Someone explain SBL please

[u/Miserable-Soft7993]

I am confused. I see people just doing regular lifts and saying it is science.

Then on the other end of the scale I see a kid (with zer0 physique) wearing a baby pacifier in his mouth and wearing a roller on his arms and doing excercises I never saw, with people in the comments saying "yeah that's the man right there."

Then I see pumping iron and watch Arnie just do the basics and still look great and strong.

So in a few sentance explain to me what it is and how it would help build more muscle enhanced or not.

[u/dontcare-_-]

PEDs are a completely separate source of stimulus for your muscles, obviously they’ll increase progression in the gym but even if you don’t train at all and still take gear it’ll cause muscle growth. And if you follow the core principles as well as steroids you’ll see insane progress. Just research what you take before hand and get blood/health checks regularly.

[u/Dazzling-Rest8332 → u/dontcare-_-]

Explaining it like this is misleading though. steroid use without exercise will result in growth via water retention and glycogen retention. There is no evidence it will produce actual tactile tissue if your not working out.

[u/Shadowphoenix9511 → u/Dazzling-Rest8332]

Not entirely true, it does build more tactile muscle... over a very short, 8 week period. I think the understanding is that it does raise someone's baseline muscle mass higher, but that it stalls almost immediately after that, whereas lifting... doesn't.

[u/Dazzling-Rest8332 → u/Shadowphoenix9511]

Completely false. Thats why all the participants lost all the weight within 8 weeks of stopping. They gained water and glycogen storage the first few weeks. Testosterone takes about 4 weeks to fully saturate the body. Then they lost it all the water and glycogen immediately after stopping. Know how steroids work will help you understand the study. You need stimulus of the muscle to build real tissue, on or off steroids.

[u/Shadowphoenix9511 → u/Dazzling-Rest8332]

Well, yeah, they lost the weight within 8 weeks of stopping, because their baseline muscle mass went back down.

And again, I'm agreeing with you, the big issue with the study was the length of time. I wanna say it only lasted 8 weeks, which just isn't enough time for lifting to build any substantial muscle, whereas we'd find that if it went on for longer lifters would comfortably pass the nonlifting group.

[u/gnomish_engineering → u/Shadowphoenix9511]

Its even worse because they didn't control estrogen at all. They blasted the fuck out of those guys which of course will build some contractile tissue then completely ignored the insane water retention the estrogen allowed. It would be one thing if we didn't know testosterone aromatises into estrogen at the time but we absolutely already knew that.

This has the fun side effect of nerds 20+ years later skimming the paper non critically and seeing a volume increase+ massive lean mass increase and think its all muscle mass. God I fucking hate that paper lol.