Your muscles don't grow because you train like you're on roids

Should a bodybuilder who uses doping substances and a natural bodybuilder follow the same methods? You might think that one will simply get better results than the other, but that both should apply the same training, nutrition, and competition preparation protocols. After all, doping substances are just a little help, right?

The belief that what works for a doped athlete will work just as well for someone who is not is completely wrong.

It should be noted that what is optimal for a natural athlete will also work quite well for someone who uses doping substances, but the same cannot be said vice versa: what works well for those who use doping substances may not work at all for natural athletes or may even cause them to lose muscle mass.

A doped bodybuilder does not need to trigger protein synthesis through training, as it is chronically elevated. This means that any type of training they do will work because protein synthesis is already high. However, the basal state of a natural bodybuilder is homeostasis and not protein synthesis.

It is important to understand that if training is the only way we have to break that homeostasis and elevate protein synthesis, it is essential that the training reaches a minimum stimulus threshold for this to be triggered.

This means that it is not enough to just go to the gym to exercise; it is necessary to focus on progressive overload. The goal of each workout will be to maximize the activation of all muscle fibers, fatigue them, and stimulate the anabolic hormonal environment.

We must ask ourselves: What are the factors that decrease protein synthesis? The answer includes the overproduction of cortisol and the enzyme AMPK, both of which inhibit or even block protein synthesis. When training, we mobilize our energy reserves stored in muscle or adipose tissue, which increases the production of cortisol.

A natural athlete must carefully dose the type, amount, and quality of exercises in each training session to favor protein synthesis.

The third main difference has to do with the load used in training. A natural athlete needs to train heavily to force their body to grow and break homeostasis, as muscles and tendons strengthen at the same rate, reducing the risk of injury.

Training based on metabolic stress is not effective for a natural athlete, as it consumes too much energy and increases cortisol production, which negatively affects muscle growth.

In conclusion, a natural athlete should focus on a minimalist approach that involves three fundamental points for each movement pattern: four or five sets with a heavy basic exercise at low repetitions, two or three sets in a complementary guided exercise at medium repetitions taken to failure, and one or two sets in an isolation exercise as a finisher at high repetitions. Everything else is repeating mistakes by trying to copy what the doped champions do. It simply doesn’t work.