Good thinking, kreator.
Or any local, really.
Assuming fakes are a thing, that could be one way to deter the shopkeeper from doling them out to you.
My first two cycles [2004, 2005] had lackluster results. Yet more recently, my results have been good on minimal gear.
This leads me to believe that in those first two years, I just had bunk gear. My first cycle was Sustanon and Dianabol, presumably with real Dbol pills - but the Sustanon was something called "PVL Sustanon 350". It was from a Canadian underground lab.
Reading online much later on, it appears that they were either fake...or significantly under-dosed.
In 2005, I ran Testosterone Enanthate and Dianabol...and I think the Dbols were fake that time.
In hindsight, maybe that was a food thing. Both cycles were lackluster, and sort of turned me off from further cycles. That + health concerns.
Perhaps had I had access to quality gear [which I do now], I would have ran many more cycles over the past 20 years [as opposed to maybe one month of orals once every ~4 years].
I can't think of any other reason why I respond to gear so much better today. I think I had fakes in my early years - and they really deterred me from running much gear in the years which followed.
Matt, I'm just a lurker here. I always wondered though with so much dedication, decent looks, what appears to be decent size genetics, have you ever thought of turning up the juice and seeing how big you can get, and maybe compete? Not saying to get sick doing it, but enough to try to live the dream.
I have decent shape, but always have injuries from training so realized I just don't have the genetics to do it properly, and I also like my hair (my brother is bald) so didn't want to f things up too much.