With Instagram culture and the overflow of opinions and knowledge, it can become very easy to take the wrong advice from the wrong person. When it comes to fitness and training there is a big difference between training like someone who is on gear (steroids) or training like someone who is natural. But so many people fall for this due the insincerity of many fitness influencers and experts. When someone claims that they’ve achieved the body of their dreams through the methods that they are claiming that they are following, where in reality those methods work for them because of performance enhancement drugs, and if you as a natural try their methods that they are telling you to follow, you will not get their results rather you will hurt your progress and slow it down. In this essay I would like to shed light on some important points about the way you should train as a natural vs training on steroids. 

Volume/High Reps and Cortisol:

For someone on steroids the amount of volume a person can handle is totally different than a natural. A steroid user can do 30-35 sets of 12-20 reps a set per muscle group per session with no problem. Their anabolic hormone intake such as testosterone will block the release of cortisol which is what our bodies release when energy is needed during high volume training. The more volume you do the more energy you need, which means the more cortisol you release. The natural trainee does not have the ability to stop the release of cortisol which leads him/her to not build muscle if they train in that fashion. The alternative would be to not do much volume and rely on intensity and low rep work to get the damage on the muscle with the least fatiguing way possible. High reps pump blood into the muscle and reaches muscle damage faster than heavy training, therefore you can only do high reps in a controlled way such as the last set of an exercise or one workout a week but still with lower amounts of sets.

Frequency and Protein Synthesis:

We all know about the most famous bodybuilding split (the bro split) which is a split that is low on frequency where you train a muscle only once a week. This is a method that many of what they claim to be “fitness experts” tell you to follow as a natural in order to get gains. 

The key component here is the protein synthesis. Protein synthesis is the process of building new proteins which is something essential for building muscle. Someone on anabolic hormones will have high protein synthesis spark almost all the time, where as a natural you need your “session” in order to spark the protein synthesis. So if you train only once a week you are not sparking enough protein synthesis because the spark will go down again in 48 hours. So as a natural you should know that the more OFTEN you train a muscle the more you spark protein synthesis which means more muscle to build. So a better option than the bro split is a split that targets the muscles more than once a week. 

Final Word:

The fitness industry is not limited to naturals only, people have the right to train while being on gear, and I am not against anyone who uses performance enhancement drugs, and I have friends who do. I am just against those who fool the natural athletes into using training methods that only work for them.