STEROIDS DON'T WORK (Everything Steroids Cannot Do For You) - Should You Do Steroids?

📲 JOIN THE OPTILAB ENGINE → https://whop.com/the-optimization-lab/the-optilab-engine/

🎓 ABOUT THIS VIDEO 
Explore the often overlooked limitations of anabolic steroids in this episode. While they enhance physical traits, they can't fix character, mechanics, or emotional resilience, the key factors in truly sustainable progress. Understanding these limits can help set realistic expectations and prioritize inner work alongside external enhancements.

🏋️‍♂️ WORK WITH ME 
Apply for coaching → https://theoptimizationlab.cc/bio

📘 FREE RESOURCES 
Mitochondrial Enhancement Blueprint → https://theoptimizationlab.cc/bio
Pillars of Fat Loss → https://drive.google.com/file/d/13mtEyUY7WDu2ONRfq-bKwWHP_gjMh4Zs/view 
Elbow Tendinopathy → https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eHboUOYedtomxHy2MMyKWcHmAqa1F6Yk/view 

💪 FOLLOW ME 
Instagram: https://instagram.com/optimalnathan 

🧠 TIMESTAMPS
00:00 - The true capabilities and limits of steroids

00:29 - The gap between expected and real outcomes

00:58 - Steroids amplify existing traits, don’t author new ones

01:27 - How discipline and habits must come from within

03:04 - Training mechanics can't be fixed by steroids

03:59 - Steroids make broken patterns more dangerous

05:14 - Relationship with food and emotional issues

06:44 - Insecurity and the pursuit of external validation

07:36 - The impact of steroid use on body image dissatisfaction

08:05 - The role of internal work and identity

09:28 - The unreliability of steroids in fixing mental resilience

10:24 - Curiosity and understanding your body

11:41 - Wisdom versus arrogance in steroid use

12:38 - Love for training vs. results-driven motivation

14:29 - Genetics are fixed, steroids optimize potential

15:50 - The futility of trying to look like someone else

16:42 - Inner work as a prerequisite for responsible steroid use

18:34 - The core truth: steroids change the body, not the soul

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So, almost the the whole entire conversation about steroids, like uh like all of it pretty much, it's about what they can do. They they do build muscle, they sharpen your physique, they speed up your recovery, they stabilize libido, they change your body composition faster than the natural timeline ever could let you. And that is all true, and we'll cover every bit of it later across this series. But here's the thing there's there's a much longer list, and it actually sits underneath the visible one, and almost nobody says this list out loud. It's the list of shit that people quietly hope steroids will do that steroids just can't fucking do. And the gap between those two lists, the one that everyone talks about and the one that nobody names, that's the one where most of the disappointment in this entire space is actually gonna live. So this episode is gonna be naming that list uh very out loud, not to shame anybody from having hopes, but just look, the hopes are humans, everybody's got some. The point of naming them is this so you can actually see like what you were hopping in for in the first place. And also ask yourself like whether the thing in the vial was ever gonna be the right tool for it. Because for a lot of people, like for a lot of what people want, the answer is gonna be no. And the sooner you can hear that, the better the decision in front of you is gonna get. So let me give you the principle that this whole episode rests on because everything else is just a consequence of it, right? So, steroids, they amplify, they do not author. If you take one nothing away from this episode, sit with that line because it explains every disappointment that people run to. Steroids amplify, they do not author. Now, whatever you bring into this decision is what's gonna get amplified. You bring discipline, your discipline gets louder. You bring in chaos, chaos gets louder. You bring curiosity, curiosity sharpens. You bring in insecurity, insecurity gets sharper, not softer, and that shocks people every single fucking time. So there's the spine of the whole thing. The chemistry is gonna take up what's already here and it's gonna turn the volume up, but it doesn't write new traits for you. It doesn't install the missing pieces, it doesn't magic like up some qualities that you didn't show up with. Now, almost every disappointment that I've ever seen is with the guys that I coach that like it's they sometimes like it comes from getting this wrong and then on the way into it, right? So they they walk in with some expectations that steroids can write a new chapter. They don't write chapters, they they underline whatever chapter you were already writing in a pen, but in a brighter color with a louder voice shouting it. So let me show you what like that actually means for some uh for some specific people that uh that that people are hoping to get uh from out of steroid use. Uh, and I mean this is where it's gonna get real. So the first thing spirit steroids cannot do is create discipline. We already know this, right? I know I know that sounds pretty obvious for a second, but it's not obvious in how people actually hold. So there's this like quiet belief that uh in a lot of guys that once they start, something inside of them is gonna shift and then boom, they become consistent. Like they picture some inner force pulling them in the gym, making them wake up at five, making the food prep just happen with zero resistance, right? They figure the testosterone is gonna hand them a discipline that they've never been able to build on their own. That's not what happens. What actually happens is the inconsistent lifter becomes a slightly stronger, inconsistent lifter. The guy who trains three days a week, sloppy, becomes the same guy training three days a week sloppy, except now he's bigger, a little bit stronger, and he's paying for it all with his lipids, which is the cholesterol panel uh that's gonna be tracking your strain to your heart. Um, so uh steroids, they don't show up at your apartment in the morning uh and uh, you know, just drag your ass to the gym. They don't install motivation, they don't install a habit, they won't install the willingness to do the boring shit that consistency is mostly made of. That is on you and it has always been on you. There's no other fucking way around it. So if you're inconsistent now, you're gonna be inconsistent on cycle, man. The cycle just makes the inconsistency more expensive as shit. Now, second, the second thing that steroids can't do is fix your training. So this one is a little bit different from the first, right? And it matters. Most lifters, and I mean most lifters who think their technique is decent, they don't actually know how to contract the muscle right. They don't know how to sequence movements across the week. They don't know how to budget their energy, they don't know how to load progressively without cheating. They don't know how to protect the joint under fatigue. They lift with momentum, they lift with their ego, they lift with their lower back and when their hamstrings should be doing the work. So, steroids, they fix none of that. What steroids actually do here is they make a broken pattern dangerous. So because now you're stronger, that that same garbage bench technique that was getting that you were getting away with with 315, you're now loading 405. So the same shoulder impingement that you've been ignoring and just getting yanked on harder by a heavier press. The chemistry doesn't know your form of shit. It just adds force to whatever the fuck you're doing, including the broken version of it. So the guy who basically told himself, like, oh, stairs will let me push past my plateau. Sometimes what he finds out is that the plateau was never at plateau, right? It was a ceiling due to bad mechanics. And once you shove past that ceiling on bad mechanics, you don't get a PR, you get a fucking tear, which is why I'm so adamant about reviewing a client execution on a weekly basis. And do that for every single one of my clients in the Octolab engine, uh, Octolab experience, sorry. Now, most of the steroid injuries that I've seen uh in in in athletes I work with, they're not steroid injuries, right? They're mechanical injuries that got accelerated by the chemistry. And that difference matters, right? The steroids don't blow your rotator cuff the way that a pressing bench did, right? The the chemistry just made the bill arrive a little bit sooner than it would if you had been staying under natural constraints. Now, the third thing steroids can't do is fix your fucking relationship with food. I wish it fucking did that, but it doesn't, man. It cuts both ways as well. So if you're the guy who undereats, who skips his meals because of someone low-grade anxiety, who genuinely like struggles to eat the calories that your body needs, steroids won't repair that. Like some count pounds they bump appetite, that is real, but appetite is not the relationship. A guy who's under-eating out of a body anxiety is still gonna under eat because the undereating was never really about hunger. It's about something the appetite cue can't even reach. Now, and and if you if you are the type of person who overeats, who uses food as comfort, who bounces between restriction and binges, stewards can't fix that either. That that is that is me, right? They they might mask it for a little bit because the muscle building it covers uh the look for it. So the the pattern is basically gonna stop screaming at you the same way because now you're not gonna visibly see those changes. But the pattern itself doesn't change. And in some cases, certain compounds, they crank the appetite swings way worse, not better for you. And now the same pattern has got more fuel and a louder voice. Now, uh a messed up hormone relationship with food uh doesn't get cured by hormones, right? It it gets camouflaged by hormones, and that is not the same shit. The camouflage is gonna fall off whenever you come off, and then the pattern is gonna show right back up, sometimes even worse than before, because nothing about it actually got dealt with uh during the stretch that was hiding it. Now, if your relationship with food is broken, that's the work that you gotta go first, right? And um, or at least to like name it cleanly before you actually throw a chemical on top of it that's just gonna like interact with it in ways that you can't predict. So don't just bury it in hope because that shit doesn't work. Now, the fourth thing the steroids can't do is cure insecurity. So this is the big one. This is the one that gets people the slowest, most deliberate red on the whole episode because it's the hope that drives so many bad first decisions in this space. So for a lot of people, they aren't really chasing muscle. They are chasing the feeling the muscle is supposed to give them. They are feel chasing the feeling of being seen, the feeling of being taken seriously, of being attractive, of being enough, of finally being able to like getting to put down your self-judgment that you've just been dragging alongside for years. They figured if it just could just look a certain way, man, the voice in their head would just go, you're not enough. And that voice would be basically just quiet down, maybe even shut up completely. But it doesn't quiet down, not even a little. Like what actually happens is that I've watched this pattern a ton. The guy uses steroids, guy gets bigger, guy gets leaner, more vascular, looks better than he ever did in his whole life. He looks in the mirror and the voice says, Not enough. Just, just, it just finds new material now. Your shoulders are not wide enough, your arms are good, but your legs are lagging. You're too soft in the midsection. You you don't look good as good as the other guy, right? The voice never runs out of material. It will always find some shit to point to because the voice was never about the body. The body was just where the voice was getting located. And I've seen guys put on 20 pounds of lean tissue and feel smaller than they did when they started. Like I'm not exaggerating this. They genuinely feel smarter because the dissatisfaction got more refined. The bar moved, the new body became the new standard, and the same gap between where I am and where I should be showed right back up, just as a bigger number. So this is one of the saddest patterns in this whole state. And the worst part is that from the outside, these are usually the guys who look the most successful on cycle. Like they're they're dramatic before and afters that you guys see on Instagram that basically just sell coaches everything because they're using these fucking exceptions to the rule as saying, this is what's gonna happen to you if you sign up to me. So the whole world looks at them and it goes like, Wow, the chemistry worked great, that program is great. But inside, the original problem just didn't survive didn't just survive. It actually got more sophisticated, more refined, harder to satisfy because the volume got louder and the dissatisfaction basically got better at hiding from itself. So it's honestly kind of fuck to watch, which is why when you start working with me, we work on identity a whole fucking lot. Identity and mindset, we work on a whole fucking lot. You literally go through a three-month protocol on working on your identity because we need to establish a new type of person, a new brain, because that is basically when that's what's gonna prevent you from having to white-knuckle this shit forever and just like this is just the shit that I do, right? Now, I'm not saying you can't do this if some part of your motivation lives in this category, right? Like almost everybody got a sliver of it. I'm also not saying that this is bad. Comparison can be very good and very helpful. Like you can legitimately improve yourself and get to that goal that you want to, right? What I am saying is that you've got to know the sliver is there, right? You've got to be able to see it before it starts because if you can see it, then you can manage it. If you can't see it, it's gonna run the entire show, and you're never once gonna announce, uh, it's never once gonna announce that it's running the show. So self-acceptance has to be handed somewhere, okay? With real friendships, with a reckoning and development of your own story, with therapy, you know, a confrontation with the parts of yourself that you've been routing around for years, none of that comes from the vial. The vial can't supply that. The the body just amplified, like as an amplified state, is just not gonna come and solve a problem that doesn't live in the body in the first place. So if you take one fucking thing from this whole episode, please take this. Now, the fifth thing is that steroids cannot do is create mental resilience. So if you're the type of person who panics under stress, who unravels at some small setbacks, who reacts impulsively on bad days, steroids won't hand you composure. A lot of time, they'll actually make the volatility sharper because elevated hormones can amplify your emotional baseline. So calm people get calmer, reactive people get more reactive. So this is one of the reasons that I lean so hard on the physiological readiness state, and that was once episode two in display list. Uh, mental resilience is not a thing that you bolt on, it's something that you build over time in conditions outside of enhancement. And steroids don't build it, they just reveal whether you've got it or you don't, and they make whatever's there way more visible to you and to everybody around you. So if you're emotionally fragile right now before any of this, this is not the time. Deal with the fragility first. The body's amplified by chemistry, is it's not that that is not a stable space for an unsteady mind to live. You're just gonna be miserable in a more muscular form, and the misery is gonna be loud as shit. It's not gonna be quieter. Now, the sixth thing steroids can't do is supply curiosity, right? This one is uh a little bit subtler, right? But it matters more than you think it should. It it if you're not like naturally curious about your own body, if you don't want to learn what's happening physiologically, if you don't want to understand how compounds interact, if you're not the guy who's really like ready to read his blood work and try to figure out what each marker means, steroids are not gonna turn him into that guy. They won't make you curious. What they'll do is make you incuriously and your incuriosity very expensive. So the non-curious user is gonna take the compounds without understanding them, which is gonna cause him to miss signals because signals need interest to notice. He's gonna misread his symptoms because he never leaned on and learned the categories. He's gonna escalate, escalate the doses off of feelings instead of data, and he's gonna ignore blood work that he doesn't understand. And eventually, when something goes wrong, he's gonna be surprised, right? Even though the surprise was sitting there writing the fucking data the whole time, just waiting for someone to be fucking interested in it. So you don't have to be obsessively curious to use steroids responsibly, you don't have to become an amateur endocrinologist. But if you're gonna do that work yourself, you gotta be able to be working with someone who is. Either you carry the curiosity or you outsource it to somebody competent. What you can't do is carry neither and run your own protocol. So the chemistry, it doesn't make curiosity appear in a guy who hasn't got it, it just makes the cost of not having it very real. The seventh thing that steroids cannot do is make you wise. Wisdom is knowledge plus humility. It's the willingness to get guidance, the willingness to be wrong, the willingness to adjust without your ego getting in the way. And none of that comes from chemistry. Arrogance doesn't get turned into inside just because the arrogant guy got bigger. If anything, the arrogant user now gets more dangerous on psycho because now his bad decisions are basically amplified by physiological intensity. So the wise user, he's gonna reach for fewer compounds, lower doses, he's gonna ask more questions and intervene less. The arrogant user is gonna do the opposite, and he's gonna convince himself the dose and the stack are proof of his expertise. No amount of testosterone is gonna flip that arrogance into wisdom. That that's a person level change. It's not on the chemistry to deliver, and the chemistry isn't even gonna try. It's as simple as that. The a thing that steroids can do is make you love training. Dude, there are lifters who genuinely fucking love it. They love the pump, they love the rep, they love the iron in their hand, they love the second a movement clicks, right? They go to the gym because they want to be there. And there are lifters who don't. They lift because they want the result, they tolerate the gym because the gym is where the results happen. So the gym is a chore, and the training is the cost that they're paying for the way that they want to look. So, steroids, they don't build, they don't turn tolerance into love. They might give you more energy in the gym, sure. They might make your pumps feel better, but they won't turn a guy who's been forcing himself to train for 10 years into a guy who falls in love with the iron. Your relationship with the activity is not chemical, right? It's psychological, it's emotional, and the chemistry has got fucking zero leverage on that part. Now, there's nothing morally wrong with tolerating training instead of loving it, by the way. People are allowed to be instrumental about it. I am very much in this way. I like training, I enjoy training, I love the pump, but I it's a it's a it's a fee, it's the price of admission here. I wouldn't train for two hours just because I fucking like it. I do my training and I get the fuck out. But you should know which one of these persons you are because if you don't love it, the question of whether like to enhance is actually gonna be a different question than it looks like. It's not gonna be like, how do I get past my natural ceiling? Your question is gonna be like, do I want this bad enough to keep grinding as something that I don't even enjoy, but now with chemicals on top? So the answer might still be a yes, but it's a different yes than the guy who loves it saying it. The ninth thing that steroids can't do is rewrite your genetics. I'm I'm gonna do a whole episode on genetics later in the series, so I'm gonna keep this very short here. But steroids, they don't change your tendon insertions, they don't change your clavicle width, they don't change your ribcage shape, they don't change your muscle belly length, they don't change your limb proportions, they don't change the genetic upper bound of what your aesthetic potential is. What they change is how close to your potential you can get and how fast. So that's real, right? But the potential itself is fixed. If you've got narrow clavicles and a long torso, you're gonna be narrow, clavicle, long torso version of yourself, just more developed and in the same blueprint. You're not suddenly gonna look like the guy with delts just hanging off his frame. You're never gonna look that way. You're you're gonna look exactly like the maxed out version of who you are right now. And and here's the part that you should sit with the maxed out version of who you might be might be enough. Like plenty of guys they land on a body they love, even with some average genetics, just by getting close to their potential. But the maxed out version of you won't be maxed out version of somebody else. Steroids they don't transmute, they optimize. That that is it. The 10th thing that steroids cannot do is make you someone else. So that's the meta failure of the whole list. It just earns the last spot here for us. If you're someone who's reaching for steroids because you want to look like somebody specific, some specific bodybuilder, some particular fitness influencer, some particular athlete, you're setting yourself for some self-burning, slow disappointment. Like steroids won't deliver somebody else's body to you. The compound landed in their drone genetic terrain, the muscle insertions, the hormonal baseline, the training history, the decades of consistency, all of that is combined to make the exact physique that you're staring at. You're gonna run those same compounds in your terrain with your different bones and your different ratios and your different response curves. So the result is just a more expressed version of your body, not of theirs. So if the fantasy is like, hey, I want to look like that guy, the answer is you're not gonna look like that guy. You're gonna look like the maxed out version of fucking you. And that maxed out version of you, like if it doesn't excite you in advance before the cycle even starts, the cycle is not gonna fix that. The cycle is gonna deliver you to yourself, just amplified, which is the whole point. Now, let me give you the uh pushback that I hear from this. It goes, like, man, all of this like inner work framing is overcooked to to the brain, man. Plenty of guys they use steroids without doing any of the self-examination, right? They're just they're completely fine. Like they lift, they eat, they cycle, they get on with their lives. There's no therapy, there's no journaling, there's no reckoning with their inner voice. You're just turning a simple decision into a spiritual ordeal. And the spiritual ordeal is mostly just a way for the careful and the anxious person to keep delay in use. Most people don't need any of this shit. They just need to lift and don't be fucking idiots about it. Yep, okay, uh, there's plenty of guys who use steroids without some dramatic inner upheaval. The pattern that I've been describing doesn't detonate on everybody. That's true. Uh, I won't pretend it's otherwise, right? But look closely at what doesn't detonate in those guys because the reason is the entire principle is just expressed. So it doesn't detonate because the inner work was already roughly in place when they walked in, usually without them even calling that. The guy who just lifts and it's fine. He it's it's not evidence that the inner work is unnecessary. He's evidence that he showed up with most of that work already done, by luck or by temperament, or by upbringing, or by earlier hard chapters that he's been moved through. So he is the principal actually in practice. The chemistry amplified what was already settled, and the settled thing actually held up. So the objection, it mistakes a good outcome for the absence of the variable. The variable was always there. It was just favorable in his case. And the guys, um, like the guys, it's it's not favorable for the the the the the for these people, like it's gonna be the ones who walk in with an unaddressed insecurity, some unstable moose bedline, a fragile identity. They don't get to skip the inner work because somebody else got to. They find that mid-cycle that their inner work was always gonna be the load-bearing obstacle. The framework is not the obstacle. It's the cheap version of a lesson the unprepared learn is going to cause very expensively. So let me bring this home. Here's what steroids can't do. They can't install discipline, they can't fix your mechanics, they can't repair a relationship with food, they can't cure insecurity, they can't manufacture mental resilience, they can't supply curiosity, they can't grant you wisdom, they can't make you love your training, they can't rewrite your genetics, they can't turn you into somebody else. Notice what every item on their list has in common. They're all things that live in your character, in your psychology, in your internal work. They're all things that have to be developed somewhere outside the body before the chemistry ever shows up. Steroids are external, they show up in the body. They can't reach into the parts of you that are not physical. The parts of you that are not physical, those have to be tended by you on your own time before the enhancement arrives because the enhancement is not equipped to do that work, and I'm not gonna pretend it's going to. So the most important line that I can live you with is that steroids, they change the body, they don't change the soul. If the soul work wasn't done before, there's no amount of body change that's gonna be substituting for it. You're gonna arrive at a more masculine, you know, muscular, masculine version of yourself, of the same self that walked in. And that self is just that walked in, is just basically like what you'd be stuck living inside forever. So that's the whole shit. So some of you watching this, you're gonna realize that you've got some soul work to do before you go any further with this decision. So that is not a stop sign forever, it's a stop sign for now. So do that work first, come back to the question later with the work actually done, and the decision is gonna be different, probably calmer, and almost certainly better. So, some of you you're gonna realize that you've already done a lot of the work, that you are basically coming to this place from a stable place, and that's good. The series is gonna continue, and the decision is genuinely open to you. And some of you are gonna realize that the soul work is exactly what you've been avoiding by focusing on the chemistry. The chemistry was the externalization of an internal problem, and that realization by itself is worth more than any cycle that you could have run while still avoiding it. So steroids are powerful, they're also limited as fuck. That the gap between their power and their limits is exactly the gap that your character has to fill, and nothing else fills it. Not not more research, not better compounds, not bigger doses, not the right coach. It's your character. Filling is going to be part of the work that chemistry can't help with and never fucking could. So, next episode, we're gonna get into how steroids interact with aging, how the protocol shifts at 25 versus 35 versus 45, and why age changes the terrain without dictating the actual goal. I'll see you there.