OptiCast - The Optimization Lab Podcast

Should Women Do Steroids? You Are Not Expecting This Answer

The Optimization Lab Season 1 Episode 88

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0:00 | 14:59

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🎓 ABOUT THIS VIDEO
Nathan challenges the outdated "half-dose" approach to female enhancement, the industry default of simply cutting a man's protocol in half for women. He breaks down why women aren't just smaller men, the physiological and hormonal differences that change how androgens affect the female body, and the real risks of unmonitored exposure, including irreversible changes like voice deepening and facial structure shifts.

The conversation covers micro-dosing and why women often respond more efficiently to smaller adjustments, the concept of "leeway" (how much androgenic influence a woman's body can tolerate before masculinizing effects set in), and how individual variability in bone density, facial structure, and baseline hormone levels shapes that leeway. Nathan also explains how the menstrual cycle serves as a real-time feedback tool for monitoring safety, why hormone literacy is non-negotiable before exploring these options, and why generic, copy-paste protocols cause avoidable harm.

The episode closes on a broader point: strength and enhancement don't diminish femininity. Informed ownership over one's own body does the opposite. Precise coaching, not fear-based restriction, is what makes responsible female enhancement possible.

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🧠 TIMESTAMPS
00:00 - Why women aren't just smaller men: challenging the industry standard
00:56 - Societal and clinical misconceptions about women and steroids
01:49 - Biological differences affecting androgenic response
02:17 - Reversible vs. permanent side effects
03:11 - Micro-dosing and female responsiveness
04:09 - The risks of unmonitored androgen exposure
04:36 - How individual anatomy defines leeway and response variability
05:20 - Why cycle monitoring is crucial for safety
06:15 - The danger of copying generic protocols
07:11 - Debunking the myth that strength compromises femininity
08:04 - Precise coaching over fear-based bans
09:04 - Self-awareness and cycle feedback in low-dose protocols
10:53 - Why hormone literacy is necessary for safe exploration
14:28 - Final thoughts: respecting women's autonomy

SPEAKER_00

So I had this woman come back to me uh uh a while back. She was a national level competitor, she's been into sport for a few years, and first thing she said to me, like before we even talked about a single compound, was like, dude, just give me the guy's protocol as like half the dose, which was fucking wild, right? It wasn't dumb. It was like she was one of the sharpest people that I've ever really like had the pleasure of working with. That's just the water that she's been swimming in, so to speak. So that's what the whole industry told her that she was. And even in clinics, we have a dose, like uh a chart that basically dictates like how to starge people's doses, and it's just always just a fraction of the guys. You just treat women like in general as smaller guys, you know, just shrink their doses, keep everything else the same, and off you go. And I told her right there, that's the single dumbest, most damaging fucking idea in this entire space, and it's been aimed at women for decades. A woman is not a guy with a fucking volume turned down, she's a different system, completely different landscape, different rules altogether. Half of you already know that in your gut, you just never had anybody say it out loud in this way, and that's what we're gonna be doing today. You know, women on enhancement should women do steroids, okay? And I want to be dead clear about where I actually stand before I go one inch further because this topic gets handed like absolute shit from both directions. So one camp is gonna say that women shouldn't touch any of this. It's forbidden, it's the danger zone, only if you're a national level competitor. If you're like uh in this category, you shouldn't touch these things alone, just they stay in your fucking lane, right? The other camp is gonna say, oh, just hand us the fucking men's playbook and just say good luck. Both of these are fucking insane, right? Both of them are failing the same exact person. And uh, dude, a woman exploring enhancement, she's making a real choice, right? It's a legitimate choice, and it's hers to make. It's got nothing to do with you, bro. It's her body, her fucking choice. So she's got as much rights to chase performance, to chase how she looks, to chase how her own fucking vitality and energy are gonna be displayed as any guy that walks in the gym, okay? That is settled, okay? Anybody telling a grown woman that she can't even ask a question, they're just dressing up their discomfort as concern. And I don't have patience for that type of shit, okay? Here's where it turns, okay? And this this is what this whole episode is about. The the difference between a guy and a woman here is not about who's allowed to do what. It's about the parameters of caution, okay? It's how careful and careful about what, because the landscape that she's operating in, like biologically, is genuinely different. It's not worse, it's just different. And that word, it matters so damn much. I'm gonna hammer it because everybody just slides straight from the different to dangerous to don't. And that slide is her women get failed. So the frame that I want you holding for this entire episode is not forbidden, right? Not fearful, conscious exploration, right? She doesn't need fear, she needs respect. So respect for her physiology. Once you respect the physiology, the whole thing's opened up. So let me tell you the part that surprises a lot of guys. Women, they have an edge here, right? So women will frequently respond beautifully to fucking doses that a guy would just like straight up laugh at, very tiny amounts. She'll just pick up fitness, you know, firmness. She will get a real muscular shape. Her fat is gonna come off, the head is gonna clear up, her energy is gonna climb, and she's doing it on interventions so mild that I dude wouldn't even feel them. The female body, it responds to these micro adjustments, very small nudges and real shifts. You guys know we we literally ran fucking two milligrams a couple of times a week with Aubrey for the longest fucking time to get her to the physique that she has today, which is fucking 30 pounds above where she was a couple of years ago, right? A little really does go a long way here, and that's uh not a limitation, that is a gift. You know, she's she's got a body that actually uh talks back very fast and very loud when you feed it, even just a whisper of a signal. On top of that, the women that I coach, they're usually way more tuned in than men. They are more reflective, they notice the shift in the mirror, the shift in mood, the shift in their sleep, like days before a guy would even clock any of it. Guys, they tend to just bulldoze, right? They override the signal because they just want to hit the fucking number. Women in general, they listen. And listening is the whole skill, right? That's the entire game that I talked about in the last episode on Tuesday. So a lot of ways that she actually walks in with the advanced trait is already installed in her. Lower doses, sharper feedback, better instrument is on paper. That is ideal. So if all of that is true, then why the caution, right? Well, here's why. This is the reason, this is the part that you can't skip because it's the actual reason the men's playbook is fucking poison for a woman. So some of the side effects on women don't reverse, right? So when a guy stresses his liver or his blood pressure creeps up or his lipids go sideways, that stuff walks back, right? It's just the cost of doing business. It just backs off, the body recovers, the markers return. It's reversible. It's annoying, it's worth avoiding, but it is reversible. On a woman, androgenic exposure past a certain point that's dictated by her own physiology and the interaction with the drugs is gonna change her in some ways that don't walk back. Like the voice is gonna deepen. And then, yes, it reverses a little bit after you come off, but it's gonna stay deep if it actually like solidified, right? If it actually had changed in the vocal cords and the calluses, you're fucked. Facial hair, body hair, like it's gonna come in and it's gonna not gonna leave with a compound. The the clitoris is going to enlarge, right? And that's structural. You can't revert that. So over a long enough exposure period, even the jaw in her bone structure will shift. I want to be very precise because none of that shit is a health catastrophe, okay? Like nobody's dying from a deeper voice, but they are permanent physiological expressions of androgenicity. And once they're written, they're written. There's no post-cycle for your voice, okay? Now, can we mitigate all of that? Yeah, we can mitigate every single one of these things, but you have to do it according to the framework that I'm giving you today. So that is the asymmetry, right? A guy's mistake is mostly just drawn in a pencil. A woman has realized a mistake or drawn ink. So you get the same word, same side effect, right? But a completely fucking different weight to it because one erases and the other one doesn't. And that single fact should reorganize how the entire thing gets approached. Not with fear, but with a lot of precision, which brings me to a concept that I want lodged in your head because it's the smartest tool in this conversation, and that is leeway. Lee weight is how much androgenic room a specific woman has before masculinizing changes actually start showing. Okay. So the the part that trips people up is that this goes past Ramona. This is anatomical, it is aesthetic, it is individual, right? The two women on the same exact compound with the same exact dose, they're gonna get two completely different visible outcomes because they started from two different places. So think about like everybody's got a different size cup, right? And androgen and water. Same poor, you know, but one cup has got way more room before it starts to spill. A woman with rounder, softer faces, like like just a more like feminine, so to speak, facial structure. I hate saying the word feminine because feminist is femininity. I really hope that you're not trapped by the concept of femininity that we have and stereotyped in our culture, because femininity is so much bigger than that. But if she has a more rounded face, so to speak, she can carry a little bit more of like androgenic influence before she starts reading as masculine, right? A woman who's uh naturally already has a deeper voice, she's got less room for vocal change because she's already closer to the line. A woman with a naturally smart, uh small clitoris, she has more room before any growth is noticeable. One who's naturally larger, well, you might see that earlier. So a woman with angular, sharp bone structure, she's gonna look masculinized off of very smaller shifts in muscle density, or where her fat even sits, where like a softer featured woman wouldn't read that way at all. And I I need you to hear the spirit of this because said wrong, it sounds like judgment. It absolutely is fucking not, okay? This is not ranking women, this is a calibration, it is data. It is a coach looking at the actual person in front of him instead of a spreadsheet, okay? So her starting point is just information, same as a blood work information, right? The whole reason this matters is so she doesn't get treated like some fucking generic template, right? So when some fucking clown copy-pastes a female cycle off a forum, that's what is naive as shit, right? Because the protocol was built for somebody else's cup, somebody else's leeway, somebody else's room, somebody else's face and voice and structure. So running it on yourself is literally a coin flip with permanent stakes. Now, some of you are getting uncomfortable. I get it. So let me pick the heckle mid-swing here, right? So somebody's out there going, like, this is exactly why women just shouldn't touch this at all. Listen to yourself. Permanent changes. Individual risk is too much. Please protect them from it. And I understand where this comes from. It sounds like care, but it's the same tire to move, just in a nicer shirt, right? It's still deciding for grown women what she's allowed to want for her own body. The permanence isn't an argument for banning her from the room. It's an argument for coaching her better, man. Like you don't respond to high stakes by slamming the door. You respond by being precise, more gradual, more awake. You know, the stakes are the reason to do this well, not the reason to refuse to do it at all. A woman doesn't need me to be scared on her behalf. She needs me to be good in my fucking job. So, how does she actually do this well? It starts with how she moves through it gradually. I don't mean gradually out of fear, like she's fragile in my break, right? She's not fragile. You know, I mean gradually out with self-knowledge, right? Start low, you know, watch what the body does, adjust off of what you see, not off of what a chart predicted. And her body's gonna make that easy for you because it speaks quickly and it speaks clearly, and women are very self-aware. So she doesn't have to guess for long, right? She's just gonna nudge. Within a very short window, the body's already telling you something. So that fast feedback is the exact thing that's gonna make uh, you know, the low and careful the smart play instead of just the slow one, right? And there's an empowering piece that the fear crowd just fucking skips, very convenient, right? She doesn't need anywhere near what a guy needs, not close. The doses in well-run female approach, they're so far below a male that it will shock the shit out of you. That's not her being limited, that is her being efficient because the body responds to small, so give small. Anybody pushing a woman towards guy size anything is not just being dangerous or they're not being generous, they're being reckless, right? And they don't understand the system that they're touching. The single most important marker in this conversation, the one I want it fucking tattooed on every woman's arm before she touches any of this, is your menstrual cycle is your compass, okay? The cycle is the apex readout of your internal hormone balance, right? Is the dashboard. When your cycle is regular, it's telling you the whole thing is in tune, your estrogen signal is stable, your progesterone is playing the part, the testosterone feedback loop is behaving, right? All of that harmony underneath is very protective. It's basically the body running the way that it's built to run. So the cycle is not some side issue that you just monitor as an afterthought. It is the headline, right? It's the check engine light just wire straight into the core of her system. So when her cycle gets disrupted, when it goes too irregular or it just disappears, that is not a minor footnote that you just push through. That is the body talking very loudly and very early before anything is permanent, even on the table, right? That is your smoke detector going off while there's just smoke. And move there, the move right there, the smart move is to stop and just get the cycle back before getting any further. This is not just you being like, oh, just punishing her, right? It's not because you screwed up and now you're grounded, right? It's because the sharpest read available and ignoring that read available, it's how a reversible warning turns into an irreversible outcome. A woman who honors her cycle, she has an early warning system that a guy would fucking kill for. So she should use the hell out of it. None of this works without knowledge, though, but I mean specific type of knowledge, not some vague internet bullshit, right? Female-specific hormone literacy that is a real prerequisite here, more than any fucking compound. So she's gotta actually understand her machine, you know, how her estradiol swings across the month. Like what is progesterone doing? Why does it matter? What's the difference between progestogenic influence and androgenic influence, right? The difference between the testosterone that her body makes and an androgen that she brings from the outside, what her birth control is doing in the entire signaling picture, right? Because that's gonna change everything and most people never account for it. And which supportive supplements actually protect her endocrine balance instead of just being noise? If she doesn't have that literacy, she should not be exploring this alone. Full stop, okay? I want to be very careful how I say this because it's not about capability. Women are not less capable of understanding their bodies, they're usually more capable than guys, as a matter of fact. It's about the fucking stakes, right? When some of the downside is written in fucking ink and tattooed, you can't freestyle the shit. You learn the system memory by the fucking cold, or you work with somebody who has that level of proficiency before you touch anything of this, okay? Because the stakes are really fucking high. Not because you're not capable of doing this. You fucking are. It's just gonna take a lot of work because it's a very complex system. And even coaches who are very experienced and even treat women, they don't really understand a female physiology. It's very complex, which is why it's one of the things that interests me the most, is because of the complexity itself. So we put all of this together, and here's what the responsible exploration for females actually looks like in the real world. It's honestly a smarter process than what most guys are running. So it's more subtle, it's more responsive, it's it's it's it's more aware by how things look, not just how they measure. It's more driven by real-time feedback instead of a fixed plan. She's reading her cycle, she's uh, you know, reading the mirror, she's reading her energy, she's reading her mood, she's adjusting off of very tiny signals, and she's doing all of that in doses that a guy would consider just a rounding error. So that is not caution, just fucking junior varsity version of enhancement. That is the advanced version. The men should be taking fucking notes here, okay? And I gotta close with the the part that sits underneath all of the physiology because it's the thing that the whole culture gets ass fucking backwards. There's this idea floating around that the fucking strong, muscular, enhanced woman has somehow given up her femininity, like traded away, like it's a fixed amount of woman, and every pound of muscle spends some amount of woman down, and that is bullshit. It's small and it's a fucking cage. Femininity is expansive, it is not restrictive, it doesn't get smaller when she gets stronger. Women don't lose it through muscle. She can't lose femininity through confidence, she can't lose femininity through strength or through choosing exactly what the fuck she wants her body to be. If anything, a woman standing in the body that she deliberately built on her own fucking terms, that is about as fully a woman as it possibly gets. The enhanced woman is not less of a woman, right? She's a woman completely inhabiting the form that she chooses, and that's not a betrayal of anything, that is ownership. And that's the frame that I want you to live with, right? Whether, whether, whether a woman is thinking about any of this or or a coach is gonna work with one, nothing is forbidden. This is not coming out of fear. This is this she's not a small man with doses turned down, right? It's a different system, running different rules with real fucking advantages and real permanence as well, that deserves precision and respect instead of a hand-me-down protocol. So treat her like the specific person she is. That is the whole thing. That is the job. The next week, what we're gonna do is we're gonna get into something that's been sitting under this entire series, and it's why the same compounds give two people completely two different outcomes, right? Choosing compounds and the art of personalization. Why the answer is never just the molecule, it's the molecule meeting the specific human in front of you, and I'll see you there.