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09/14/09
As you conduct your research into how muscle is built, how your body works, and what drugs and hormones most come into play in order to help facilitate muscle growth, you may run into some holes in your knowledge base as certain hormones are discussed. Let’s examine cortisol, testosterone, growth hormone, and insulin, breaking down the key elements of each. This will provide even the most advanced steroid user with a bit of reference material when putting all of the hormone pieces together when creating a solid cycle while ensuring all of your bases are covered.
Cortisol
Most simply put, cortisol is the hormone that is the enemy of everything we do in bodybuilding. As you work to build muscle, shed fat, and grow stronger, cortisol is working to make you smaller, fatter, and leaner. Cortisol is produced by the brain every time you experience stress. If you’re the type of person who is overwhelmed by most things in life, there’s a good chance your cortisol levels are high. If you’re a laid-back individual who doesn’t take things all that seriously, you probably enjoy low cortisol levels. The use of anabolic steroids will nullify most of the effects of cortisol upon the body.
Testosterone
This is the lifeblood of bodybuilding. Our bodies naturally produce 20 to 40 mg of testosterone per week. Most bodybuilding cycles call for 10 to 20 times that amount. When your blood levels of testosterone are peaked, you will gain muscle and shed fat while getting stronger. Without adequate testosterone levels, you will have minimal sex drive, no desire to lift, and no ability in the gym. Testosterone is a major key to bodybuilding, and every good steroid cycle will include testosterone.
Growth Hormone
Aging is the enemy of the bodybuilder. As you grow older, you experience more and more cell deaths each day. When enough of them die, you eventually cease to function as an organism – and you die. Growth hormone, originally siphoned from the pituitary glands of cadavers and later engineered in laboratories, helps to retard this cell death. This includes muscle and skin cell death. If you are looking for some magic elixir to bring you back to your teenage years, this isn’t it. If you are looking for a drug that will revitalize many of your body’s processes – including muscle growth and fat loss – then GH may be right for you.
Insulin
If you are currently obese, there’s a very high likelihood your body is resistant to insulin. High carb diets lead to insulin resistance, which leads to diabetes, heart disease, and a major inability for bodybuilders to shed body fat. Injecting insulin, along with growth hormone and the use of anabolic steroids, will allow a bodybuilder to be less resistant to insulin, and to grow while shedding fat at the same time. The remarkable jump in professional bodybuilder stage bodyweights we have seen in the last 20 years are due to the introduction of insulin to drug regimens beginning in the very early 1990s. It is a highly dangerous drug whose use can lead to immediate death of blindness. However, cautious and consistent use can lead to better protein shuttling – moving amino acids to the muscle groups at previously unheard of rates – which can lead to very fast new muscle growth.
