The steroid doctor of the eighties, Dr. Walczak, explained it like this: If you are training properly (what's proper is for another debate) and eating properly you can expect to reach the upper limits of your natural genetic limit within two years with 85% of those improvement taking place in the first year. You can play with weight and body composition and make slight improvements due to new unaccustomed stimulus but it's not going to make a huge difference. After that, then it's all drugs and diet (meaning the protein and caloric requirements have to met).
For those that claim these gurus are just drug dealers and chemist have zero experience as to what these people do and why a pro bber, someone who is highly advanced in this field and is not as ignorant of the requirements necessary to be where they are as so many like to claim, would hire and pay thousands of dollars to these gurus. At the highest level, where a fraction of one percent is the difference between winning and losing, these gurus provide objective instructions to finely assess and tweak a world class physique striving to be number one on the planet. Diet is probably the most important aspect at this stage. Not drugs and training. Those are already a given and is not going to be the deal breaker. You can only ingest so much diuretics and not die. How you manipulate carb and fluid intake is the deal breaker at this stage.
In the modern age, no one will win the Mr. Olympia title coaching themselves.
I would be surprised that if anyone here that has actually competed like Coach, Tres Taco, Go4It considered drug and hormone intake as the deciding factor in the last stage of prep and not the 24/7 vigilance in any food or liquid they put into their bodies.
