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Comment by tomalaci | Hacker News Reader

Steroids. You will be growing muscle while sitting on a couch, even better than someone that naturally trains. However, you very likely will develop asymetries or other weird complications because you didnt properly work out.

My point is that, even though we might find even more ways to improve/modify our bodies, they will come with slew of risks that are just not worth it if you can achieve it naturally.

On another note, I feel like there is severe muscle inflation in media which would distort how fit a person should be. You really do not need to kill yourself in the gym or hop on a some reddit-approved juices to get very fit. Just gotta experiment and find a comfortable full body workout that you can do consistently, like you brush your teeth every day.

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You get plenty of asymmetries working out too, it's natural. Don't think just weight lifting, think of: tennis, boxing, baseball

Actually, that's not how steroids work. It's a common misconception that one can take "roids" and just sit on the sofa while munching on potato chips and get shredded and pack on muscle but in reality what the steroids do are to move ones natural limitations further away thus enabling larger muscle mass than naturally. But this still requires one to put in the work, i.e. the stimulus to trigger the muscle growth and to rest and eat properly.

They do work that way. Lots of studies show gains in muscle mass even with no excercise when people are on steroids. Consider average men who never excercise vs average women who never excercise. The men will have more muscle. That's what testosterone does, among other things.

That's part of why steroids were and sometimes still are used medically for people with cancer and other wasting diseases. It makes them eat more (they're usually strongly appetite inducing) but they also just help develop muscles even if sedentary.

(Of course it would be far more effective to also engage in high intensity resistance training.)

Steroids are usually given to reduce inflammation and as immunosuppressants to stop the body from fighting back against whatever treatment is being given. The main method of weight gain with prednisone (the most common steroid) is water retention. Anabolic steroids are not commonly prescribed to cancer patients.

Cortico steroids usually result in muscle mass loss.

One completely random study result[0] supporting that couch + testosterone leads to bigger muscles. Maybe it is some puritanical thing, but not sure why this myth persists. Exercise + juice results in even bigger gains, but it is possible to increase muscle mass without hard work.

  ...The men in the testosterone groups had significant increases in the cross-sectional areas of the triceps and the quadriceps (Table 4); the group assigned to testosterone without exercise had a significantly greater increase in the cross-sectional area of the quadriceps than the placebo-alone group

[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199607043350101

That's not how steroids work. Muscles need stimulus to grow even with steroids. What steroids do is make your body recover faster so you can train more often and build muscle right away.

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