There are quite high chances that you have heard about steroids being discussed on numerous sport news, sport forums and generally anywhere else where sports are involved. Being a sport fan at all, there’s a high chance that you’ve heard about steroids. If you don’t know why – because steroids are greatly boosting the performance and physique abilities of the user.
Because of the huge benefits that you may get from the use of steroids, you may have heard that there are lots of sports men and athletes who have chosen to use steroids in order to get all of those benefits. However, many people don’t know what exactly steroids are and how they work. Either you simply want to find out the answers to these questions for general knowledge or you also want to use steroids and that’s why is imperial for you to find these answers – you can start reading this article where we hope that you’re going to find what you need here.
Regardless what’s the reason why you want to find out how steroids work and what they do as soon as entering the body then this article is going to provide you with some information on how steroids are working.
- First off is important to mention that there are various different types of steroids with the most famous and widely used steroids being the anabolic steroids – the only steroids that are being used for physique and performance enhancement purposes. Even anabolic steroids are of various different types too but most anabolic steroids are working in similar ways.
With this being said, you may want to know – how do anabolic steroids are working? So well, in order to explain it in the easiest possible way – the anabolic steroids are acting as an agent for producing extra amounts of testosterone in the body. This is the most important hormone for growing muscle mass and increasing performance levels and is also known as the most important male hormone.
Testosterone is present in both male and female bodies in natural quantities and is the hormone which offers the male sexual traits and offers muscle growth. Because this hormone is naturally found in much bigger quantities in the male body compare to females, that’s why men naturally have much bigger amounts of muscles than women.
Steroids are actually anabolic and androgenic and this is one of the reasons why steroids are displaying 2 types of effects.
Androgenic Effects and Anabolic Effects
- The first type of effects that you are receiving from using steroids that should be discussed and the type of effect that most people are searching for when using steroids is anabolic effect. The benefits of the anabolic effects are normally resulting in the growth of the muscle to some degree and this degree is being determined by the amount of anabolism.
Everyone who is searching to increase their muscle mass and strength levels is searching for a perfect anabolic environment in their body which can be greatly boosted by anabolic steroids. The anabolic content level in the body is greatly promoting the lean and bulk muscle growth. The more anabolic level in the body – the more muscles you grow, the faster this occurs, the more amount of strength you have and so on and so forth. Anabolic steroids are perfect in offering the anabolism effect.
- The second effect of steroids is androgenic and these rewards are usually manifesting themselves in the growth of secondary sexually male characteristics or also known as the advancement of puberty. For this reason anabolic steroids are being prescribed to young males, to teenagers who are being slower in the physical development and growth compared to their peers.
The androgenic effects are also very important for offering a promotion of muscle density and its strength, therefore the androgenic effects are known to offer more strength levels by improving your muscles density. But due to development of sexually male characteristics women prefer steroids with less androgenic effects for not developing sexually male traits known as virilizing side effects. One of the reasons why males generally have a much better tolerance to steroids than women.
Uses of Steroids
Anabolic steroids are being prescribed to patients by licensed doctors for a wide variety of various different medical needs and purposes. For example, the steroids have been proven to be extremely helpful for people suffering from anemia, growth and body development issues, some various types of cancers, muscle and weight wasting syndromes and many others.
As being mentioned earlier, anabolic steroids are having very big benefits when is coming to the growth of the muscles and body, taking in consideration that there are patients suffering from serious injuries, chronic conditions, surgeries etc. which are leading to muscle wasting. The steroids are prescribed to such patients with a big success rate.
The steroids are helping patients to maintain and promote the growth of damaged muscles as well as to strengthen the body physique. Is quite obvious that bodybuilders who are searching for as much muscle mass development as possible are using anabolic steroids with great success for their needs.
Results of Using Anabolic Steroids
When talking about the result of using anabolic steroids it very much depends on what type of results are you searching for. The success rate of patients suffering from various health conditions using anabolic steroids is quite high, but anabolic steroids are being very commonly used by bodybuilders and other athletes for physique and performance enhancement.
There are various different studies, examples, photos, stories, reviews and other type of information which prove the anabolic steroids to offer huge results when talking about physique and performance enhancement. The anabolic steroid results is also depending on specifically what type of results you expect. There are various different anabolic steroids used either in bulking cycles or in cutting cycles. That’s why anabolic steroids are categorized as cutting steroids and bulking steroids.
While some steroids can be used for both bulking and cutting, most of them are being designed for a single type of steroid use – either for bulking or cutting.
- As much as we can understand from their names – the cutting steroids used in cutting cycles are greatly helping people to lose body fat and cut down body weight while they greatly help to maintain lean muscle mass. Cutting steroids are used for getting a shredded physique – with defined muscle mass.
- On the other hand, as much as we can understand from its name – the bulking steroids used in bulking cycles are made for helping the users to gain as much amount of muscle mass as possible. These steroids usually greatly increase your overall weight and while some of it may be water and fat, most of the gains would be lean muscle gains.
That’s why people are usually performing bulking cycles with bulking steroids for getting as huge as possible and then cutting cycles with cutting steroids for maintaining the muscles and getting a shredded physique and an overall amazing look.
How do anabolic steroids are doing this? There are various different factors coming at play – all of which are beneficial for growing muscles and losing fat. For example, they boost testosterone – main hormone responsible for growing muscles and losing body fat. Other than that, they are an extremely important ingredient in helping a better protein synthesis by boosting this process. They aid nitrogen retention as well.
So, boosting protein synthesis is very important because that’s the process which is helping the body to develop lean muscle mass. A combination with more testosterone, boosted protein synthesis and nitrogen retention allowing for an anabolic environment – the individual can expect huge increases in muscle mass.
There are many other important things when talking about increasing muscle mass and we won’t discuss about all of them since they are quite a lot. But another important thing to mention when talking about “how steroids work?” is important to say that anabolic steroids are boosting the production of red blood cells and this is so important because these are the cells that are responsible for carrying oxygen to the muscles in the entire body.
We all experienced body aches and body fatigue, especially after and during an intense workout session. That’s happening because your muscles are not getting enough oxygen. The muscles are getting fatigued and you cannot continue with your workout. By increasing the production of red blood cells this is going to lead to positive effects of allowing your body to work out more and longer periods since they receive more oxygen.
The recovery rate is going to be greatly boosted as you get both a higher efficiency and a faster healing after each training session. So your muscles are getting tired much slower allowing you to work out more and you heal much faster, allowing for the time between the workouts to be shorter.
Men Vs Women Using Anabolic Steroids
It was already mentioned earlier that men are generally tolerating anabolic steroids much better than women and there are various reasons why. Since men tolerate them much better, the side effects intensity and their frequency are generally much less severe compared to women when using anabolic steroids. Plus, men can tolerate some steroids that they are not being recommended for use in women at all.
- Mainly because of the boost of testosterone and the androgenic effects women are having a much lower tolerance. This is resulting in women getting much worse androgenic side effects and those are known as “virilizing” side effects indicating a woman goes through “virilization” which is basically the process in which a woman is being turned into a man, that’s because she’s developing man-like traits.
We can mention among such side effects – growth of the body hair where they shouldn’t appear such as back, arms, legs in abnormal amounts. They may get facial hair growth. Women can get deepening of the voice, irregular menstrual cycles, shredding head hair, enlarged clitoris, aggression and developing other man like traits or also known as male physical characteristics that are not physically appealing for a woman.
Any woman using anabolic steroids should be aware of such side effects and they should stop using anabolic steroids immediately in case any of those side effects start to be noticed. By immediately stopping the use of anabolic steroids after the apparition of such side effects, they would disappear shortly after discontinuance. However, by continuing to use anabolic steroids despite the fact that you are already getting virilizing side effects, there’s a high chance that the side effects would be permanent and irreversible.
- There’s a big number of anabolic steroids which can be administered by men, but they are not recommended by women. In fact, there’s actually a short number of anabolic steroids which can be used by women for physique and performance enhancement.
Men generally have much bigger amounts of testosterone in the body and they generally need much bigger amounts of androgenic effects and that’s the main reason why men tolerate steroids better than women, however side effects are possible for both.
Conclusion
We hope we have answered some of the most important questions about “how steroids work?” Is quite obvious that there may be many other questions but by searching through our website, there’s a high chance that you would get them answered as you can find a lot of valuable information about anabolic steroids in general.
But as a short summary you should know that anabolic steroids are increasing testosterone levels in the body and this is leading to 2 different effects – anabolic and androgenic effects. Because of these effects, and especially because of androgenic effects, men can tolerate steroids much better than women.
They are very important for a person searching for physique and performance enhancement. The steroids are also working by greatly boosting the synthesis of protein in the muscles and by helping the nitrogen retention as well as the creation of the red blood cells count in the body. There are many other benefits as well – but these are the most important when you want to increase muscle mass.
With all of this being mentioned, is no wonder that anabolic steroids are the first choice for bodybuilders and all other athletes searching for increasing physique and performance as the steroids are amazing at increasing power levels, strength, speed, endurance, recovery rate and speed, agility and stamina.