CFC, nope definitely don't intend anything to sound like iron clad facts.
I do want to clarify - in regards to AAS, my reference to being relatively 'benign' is that a person can do significantly more damage with a few doses of MDMA, a night of cocaine, or even moderate use of many other illicit drugs/alcohol. I've got friends, and there are countless stories here, where even very moderate use of such drugs, especially MDMA, have led to months or even years of repercussions in severe cases.
Comparatively, running even multiple grams of AAS per week for a couple of years would have some deleterious effects but be very mild and relatively a non-issue compared to the typically accepted American diet and sedentary lifestyle that go mostly unquestioned by society which would have equal or worse outcomes IME.
I do view AAS much differently than other drugs after observing the abuse of each although I wouldn't call my use abuse per se...not particularly responsible but not abuse. For example, one of my old coaches is long time friends with, and coached by, John O'Reagan who also coached Dallas McCarver, among others. My ex-coach is now 48 and his personal drug use that he laid out for me, going on since his late teens, for almost 3 decades was actual abuse. Minus some very short periods, nothing under 1800mg a week which was only later on in the game after he got into his 40's but he still competes at a national level and his preps spare nothing. Similarly, I live in the same vicinity as Dallas McCarvers old coach (PM me if you would like the name and more info) and have trained with him as well as seen some of his drug protocols. Those are cases of true abuse.
I don't say any of this to be argumentative, only to explain where a couple of my opinions come from and not that I would ever recommend that to anyone else.
Where I land at the end of the day is that the above advice is what I would give to my younger brother who often asks about AAS use but has done copious amounts of his own due diligence as well from all aspects. In these cases, I feel it's irresponsible not to recommend nolva/clomid at minimum but that's my opinion. A lot of my thoughts stem from potential harm - what are the possible dangers of him adding HCG to his run? What are the possible negative consequences from him adding an oral? From blasting and cruising? From frontloading? From using nolva/clomid during PCT? Etc. The thoughts given are what I would explain to my little brother and then tell him to make whatever informed decision he sees fit from it combined with his own research. So, while I definitely do not wish to portray anything as concrete, it is an opinion that I think can be valuable for consideration.
My friend, sorry this is getting a bit long, but it makes me sad to read your reply tbh and I do worry about your health. You seem like such a nice guy enjoying life to the full atm. But I can see that none of what we've said (or what thousands of researcher's have published and analysed) about dosing and heart problems, atherosclerosis, kidney, liver, neurological or anything else has really cracked through your defences since you've been posting here.
One of the most telling things you just wrote in regards to PCT ("
A lot of my thoughts stem from potential harms") seems to have gone totally over your head with your AAS use. How can you not see that? You're kidding yourself that what you're doing right now isn't harmful or the
height of abuse. I mean, it's your life and your body, and I'm not jumping in patronisingly telling you to stop, just like I rarely do with other people's recreational drug choices. But since it seems to have become the focus of your defence, your high-dosing strategies are ill-advised and aren't going to help you reach your goals any faster than a fraction of what you take used more intelligently. You're just knocking years off your life and risking chronic health problems in your 30-40s and onwards for such minimal extra gains
I get it: you're young and outwardly healthy, and probably feel pretty invincible atm. And you're clutching at any straw you can to defend what you do. But it's a plain fact, given your age, that you have relatively limited real-world experience in this sport. You haven't had to see your friends dropping like flies or suffering health problems from what they did when they were younger yet. You haven't been reading for years about story after story of others whose crazy AAS abuse in younger years came back to bite them badly as they aged. Or if you have (maybe articles by guys like Chris Collucci, Big Dead Bodybuilders, the continuous spate of pro's dying etc), you've very selectively ignored those cases as, tbf, many young bodybuilders are prone to doing, not just you. I think this is one reason you keep coming with those stories from other coaches and pros or whatever who are more experienced, but which really aren't helping your case and certainly not if we're talking about
harm reduction.
If you've ever read Bluelight's mission statement as a charity or our BLUA, you'd realise that we can't possibly advocate the often ignorant delusional stuff you read on a lot of other forums about dosing and polypharmacy. The unnecessary cycles and compounds, often essentially geared towards wannabe competitors, normalises incredibly risky and abusive AAS use among a much wider section of bodybuilders than it should. And when
those cycles become your benchmark, or when you look at what you've been told was "a pro's cycle", then naturally you'll be inclined to fool yourself that what you're doing isn't too risky.
Again, I have no desire to stop you doing what you're doing (ok I lie, I'd like to see you try much lower doses, but I never push it). You clearly enjoy what you're doing and we all seriously enjoy your enthusiasm. But because your logic determines that what you do is safe, inevitably your advice to noobs quickly risks going OTT with doses and protocols. You just saw a noob on here gain 30lbs+ on a cycle that you thought was too small to be worth doing. For the sake of anecdotes, this has happened hundreds of times in my coaching of others (as I said to you before). And with myself. And other big guys, not just noobs. But to realise that, you would actually have to try doing it on yourself and others. If it never worked, I would never advise people try it. I advise them to try it because I've seen it work so many times. And to deny that lower doses are safer with fewer sides, requiring fewer ancillaries (like a standard PCT), and causing fewer risks of acute or chronic harm (or risk of dependence on abuse levels of AAS) would be plainly false.
Anyway, I guess this is all just food for thought. I appreciate you probably find us old farts boring and annoying and are going to ignore us. But we do have a mission to uphold for others, and you need to understand that. And we're at a point wrt our own experience where we've seen it all before a hundred times, and figured how to put priorities like enthusiasm and addiction into some kind of lifelong perspective - including harm, abuse, and signs of self-delusion in their rightful slots near the top.
