But he didn't want just size. He wanted to look jacked. Do you understand that you can give some people steroids and the physique changes in a way that NO amount of time or training and eating allows? You start hormones and your shoulders start to "spread" in a way that is abnormal. My brother stupidly used steroids without training at all but in 6-8 weeks his body, when in a t-shirt, looked very different - you have the shoulder widening effect with the trapezius hyperthrophy. No amount of training causes this same look. Steroids cause water retention but not all water retention is the same. Water from anabolics looks different that water from kidney or heart issues. Most of the weight Matt gained is water but it looks like steroid water retention, meaning it looks like muscle. Consider this scenario: identical twin girls. One trains like crazy. The other doesn't train but uses anabolic steroids. Both weigh the same after 2 months. Will they look the same? Who is likely to visually have more jacked traps and wider shoulders? Do you not understand that anabolics cause a different look? Even you skin will look different. Anabolics may cause the muscle in your hands and jaw (and head generally) to hypertrophy in a way that simply does not happen without hormones.
On pubmed there is a case study of a person whose face got lopsided. What had happened was he ate gum on one side of his mouth and used Winstrol causing the jaw muscle on one side to hypertrophy. You think if he didn't use steroids and ate twice as much gum he'd gotten the same lopsided face? Unlikely.
Or think about this: in Rambo II Stallone weighed 150lbs. Could he have weighed the same or more without steroids? Maybe. But it wouldn't have looked the same. Do you get it?
Steroids = different look. It simply can't be duplicated without them. 150lbs = twink weight. But can looked jacked with hormones.
The only way anyone looks remotely "jacked" at 150 lbs is if his body fat is severely low and he's athletic, steroids or not.
Speaking of traps, I've been motivated to train mine more, after my brother-in-law complimented me on mine, during a family get-together. In addition to that, when I posted about my training style of using "alternates" (doing a set of one bodypart, resting, and doing a set with the opposite bodypart), I realized that I pretty much ignore my traps when I do shoulders.
But, with a strained forearm, doing barbell or dumbbell shrugs became problematic. Fortunately, complex problems often have simple solutions. The Smith Machine where I do military presses also has two calf machines next to it, one seated and one of those sorry Hoist plate-loaded standing calf machine. The Hoist machine sucks for doing calves....BUT for doing shrugs (until my forearm healed up completely), it worked great. So, it's a set of shoulder presses on the Smith, rest, then alternate with shrugs....until I'm done with shoulders and traps.
So far, so good!!
Exactly!!!
This x1,000.
MCWAY seems to think being 200-lb naturally is the same as being 200-lb on steroids. It's not. And in my case, NO AMOUNT OF TRAINING CAN GET ME THIS LOOK.
And what an insult for him to suggest someone who has trained as long and as consistently as me could post such results.
What absolute BALDERDASH!
Perhaps - just PERHAPS - with changes to my NUTRITION, things could have been closer, as I've always been between 1,000 and 1,500 calories daily.
I rest my case! 1500 calories? PLEASE!! That's a little more than one of my weight gainer shakes back in my college days. And I was downing THREE of them, in addition to regular food.
It reduced closer to 1,000 to 1,100 from 2014 before this cycle, and now it's generally over 2,000 daily, although in the past week, I think I've slept back closer to 1,800 or less...regressing to my old habits, and losing some size to go with it.
The quick gains from steroids have motivated me to eat more. It's hard to do something like double my calories, knowing it will take over a year to get WORSE results.
That is "BALDERDASH"!! And I know that from personal experience. I go back to what I did in 1996. In addition to the 21 lbs I put on that spring semester, I added another 5 in two months during summer break to get to 215. Then, I finally got to try creatine (Phosphagen HP, to be exact).
As most people know, when you load for the first time, you'll swear creatine is the second coming. In my case, it was 7 pounds in one week and 5 pounds the second week.
That means I started spring semester 1996 at 189 lbs, left school for the summer at 210, added another 5 pounds to get to 215 and added creatine to get to 227 before I went back to school. Take a wild guess as to what my friends, teachers, and dorm director asked me when I returned to campus.
If my math is correct, from early Jan to late Aug is approximately 8 months. Eight months, 38 lbs, no anabolics (couldn't afford them even if I wanted to use them). It was food, weight gainer, and (at summer vacation's end) creatine.
So, this sniveling about needing 18 months to put on 20 - 25 lbs, without steroids is unwarranted. BTW, this wasn't regaining weight I once had. I'd never been over 200 in my life prior to 1996.
Anadrol has made the difference - causing me to bring my calories up to a sufficient level.
But my point is - no amount of training will give me the 24/7 full and pumped up look that I get from gear. I can maybe maintain half a chest pump one day after chest day - but not much more.
Steroids allow this to be a daily thing.
It's sad because I'm willing to do things naturally to look this way...but it's simply not possible.
No, you're not!! You've been told the one thing you need to do. But, you won't do it, which is why it's back to twig city when you go off the sauce.
It's depressing knowing that the look I want necessarily requires steroids.
But it does. And I've had way too much experience training naturally to believe the hogwash that MCWAY spouts.
Hence, you have the mark of sheer immaturity and insecurity. When you're truly BIG enough, you don't worry about being pumped all the time. I outgrew that garbage decades ago. I still can't believe I was the goofball, doing pushups every so often at water parks and beach picnics, trying to stay pumped to impress girls.
Once I got to a certain size, that foolishness was necessary.
