IMPORTANT – The post is written under the assumption that Mike, and the rest of the top bodybuilders of his era, used steroids. If you don’t like this assumption, please don’t read the rest of the post.

Mike Mentzer  may have been the smartest body builder of all time – or at least of his generation.

He seemed to have realized something that none of the other trainers of his day realized – Time is extremely valuable.

And, Mike may have also realized that he could let the anabolic nature of steroids do the majority of the growth inducing work – That there was a MAXIMAL rate (speed) at which his muscle could grow or increase in size. And once that rate was hit by using the right combination of intramuscular tension, recovery and anabolic steroids, all the bench presses, dead lifts and squats in the world were not going to speed it up to any noticeable degree.

Think about it. The general consensus is that Mike spent very little time in the gym….somewhere between 3 days per week to less than an hour a day every 7 to 14 days (Forgive me – I don’t know the exact claim).

Many of his competitors spent 2-3 hours in the gym 5-6 days per week. And say what you will about Mike, but you have to admit, his build was at par with the rest of the top competitors of his time.

So to me, he was smart enough to know he could train intensely then let the hormones do the work that they do. Essentially guiding growth  with infrequent intense workouts. And as we discussed previously on this blog (Infrequent training and muscle growth), he could have done absolutely no work and still would have probably grown better than anyone who was training hard, but not using drugs.

When you compare his results to a number of his peers at the time (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Zane, Boyer Coe and Chris Dickerson to name few.), and if you assume the steroid dosages were roughly equal in effectiveness and health risks, you begin to wonder- why spend all that time working out if you didn’t have too?

Two hours a day, 5 times a week, that’s 10 hours that could have been spent doing something else.

Next, when you consider long term health, and the wear and tear on the body, Mentzer may have also been one step ahead of his peers. It is easy to reason that with much more recovery time between workouts Mike most likely would have had much less joint and tendon wear and tear.
Bottom line. Mike Menzter did less work but achieved similar results as his peers. This is likely due to a combination of awesome genetics, anabolic steroids and a unique style of training.

Now here in lies the conundrum with this theory: Is it better for long term health, use of time, and overall happiness, to not use steroids and be in the gym for multiple hours per week, or to use steroids and hardly be in the gym ever?

The obvious answer is the quick “steroids are bad” retort, but I think this warrants further investigation – Especially when we throw ‘low dose steroids’ into the mix – The amount that would mimic the build of a highly dedicated natural trainer, with a fraction of the time and wear and tear required.

More of a ramble today than a concise thought, but there are some things worth considering here.

BP

It’s important information that I think needs to be shared with as many people as possible.

So I’ve set this up so you can share it with anyone you wish. It’s also a work in progress. I will be adding more presentations, more downloads and more information as quickly as I can.

So with out further ado:

If you want to know how eating less (including fasting) can indirectly HELP you build muscle, and how over-eating, lack of sleep and even too much strenuous exercise can slow the muscle building process then this new project is for you:

Click HERE ? Inflammation and Muscle Growth

The presentation is live, and downloads will be made available shortly.

I hope you like it (Feedback welcomed)

BP

People on steroids who are NOT training have the ability to gain more muscle weight and muscle size then those who are not on steroids but who ARE training.

In other words, by being on steroids you can gain more by sitting on the couch playing playstation than your buddy can by busting his ass in the gym.

If you take that into account while reading HIT reviews, it illustrates that steroids MAY (note: I’m not saying are) be a confounder.

In this bar graph the people on the left were not working out. First bar is placebo. Second bar is people taking testosterone.

The people on the right were working out. First bar is placebo, second bar was taking testosterone.

Notice the Testosterone no exercise bar is higher than the exercise with no testosterone bar (bar 2 versus bar 3)

Here’s the same study looking at the size of the subjects triceps:

Check out bar 2 versus bar 3.

Something to consider next time someone tells you the key to building muscle is to train for 15 minutes once every other week.

“The simplest explanation is likely the correct one”

BP

(graphs from N Engl J Med 1996;335:1-7.)

I think we all know that steroid use is probably much more prevalent that we’ve been led to believe.

And while the average person may only think of larger-than-life bodybuilders as the only people who use steroids, the educated/experienced person has a pretty good hunch that celebrities, rock stars, hollywood actors (and actresses) athletes, and ‘average sized’ male models all have a good chance of having some sort of experience with steroids.

Now, the point of this post isn’t on the ethical, moral or legal debates about steroids. Rather it’s about the health effects.

It is well assumed that long term steroid use has a causal relationship to negative markers of health.

The assumption being that steroid use CAUSES the negative health effects.

This is the fact that health care experts, governing sports bodies and the mainstream media trumpet as the main point in their anti-steroids argument.

However, my thought is that there is an alternative hypothesis worth exploring.

The hypothesis is this:

Long-term steroid use is associated with negative health outcomes, but it is not causal.

It is having and maintaining a muscle mass that is far outside the realms of normal for your specific height that is causally linked to disease.

In other words, it’s the massive amounts of extra muscle causing the diseases…the steroids are just what allowed you to have that muscle.

The interesting thing about this hypothesis is that it opens up the idea that small dose steroids my not be bad for you, and that having massive amounts of muscle (even if somehow obtained naturally), could actually be associated with disease.

A bit of a re-think, especially in our current “more muscle = more health”  way of thinking.

I’m definitely not an anti-muscle person (You can see Anabolic Again for proof of that), but I do find it interesting after seeing John Barban’s Transformation that a natural lifter can look very muscular while still having an amount of muscle that would be considered ‘normal’ for is height. Heck, John even has a normal BMI in these pics ==> http://johnbarban.com/transformation-pictures/

BP

If you are on Anabolic Steroids there is a chance that you DO need an increased amount of protein in your diet.

After all, with one a good round of Anabolics you could possibly gain more skeletal muscle mass in 8 weeks then most men do in 80 weeks.

In fact, when you think about men in their 30′s, 40′s and beyond, a cycle of anabolic steroids may add more muscle then they would otherwise see in the rest of their lifetime.

So really, it’s reasonable to suggest that the nutritional needs may be different for people who are ‘on’. (i.e. they may need significantly  more protein)

The other issue with Anabolic Steroid use that may necessitate higher protein intakes is that it is a situation of FORCED muscle growth.

Meaning your muscles are going to grow regardless (even if you are not weight training)…which makes me wonder:

Where does the needed protein come from in situations of FORCED and rapid muscle growth?

If not diet, then we are looking at other sources.

And while for normal non-steroid people, the labile amino acid pool, as well as the amino acid recycling that occurs in our body is usually enough to make up for any deficit left from our diets..you have to wonder: In situations of massive growth could these amino acids be leached from our internal organs?

And at what rate?

Could high dose Anabolics actually cause organ damage if not matched with suffecient dietary protein to match the increased rates of growth?

Bottom line – this post is more of a rambling ‘think out load’ kinda post, but it does make you wonder if A) steroids create a need for more protein and B) why we take nutritional advice from people on steroids if we are NOT on steroids….

BP

PS – If you are interested in my views on protein you can see www.TruthAboutProtein.com

By and large we are all roughly related in how we look.

If I put a person, a gorilla and a hippopotamus together in a room, chances are you would easily pick out the human.

If I was abducted by aliens right now, and was forced to describe the male part of the human race, this is what I would say:

They average about 5’10″ in height, with about 148 pounds of lean mass. At any given height they can vary greatly in weight, but this is due to their ability to store energy in the form of fat mass.

If I was asked to explain further I would say this:

Their height is normally distributed with a standard deviation of about 3 inches. This means that 95% of all men fall somewhere between 5’4″ and 6’4″ in height.

At any given height their lean mass is also fairly normally distributed with a standard deviation of about 7 pounds. Meaning, an extremely athletic healthy male can have about 14 pounds more lean mass than the average, and a man can be about 14 pounds less than the average before we begin to worry about them being in a disease state.

(or imagine the picture a 6 year old child would draw if they were asked to draw a man or a woman…it would probably be pretty obvious and pretty average looking, not too fat and not too skinny)

In other words, our physiology, much like everything else about the human body, is VERY tightly regulated. Everything is interconnected.

Yes, there are some anomalies that somehow have more muscle than anyone else, just like there are some men who are 7 feet tall. But these are very very rare cases (About 2.5% of the population).

For the most part you and I are limited in how much muscle we can add, based on the fact that we are all human beings. There are checks and balances EVERYWHERE in our bodies.

And this is for GOOD reason.

Here is something that people selling exercise programs with claims like “Add 60 pounds of muscle in 6 weeks” don’t want you to think about.

Many of the things that can cause your muscle to grow beyond its normal limits are also connected to higher than average rates of cancer.

After all, cancer is by definition, uncontrolled growth.

• Chronic high testosterone? Correlated with Increased Cancer risk.
• Chronic high insulin? Correlated with Increased Cancer risk.
• Chronic high Growth Hormone? Correlated with increased Cancer risk.
• Chronic high IGF-1? Correlated with increased Cancer risk.

The point of all this is – You are human. So be happy with your build, work towards increasing your muscle mass and decreasing your fat mass, but have REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS.

From my findings, an adult human male can expect to gain about 14 pounds of muscle through strength training, for a female its closer to 6. After that any muscle growth is extremely slow.

If you want more muscle and are willing to go the pharmaceutical route to get it, just be aware that there may be long term health ramifications.

If you want more muscle and are NOT willing to go the pharmaceutical route, and are upset about your lack of progress remember – there are good reasons why you are limited in your ability to grow.

Eat less and move more. Try your best to build muscle while keeping your body fat low, and remember you are human. This means you are probably not going to be 250 pounds and 5% body fat any time in your life unless you are also about 6’10″ tall.

BP

As far I am concerned there is only 1 thing that has shown a clear, reproducible dose-response relationship with muscle size in humans (other than height).

It’s not protein or calories. It’s not even workout length, weight lifted or even Growth Hormone.

While all these things may (or may not) play a role, the only thing that has a clear dose response relationship is testosterone.

We know some athletes use it. We know some recreational lifters use it. We know some fitness models use it. We even know that some h0llywood celebrities use it. (I’m saying ‘some’ to keep me out of trouble).

We also know that for various reasons a large percentage of these people lie about using it.

This skews all of our data.

Because people lie about using steroids we have no idea what the natural limitations of the human body are. It is a GIANT confounding variable in the study of exercise and muscle growth.

For instance:

Eating high amounts of protein has been a giant let down for most people, so why is it still be touted as a muscle builder? Well, maybe protein works differently for guys and girls who are on 2,500 mg of Testosterone per week.

Eating big? A great way to make you fat. UNLESS…more calories may actually mean more muscle when you are using D-bol and Trenbolone.

It always kills me when I hear big guys (typically power lifters) tell little guys that the key to getting big is to eat McDonalds 8 times a day. For some reason they leave out the side order of Anadrol.

Without mentioning the steroids, the ‘prescription’ for getting huge muscles is also the exact same prescription for becoming an obese North American.

Now, I’m not advocating steroid use, but what I am saying is that to truly start to understand what causes muscle growth, we need everyone to be open about steroid use.

This is why most fitness magazines are useless, as are most fitness websites. Having people tell you about their awesome new workout that helped them put on 30 pounds of muscle without telling you about their new steroid stack that went along with the workout is just useless information.

As is ‘muscle building advice’ from guys who have been the exact same weight for the last 5 years.

The bottom line is that we are not nearly as far along in understanding muscle growth as we would like to believe, and we are not going to move forward until steroids are openly discussed.

BP