14 Brutal Lessons From 10 Years of Abusing STEROIDS

Steroids are the hot topic of social media and I've been taking them for 23 years. My journey started at 15 years old taking Deca and I became a professional bodybuilder at 25 and now I'm 38 years old. And today I'm breaking down 20 brutal lessons I learned the hard way from two decades of using steroids. Because when you're starting out, even if you're only a few cycles deep, the information out there is freaking overwhelming. And half the advice is bro science. It's guys that have no idea what they're doing. And the other half is people fear-mongering you. and no one's telling you what you actually need to know and what actually matters. And you're going to sign up for this the long haul. You better know what you're doing. And by the end of this video, you'll either completely rethink your approach to steroids, peeds, or you're going to realize you're not cut out for this at all. Either way, you'll know the truth. So, let's jump right into lesson one right now. Just because it's an oral steroid does not mean it's for beginners. This is probably the worst and most dangerous advice I hear guys tell each other, especially online. Guys think swallowing a pill is safer than injecting it. And that's actually completely ass backwards. Orals are hepotoxic, meaning these drugs are methylated and a needed to survive in your liver, which means the doses stress your liver more. They mess up your lipids. They spike your blood pressure. And these are things that injectables typically don't do as bad. They still affect it, but it's way different. We'll talk about that in a second. They also destroy your gut microbiome, which is why most guys feel worse mentally on orals and affect them mentally worse because, well, your gut microbiome controls all these things. And injectables just don't do that. Anavar, Winstrol, Dball, Anadrol, T-ball, whatever. These are not beginner drugs. And I've seen guys pop 50 milligs of Anavar, 100 milligrams of Anadrol a day for 12 weeks because some influencer told them, "Oh, bro, it's mild. Don't worry about it. I did it. " A basic testosterone cycle is 100% safer and more effective than any oral only protocol. And if you're considering an oral only cycle, just stop right [ __ ] now because you're about to make one of the most expensive, costly mistakes of your journey. So, lesson number two, roid rage. It's real, but it's not what you think. Everyone jokes about it. It's a meme at this point, but it's not universal when it hits because, well, it doesn't look like what you see on social media and what social makes it seem because most guys run grams of gear and stay completely calm. Like myself, I'm never angry, never mad, I'm not shortfused. And for others, this change is terrifying because it's not always explosive anger like you think like these memes are. Sometimes it's cold indifference, paranoia, anxiety, or this slow emotional drift where you become someone your family and friends don't even know or recognize. And the scary part is that you won't see it happening. You'll just think it's you. It's a new you. And you'll rationalize all this irritability and tell yourself, "Everyone's just overreacting. It's not me. " Steroids are going to disrupt your neurotransmitters 100%. High androgens affect your dopamine, your serotonin, and the entire reward and aggression pathways that well, your gut controls. And that brings me to something even more dangerous than just some mood changes. Let's go to lesson number three. Feeling invincible on drugs is basically your body lying to you about the damage it's causing. Because the most insidious thing about peeds, androgens, is the mental state that it creates for you. this environment, well, this fake reality because you feel amazing, you're recovering faster, you're stronger, and the confidence is through the roof. Everything feels right. And that feeling tricks you into thinking that you're healthier than ever. But you're really not at all because your blood pressure is climbing, your kidneys are filtering compounds. They weren't designed to filter the toxins, the solvents, the impurities, your hemocrat is rising to dangerous levels, your hemoglobin, your heart rate, all things are happening very silently while you feel like a god. and you don't care because you look amazing. You look in the mirror and you're so proud of yourself. And I actually had a client going through this exact same situation recently. He couldn't get off that mental high to get healthy first. And we're no longer working together because of this because I want him to get healthy before we continue to push. I'm not going to name names for his privacy, but this trap kills men all the time. And women, you're guilty, too. But men, you really fall for this trap because you're ego. And this is exactly why I have lesson number four. what it is because this is extremely critical for you to remain healthy. Blood work is not the only tool for tracking and measuring health. No, there's plenty of tools out there because your kidneys are filtering out all these compounds 24/7, your liver. So, even if your blood work looks fine and you have early stages of neuropathy, it's not going to show up for years. You understand that, right? And don't get me wrong, you should be getting comprehensive panels every 12 to 16 weeks if you're going to run anabolic steroids. But blood work is a delayed indicator. By the time your kidney damage shows up in these standard labs you're getting with blood work, you're already in trouble, bro. And that's why I tell my clients to track your blood pressure, your heart rate availability, which is HRV, your resting heart rate, your sleep quality, and 100% come to True Genetics and get an epigenetic test done and measure the toxicity levels in your body. GI map tests help as well if you don't want to budget an epigenetic test, but you need to do other tests than just blood work. And this

goes for anyone, but we're talking about people that are going to use anabolic steroids. Because I've seen guys with perfect blood work, and this happens all the time who couldn't walk up a flight of stairs without even getting winded. And they had high blood pressure literally all the time. And these guys were allegedly so healthy. And the absence of bad news on your blood work is not the same thing as having good health. Now, once you understand that, this next lesson is going to make a lot more sense for you. So, let's move on to lesson number five. The smartest peed users run the most boring protocols. Now, what does that mean? This is going to disappoint a lot of you. I'll tell you that beforehand. Everyone wants this exotic stack that's going to make them look like Sebum, Chris Bumstead, Mr. Olympia, the god of all gods in bodybuilding. But the guys who have been doing this successfully for decades, let's talk about Jay Cutler, Brandon Curry, he's still competing. Uh Dexter Jackson, he competed till he was 50 years old. They're not blasting a lot of gear once they get older and they have the muscle tissue. You want to know what the secret is? elite genetics, elite training, recovery, and prioritizing nutrition, keeping your body as healthy as possible. Because when you're running a simple protocol, you can actually attribute your results and side effects to very specific variables. And now you know what's working and you know what's causing the problem, the friction. When you're running test, trend, mastron, anavar, growth hormone, insulin, peptides, anti-estrogens, fat burners, thyroid medicine, you have no idea what's doing what. And I know this is not exciting. I know you guys want to hear something else, but if you want to be in this game for the long haul, boring is going to win. And being smart, and this is why boring protocols only work if you understand why you're using them in the first place. Which brings me to the next lesson, which is lesson number six, peeds. These don't fix your insecurities. If you're taking peeds just because you think a bigger body, a bigger physique, more muscle is going to make you confident and attractive, people are going to like you, or you're going to feel more complete with your life. Cuz let's say you have a great career, you make a lot of money, you have a big home. I'm telling you guys, you're setting yourself up for a psychological trap. You're never going to escape. I'm not even going to say might. You will never escape it because I'm going to tell you what actually happens. This is reality. You take steroids, you get big. You thought 180 lbs lean would be enough. Then you set the bar to 200. Not enough. 220, not enough. Now you're chasing a look that exists in your head, but never actually in reality. bi dysmorphia will not go away when you get enhanced. Guess what happens? It gets worse because PEDs amplify whatever is already there. The difference is now you're insecure on hormones and you're all over the place and you're dependent on drugs. Which brings me to the next point, which is lesson number seven, estrogen. Now, when you don't manage estrogen properly, these AI cause way more harm than the steroids themselves if you don't know what you're doing with them. Now, they can be very safe, but if you don't know what you're doing, damage is going to happen because your body becomes more resistant to these anti-estrogen compounds the same way insulin does. So, you're going to need more to get the same effect. And this is exactly why I have guys rotate their aromat inhibitors if you're going to be on all year. Not someone that's using TRT. I'm talking about guys that are running cycles. The AI abuse crashes your E2, which then is going to tank your IGF-1, insulin growth factor, which means you're killing your gains while you're trying to stay dry and shredded and hard vascular. This is where guys completely [ __ ] themselves up. And everyone is so scared of estrogen. But guess what? Low estrogen is just as bad for you. All you want to do is regulate estrogen. Guys are worried about gyno and water retention, all these emotional side effects. So they hammer anti-estrogens from day one of their cycles without monitoring anything. They don't understand that estrogen is very anabolic. It's cardioprotective. It's neuroprotective. And it's going to drive a hormone that's very important, IGF-1, which is one of the most important growth factors in your body. You understand? Without IGF-1 and having great testosterone levels, you're probably not going to build that much muscle. But when you have healthy uh insulin growth factor markers and healthy testosterone levels, now you're growing like a monster cuz that's what regulates how much muscle you can build. It retain and collagen and also elasticity of your skin. Do you want to get old and be jacked? No. You want to stay young and look fresh. So, when you crash your estrogen trying to stay dry, have water retention, avoiding gyno, you're tanking your ability to build muscle, you're destroying your joints, you're wrecking your lipids, and you feel like absolute [ __ ] dog [ __ ] And here's the kicker. Your body adapts to too much anti-estrogen, and you're going to keep needing more of it if you're not safe with these things. And the guys that look best long term, they keep their estrogen balance in ratio to compared to what their testosterone levels are, which hormones they're using. They incorporate Masteron. They incorporate primabolin. And now they let their estrogen stay a little bit higher because you know why? They're managing the ratios of all their androgen hormones. And they manage it with adjustments to the doses, lifestyle, nutrition, supplementation, and then you know they're not letting drugs control everything. They don't want to keep stacking drugs on top of drugs. Learn to manage estrogen properly and safely, and you will feel so much better. And once

you understand that you can manage it properly, you'll stop spending years spinning your wheels wondering why you look and feel horrible when the drugs didn't do anything for you. They made you worse. And estrogen is not the only thing that people mismanage. There's something even more insidious happening with orals. Did you know about this lesson number eight? High doses of anabolics. Well, they stress something called our Vegas nerve. You know what a Vegas nerve is? You guys ever hear that before? Well, this is usually why you can't sleep. You're anxious all the time. You have GI issues. Your autonomic nervous system has two modes. You have sympathetic, which is fight orflight mode. I'm sure you guys have heard that. It's not good. Parasympathetic, which is rest and digest. High doses of androgens push you into chronic sympathetic mode all the time. So basically, you're just turned on 24/7. The best example I give you is like if you got chased by a lion. It's a horrible example, actually. Guess what happens? You get all this adrenaline, epinephrine, dumped into your blood because you're in survivor mode. You're in fight orflight mode. Basically, steroids do that 24/7 to you. Your body's stuck in this fight orflight mode. And that's why you can't sleep. That's why you feel exhausted all the time. And here's the problem. You can't recover when you're in sympathetic overdrive. Your body needs to be in parasympathetic activation mode, right? So basically, you need to shift your body into this rest and digest mode for your body to adapt from the training and to be able to build muscle. So when you're on high doses, you lose that ability. And more doesn't always equal better. As you guys know, sometimes more is just putting more stress on your nervous system. And at that point, it's already maxed out. So overdrugging this is not going to work. And that stress doesn't just go away when you come off. In fact, that's usually when things get worse. Lesson number nine. Coming off is going to make you feel worse. Actually, and I went through this myself when I retired at bodybuilding at 30 after my professional bodybuilding career. [ __ ] at the fan, as you guys know. You saw foes of me. 360 lbs, hair falling out, chronic problems with every [ __ ] hormone in my body. Every organ in my body was a mess, loaded with toxins, parasites, worms, candida, blood pressure problems, cholesterol problems, you name it. The only thing that was still somewhat okay was my heart. Thank God. This is why I always tell you guys prepare because coming off is going to feel worse than being natty ever did because your brain remembers when you're on these steroids and when you were high. Pretty much this psychological trap keeps people on them for life. This is why guys don't come off ever. I'm not talking about TRT. Again, preface talking about the steroid cycle. The brain got used to this overload of dopamine in the brain and adapted to that and that was your new normal. Everything was giving you dopamine hits. Everything. And this is why the PCT is so brutal. Your postcycle therapy. This what you do once you come off. You want to restore natural testosterone levels. Now, if you're going to be using steroids, understand that coming off and tapering down to this TRT is going to be the hardest part. I can tell you firsthand because I went through it and hundreds, if not thousands of my clients have done this. You have to understand high doses and very aggressive stacks are not the only reason this happens, which this takes us to lesson number 10. Time on the drugs does more damage than high doses. I talk about this a lot. The longer period of time that you expose your body and your health to drugs, the worse it's going to be once you try to come off. Everyone thinks blasting high doses is the dangerous part, but yeah, let me say this, it's risky. But the real damage comes from time under being suppressed and stressing the liver, stressing the kidneys, stressing the heart. You can run a gram of testosterone, let's say, for 12 weeks, come off, recover, and be fine. Now, your age does play a role in this, but if you're on, let's say, 600 to 800 milligrams a week for 5 years straight, and let's say you're in your 20s and 30s, and you never come off, good luck. That constant exposure is going to cause irreversible damage and your cardiovascular system, your lipids, your endocrine system, your kidney, your liver are all going to be stressed out 247 365 because you're not giving your body a break. Yeah, blast and cruise sounds smart because you're not running crazy doses 365 days a year. But you're never giving your body a chance to reset. And this is why the guys who've been on TRT or done blast and cruise cycles for a decade straight often have way worse health markers than a guy who just did a few high dose cycles and actually gave his body a chance to restore its natural hormones. He came off. The body can handle acute stress, but when you expose it to chronic stress for a long period of time, this is very different. If longevity is your main goal, the time off matters more than keeping the doses moderate. And again, we're not talking about TRT doses. And one of the biggest sources of chronic stress that no one wants to talk about is lesson number 11, chasing dryness, the hardness. This is bad. That destroys more people's lives than heavy cycles. Instagram, social media basically convinced everyone that you need to look stage ready and be shredded with a six-pack, have veins, be like 8% body fat year round, and that it's healthy. No. To achieve that, guys are running diuretics all the time, abusing AIS. They're doing low carb diets, low calorie diets, tons of cardio, fat burners, stimulants. Your body's not

designed to stay around 5 to 8% body fat all year. Listen, there's some freaks out there. There's some people that are exception, but most of you watching this, the other 99%, you're not the exception. Stage conditioning for photo shoots or a movie scene are just for temporary purposes. It's not a sustainable lifestyle. Any of you want to do it and you, let's say you claim you're healthy, eventually it's going to have its side effects. is creep up on you and cause damage. When you try to maintain that long term, it creates this high level of stress on your system. That's worse than any steroid cycle you can take. And that constant stress makes this next issue even worse, which is lesson number 12. No compound fixes bad sleep or fried nervous system. And this is why for most guys, the reason they hit a plateau is because they're not recovering. They keep adding more steroids thinking that's going to fix everything. Everyone wants a drug solution to the recovery problem. They don't want to sleep. rest. They want to take a day off from the gym. Oh, I'm going to take melatonin. more growth hormone. I'm going to take DSIP, the sleep peptide. I'm going to take this. No. If you're not sleeping seven, eight hours a night or more and you're training hard, you're on all these steroids, your nervous system is fried from overtraining and stress. No compound on earth, if you're mega dosing growth hormone, is going to fix that. And this is why these boring protocols work 100% of the time. Because when you're not running an entire pharmacy worth of drugs, you can actually focus on these fundamentals that actually matter. Your training, your nutrition, your sleep, your stress. The best cycle you can run is the one that supports your recovery capacity, not the one that exceeds it. Which is exactly why this next lesson is so critical for actually seeing good results, which is lesson number 13. Tit training your doses slowly instead of making huge jumps. This one's very simple, but most guys completely ignore this advice because everyone wants to jump straight to their target dose, the highest dose. Day one cycle, 500 milligrams. Day two, 1,000 milligrams. And well, that's just stupid because when you titrate slowly, you're going to accomplish a couple things here. First, you're going to find the minimum effective dose. Second, this one's really important. You give your body time to adapt. You can manage the side effects as they appear instead of getting hit with everything all at once, not knowing how to handle things. Third, you collect data. You know what 100 millig, 200 millig, 250 millig feels like. You know exactly what's going on. Now you can actually attribute the changes to a specific dose that you're taking with those compounds and start lower than you actually think you need to do because what are you rushing for? Give it time. And that's how you can actually run sustainable protocols that don't wreck your health for just a little bit of progress. And sustainability is everything. Trust me, guys. I'm 38. I've been in this game for a long time. Because lesson number 14, if you want to stay in the game a long time, longevity becomes the only thing that matters. Right? If you can last longer, be just as good, improve, you're unstoppable. And this is the lesson that makes perfect sense after you've been in this game for as long as I have for 15, 20, 25 years. When you start, it's all about size. Then it becomes about aesthetics. You want to stay lean. You want to look good year round. You want to compete. You want to win. But if you stay in this long enough, something in your mind is going to shift. You stop caring about being the biggest or the most impressive to others. You just want to be healthy. You want to stay functional. You want to keep training without being in [ __ ] pain. You want to be alive and well enough to enjoy the physique that you built. Longevity becomes the only thing that matters. And I've seen guys I looked up to develop like serious heart problems, kidney failure, strokes, heart attacks. I've watched people who I thought were invincible become cautionary tales. Sad. Really is. And at some point you realize none of this matters if you're not enjoying it. And once you make that shift, you start making different decisions. You start prioritizing your health over just being big. And you run safer, longer, lower doses. You take time off. You actually listen to your body and what's going on and really listen. Because if you're smart enough to know that the goal is not to peak at 30 and then burn out at 35 or 40 or 45. The goal was to be training and be healthy and happy at 50 and 60 and 70. And I'm gonna leave you guys with something. Steroids are awesome. They work. And I personally would never trade anything that I did in my life to not experience what I did. And I love the science behind them. Most side effects that people experience that you read about, that you see online, come from stupidity, not from the actual drug. They can help you build an impressive physique. It's absolutely impossible to achieve naturally like Jeff Nippard. They can extend your career, your life, enhance your performance if you do it right. And this is coming from an individual who started taking Deca by itself at 15. I ran that for years without coming off. I abused steroids for over a decade straight. And it led me to the worst burnout moment of my life when I hit 30. Now that I'm 38, I'm back in the best shape of my life. When you use these things intelligently with monitoring your health, with realistic expectations and maturity, PDS are an incredible tool. And everything I share in this video isn't an argument against using peeds. It's an argument for using them intelligently. These 14 lessons took me 20 years to learn. They sound simple, but they're not. And I had to learn all of these the hardest way possible. So, if you're the

kind of person who could take this information and make intelligent decisions on your own, [ __ ] do it. But if you're serious about taking your physique to the next level with proper blood work, proper data, monitoring, customized protocols based on your response, and work with someone who's actually lived this for two decades and to guide you through all these things, click the first link in the description and book a call with my team. We work with men who over 30, want to optimize their performance without destroying their health in the process. If you got a lot of value from this video or even a little bit, hit that subscribe button, drop a comment, and tell me which of these 20 lessons hit you the hardest. Once again, thanks for watching, and I'm going to see you guys very soon.