To put it in further context: I’m specifically wondering the biology and/or chemistry of how steroid use has such an impact on the male human body that it allows for insane muscle growth.
Obviously I know there is a training portion to it all, and protein intake, but even natural lifters who are muscular are much smaller than some who use steroids and I am curious how that happens?
In: Biology
It‘s not specific to men.
And it’s not all steroids. It’s anabolic steroid like testosterone or it’s hyperpotent chemical derivatives.
All steroids mostly work in genetic receptors. They tell the cells which genese to activate, and which regulatory proteins to send.
Anabolic steroids switch on the genes responsible for building up muscle. Less myostatin gets produced, which normally prevents excessive build up of muscle as this is actually dangerous to ‚free wild‘ humans, because keeping up useless muscle wastes a ton of energy, Stone Age humans don’t have perfect access to food, thus the mechanisms that store energy as fat rather than muscle are normally the more active ones.
If you now supply a ton of testosterone, these normal controls get overwritten, more muscle mass is produced.
Additionally the body senses an excess in Sex hormones and thus tells the testes and ovaries to stop producing so many hormones, which will make them atrophy (become tiny) upon which they may not recover from at all and ever start producing sufficient quantities of hormones after long term use of excessive testosterone.
This isn’t specific to testosterone though, all sex hormone, I.e. estrogen, progesterones, testosterone in excess to what a human body would normally get will cause this (again gender is utterly irrelevant, testosterone and estrogen are what determines 99% of sex characteristics after all, look at anabolic steroid abuse permitted body builder competitions in Asian countries: the women look exactly like the men. )
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