a good chance you weren't very good at real sports, so you quit and decided to just get bigger and stronger than everyone else. Turns out the joke was on you -- you got stuck on C-team/JV because you were a small little "late blooming" bitch with 0 hormones. You were also anti-social and didn't take advice from anyone, because you were going to "show them."
At this point there are several options:
A) You start juicing, remain mostly a shithead, and look like shit forever. No matter how big you get, you're never happy because you just have "okay" genes, and subconsciously realize that any "tiny tit" you silently smirk at whilst cranking out another dropset of upright rows could look exactly like you if he just got his little mitts on your test.
B) Fast forward five years and you finally learned a thing or two about bodybuilding, your hormones started flowing, you "bulked up," "cut down," and ended up looking okay. You got sick of the bullshit you read everywhere and ended up on getbig. Now you know better.
C) You listen to retards on T-Nation who tell you to order your Anaconda Protocol, eat your broccoli, and buy $50, 100 page PDF "e-books." You nod vigorously when they tell you to just "stick with it" (as they take a momentary break from the keyboard to "stick it" in their ass) for another 20 years, avoiding the temptation of the needle at all costs.
Fuck morons like Pat Banya, Layne Norton, Kiyoshi Moody, Jeff Rodriguez and the rest. They've built up the myth that the human capacity for adaptation is some sort of near-mythical god-like power that can only be harnessed by the most ironclad wills. Never mind the fact that these dipshits have looked the same for 15 of the 20 years they've been training... but none of the kids that they sell this shit to can be bothered to look this up (neither can I, actually
).
Like everyone says... it's not rocket science. If you are a kid who's frustrated with his results, make sure you
A) are familiar with BASIC bodybuilding (for exercise selection / volume / frequency / nutrition) and olympic lifting (for technique) practices.
B) are eating enough (again not doggcrapp 7000 calories a day bullshit... but if you are a total twink you're going to have to gain some weight -- try figuring out "maintenance" and add calories until you gain weight).
C) have entered puberty.
D) have trained while observing points A-C for at least 3 years.
if you are still unsatisfied, learn about steroids.
the end.
ps
this sort of turned into a random rant, but the original point was that anyone who says it takes a DECADE or more of hard work to get an incredible physique is either an outright liar, delusional, or has never set foot in a gym. honest people will tell you 3-5 years, at most, and even then i think a lot of times this includes a lot of wasted time (either due to pre-puberty lifting or colossal fuckups in diet / gym -- not saying bodybuilding is at all a complicated discipline but when we are young we are prone to doing very stupid things... no thanks to fucks like pat banya).
pps
yes whenever I wrote "you" in this post I meant "I"
pps
[img]meltdown.jpg[/img]edit:
Just to clarify, in light of the recent discussions in this thread, I'm not saying anything about "natural limits."
I'm saying the idea that hypertrophy occurs at a glacial pace is retarded nonsense invented by scumbag "naturals" whose lives depend on their false image.
"Plateaus" in general are nonsense too. If you are "stuck" you just need to find the "solution" to your "problem" and then things will move smoothly again. There is nothing at all NECESSARY about a plateau, give me a fucking break... just because everyone is bound to run into problems doesn't mean that plateaus are some sort of condition of life... it means you didn't know how to get bigger.
If you knew how to train, eat, rest, program, and most importantly when to take your steroids, from the get-go, you would shoot up to your "genetic potential" in no time.
If any successful bodybuilder could rewind the clock and do things all over again, they would probably forget the meaning of the word "plateau" (unless they remembered to attend geography this time...).
If you are stuck bouncing around weight for years and still unhappy with your body... put down the cell-tech and pick up the syringe.
