Chapters:
00:00 Clue 1: Capped delts?
04:06 Clue 2: Gynecomastia?
06:12 Clue 3: Post inflammatory hyperpigmentation?
07:31 Clue 4: Massive changes in physique
10:34 Clue 5: Fat-free mass index
15:20 Outro
Transcript:
A very popular clue that someone is on performance enhancing drugs, doped, specifically on anabolic androgenic steroids, and thus not natural, is that they have capped delts. The idea is that the upper body, specifically the delts and the traps, have a high androgen receptor density. Androgen receptors are the places where anabolic androgenic steroids, such as testosterone, can attach to the receptor and exert their effects. So the idea is if you have more receptors, steroids will be more effective in those areas. Therefore, people on gear will develop a disproportionately large upper body compared to their lower body. Like most bro-science this is a very simple, plausible theory that has very limited empirical support. In fact, the whole idea is pretty much based on a single study.
This study compared the androgen receptor density of the traps, the trapezius muscle and the quads, in powerlifters that were on steroids, powerlifters that were not on steroids, and untrained controls. The first finding was that the traps indeed have a higher androgen receptor density than the quads. The second finding was that in the powerlifters on gear the androgen receptor density was even higher. In the quads there were no between group differences in androgen receptor density. At first glance, this study might seem to support the model that the upper body will respond more to androgenic anabolic steroids. However, there were no measurements of muscle size and the sample size of the powerlifting group on steroids was 8. Yes, 8 powerlifters. Not exactly a great sample size, especially not combined with the fact that these were powerlifters, not bodybuilders. Moreover, the finding that the androgen receptor density did not differ between powerlifters on gear and not on gear does not align with what we see in practice at all.
Think of bodybuilders. What body parts stand out? Sure, they have big shoulders, big traps. They might have capped delts, but look at their legs. Their legs are also huge. In fact, the quads are usually a stand out body part in bodybuilders. So do these supposed differences in androgen receptor density between the upper and the lower body actually matter? And it’s really important to emphasize the word “supposed” here because this is based on a single study. The truth is we really don’t have a good idea of the androgen receptor density in various muscle groups. We do know that it can vary per fiber type, per region, per person, perhaps per training style. So we really cannot extrapolate from this single study that the upper body indeed has a universally higher androgen receptor density than the lower body. And we certainly cannot conclude from it that therefore the upper body responds better to AAS.
Because a recent study actually found that androgen receptor indicators don’t predict muscle hypertrophy. They looked at various markers of androgen receptor activity and number, and they found no relation between acute or chronic markers of androgen receptor activity or expression and muscle hypertrophy in men or women. We also have at least one study directly contradicting the idea that androgen receptor density in the upper body is higher and therefore a response better to steroids. The study looked at powerlifters, again powerlifters, so that’s nice for comparison, that were on gear versus powerlifters that were natty and you found that the size difference in the quads was actually a little bit higher than the size difference in the traps. The actual numbers were very close, though, indicating that androgen receptor density might simply not matter at all. It was 61% versus 58% and 33% versus 44% in favor of the quads versus the traps. These were the size differences of the enhanced powerlifters versus the natural powerlifters. So to clue that someone has capped delts or big traps and is therefore on steroids is not very useful.
Capped delts are usually just a result of having good insertion and origin points of your delts, which is mostly genetically determined, 2: having lot of muscle mass and 3: being very lean. Of course it’s more likely that someone is big and lean if they’re on steroids, but in itself it doesn’t really tell you much. Now I will concede that a lot of bro’s on steroids don’t train their lower body as much as their upper body, and these size differences are exacerbated when you’re on steroids. If you’re on steroids, you don’t train your lower body much, you get very big size differences between the upper and lower body. So in practice, it might be true that many people on steroids have disproportionately large upper bodies, but that’s more related to their training practices than inherently an effect of the gear.
A second popular a clue that people use a lot online to identify if someone is a fake natty is if they have gyno. Gyno is short for gynecomastia, and certain drugs like Trenbolone can indeed give someone gyno. However, the truth is, a lot of people have gyno, and in fact gyno is probably most prominent among obese individuals, obese men, and much more so than in steroid users. Gyno is mostly the result of heavily abusing certain types of steroids, and there are tons of steroid users who don’t get gyno at all.
The reason they get gyno is because they have a disproportionate effect of prolactin, progesterone and in particular estrogen on the breast tissue. If you have very high activity of progesterone, estrogen and prolactin on breast tissue, in relation to the effect of testosterone, you can get gyno, which is essentially breast formation in men. You also see this in overweight individuals because they aromatize, which is convert most of their testosterone to estrogen, so they get a very poor ratio of testosterone to estrogen. Anabolic androgenic steroids are, as the name suggests, highly androgenic. So they strongly activate the androgen receptor, they have the effect like testosterone. In that sense, they actually reduce the probability of getting gyno. It’s only when you abuse certain drugs or when you’re on a very high body fat level, and you use a lot of testosterone without any aromatase inhibitor, for example, then you could get gyno. But if you do it the smart way, you can use a whole lot of drugs and never be at risk of gyno. So yes, if you see a super jacked individual with gyno, maybe that is an additional clue, but in itself, having gyno does not tell you at all if someone is natural or not.
I see tons of people online diagnosing gyno on bodybuilders and saying: “Oh, obviously they’re on gear.” First of all, most people over- diagnose gyno a lot. Stiff nipples does not equate to gyno. Many models and competitors can get stiff nipples during a photoshoot or when they’re on stage. Speaking from experience as a model and former competitor, it can be cold, you’re posing, you’re physically aroused so you can get stiff nipples for a wide variety of reasons that have nothing to do with using steroids. And, again, stiff nipples aren’t gyno to begin with. So the vast majority of cases I see online where someone says: “Oh, look, they have gyno, therefore they must be on steroids.” – it really doesn’t make any sense.
This third clue makes a little bit more sense. Post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation. A lot of people have noticed that people on gear often get acne. That’s true. Acne is a common side effect anabolic androgenic steroids. It seems that the steroids increase semen production, and the steroids also increase the proliferation of certain bacteria that lead to acne. Moreover, they don’t just get acne, which is often not what people see, but what you get afterwards is prolonged inflammation and skin discoloration, which is called post inflammatory hyperpigmentation. These are the kind of dark spots of skin. They’re not acne. They’re not bumpy anymore. They’re just dark spots. And when you get a ton of those on someone, especially on the back, that can be an indication that someone is on gear. However, bacne is very common among men, regardless of whether they are on steroids or not. Moreover, some people just get post inflammatory hyperpigmentation, some people don’t. Moreover, there are a lot of pharmaceuticals and treatments for acne. If you suppress the acne, you don’t get the post inflammatory hyperpigmentation either. So what are someone gets post inflammatory hyperpigmentation or not, or whether they have bacne says more about their skincare routine, maybe their health, their hygiene, their genetic propensity for acne than whether they are on gear. But I would say most individuals with a back full of acne or post inflammatory hyperpigmentation and a super impressive physique are probably on gear. So this is a cue that has some ancillary use, but in itself it doesn’t really tell you anything.
Now that we’ve dispensed with the popular but widely inaccurate clues, let’s talk about clues that someone is actually on steroids. The first thing I would note, which is by far the most obvious, is that you see massive and sudden changes in someone’s physique, both between cut and bulk cycles and in an individual over time. The reality of natural bodybuilding is that muscle growth is a very slow and arduous process. It takes hard work and a lot of time to build a lot of size. There is no six week transformation where you gain 20 pounds of muscle or anything like that. If you do see those types of things, then nine times out of ten that individual is on gear. In some cases, you can have individuals with a lot of muscle memory that make very impressive transformations, but other than that, it really just doesn’t happen. Even newbie gains usually are capped at one, maybe two kilos of muscle a month. Moreover, in natural trainees, their size is very stable over time. It’s actually very easy to maintain muscle mass. I recently posted an article on my Instagram showing that a single workouts per week, if you train hard to do a good full body workout, is enough for most lifters outside of energy deficit to maintain muscle mass. It’s very easy to maintain muscle mass. Muscle atrophy occurs quite slowly, it takes more than a week to set in for most individuals. So most natural lifters, they don’t make impressive changes in their size over time, but they also don’t lose a lot of muscle mass over time, outside of, say, a Covid pandemic where they don’t train. So when you see an individual that sometimes looks amazing and sometimes doesn’t look amazing, and they say things like, “Oh yeah, I didn’t train as hard this period”, that reeks of B.S.
In natural lifters, whether you train hard or not, it makes maybe a small difference in size but it’s not going to be more than at most a few kilos. For reference, my own weight has been between 84 kilos and 95 kilos at the extremes over the past… …let me do the math first…. For over a decade. I’m six foot 1 or 185cm, and 84 kilos for me is dehydrated in contest prep with glute striations. 95 kilos is bulked up, pretty fat for my standards, and at the peak of a bulk. Some natural lifters might have more than a 10 kilo or 20 pounds difference between cut and bulk phases. Maybe they get leaner, doesn’t get much leaner than glute striations, but maybe they get leaner. Maybe they lose more muscle mass. Maybe they bulk up to a higher body fat percentage than I’m comfortable with. But if you see very dramatic changes, especially over short periods of time, and when they bulk they get substantially larger and it looks like they’re a lot fatter, that can be an indication that they’re on gear. Now, I say it looks like they’re fatter because a lot of people on gear, when they use testosterone and gear that people typically use to bulk, which aromatizes and also causes estrogen levels to rise, causes a lot of water retention. That’s why you get the popular moon face which shows that someone is not just fat, but also retaining lots of water. And it takes a lot of skill to distinguish water retention from body fat level, but water retention also makes you look a bit like a cloud, a bit puffed up, bloated, full. You still look super full and the muscles also look very full. You don’t really look fat and flabby. Everything is kind of still hard, but, you lose a lot of muscle definition. So these can be somewhat reliable clues that someone is on gear.
But by far the best way to tell if someone is on steroids is simply how muscular they are. And the best way to quantify how muscular exactly someone is is their fat-free mass index. It’s the equivalent of BMI, body mass index, but for muscle mass rather than for total weight. Total weight obviously isn’t very useful to distinguish people on gear versus those that aren’t. I’m not going to go into the mathematics of how to calculate fat-free mass index, even though it’s very simple, because I have a calculator on my websites that will tell you exactly what your fat free mass index is, or what anyone else’s fat-free mass index is, if you have their stats. It might seem simplistic to just look at someone’s fat free mass index. And indeed it is, but this is actually telling because in many domains, research has found that a very simple prediction based on hard, objective, quantifiable data is better than a lot of speculation and narratives and stories. We’re always very prone to these stories and clues, but hard data are often better predictors than any subjective clues. Why fat-free mass index and not strength?
Well, strength is a lot more variable between individuals. You’ve undoubtedly seen videos online of people that look super skinny but lift a lot of weight, and you’re like: “Hey, how is that possible?” There are a lot of reasons for that. Simply put, the strength is very heavily influenced by the nervous system on top of muscle mass. So you have the muscle mass, which is kind of the engine if you compare someone’s strength level to how fast a race car can drive, and then you have the nervous system, which is like how good the muscle mass is coordinated, it’s just like the skill of the driver. And then you also have mechanical factors like leverages and internal moment arms, insertion points of the tendons. Those things can easily double someone’s strength just based on their biomechanics. They’re not actually producing more force in that scenario. But the internal force output has a better leverage, therefore doubling their strength level in practice. So they can lift maybe twice as much as you can, even though internally their muscles are producing the same amount of force as you are.
Now, even though the calculator on my website, which the link is in the description is almost for sure the best way to tell objectively if someone is likely on gear or not. I would caution you that what the calculator does is it estimates the proportion of individuals that could achieve that fat-free mass index naturally. So it’s not a hard limit of 25 where it compares you to, which is nonsense. It looks at the normal distribution of the population of what people could achieve naturally and then it looks: “Okay, 95% of people could achieve this naturally.” In that case, there is no reason to suspect this individual of steroid use. But that doesn’t mean they’re actually natural, right? It’s a different question. You will never know if that individual is natural, even if they confess, maybe it’s a false confession. So you have to live with that reality. What matters for you is the probability that if you have good genetics, you could achieve a certain physique. That’s what the calculator does. It tells you the proportion of people that should be able to achieve that fat free mass index without steroids. If someone scores a very low percentage it is a likely but not definitive evidence that they are on steroids. There will always be some special snowflakes among us. The person with the 1 in 10,000,000 genetics that is naturally bigger than most people on steroids. So it’s always probabilistic. It’s never hard definitive proof. And you shouldn’t need hard proof, because what matters for you is whether you could achieve that. And that’s probably what you actually want to know.
Asking whether someone else is on steroids or not, it’s a little bit like in high school when you ask somebody how they did on a math exam. You’re not really that interested in how they did on their math exam. What you really want to know is how you did. Because your ability is in reference to everyone else’s ability. But that is not the best mindset for fulfillment and happiness. What you should be concerned about is your progression and where you are now, versus where you were in the past, and where you could be in the future. So what the calculator on my website also does, it has two functions. There’s one mode where you can see what proportion of individuals should be able to achieve a certain physique naturally. And then there is the other mode, at your current fat-free mass index, and with your current stats, it also does circumference measurement, so it’s body part specific, which tells you how far along you are in relation to what you could achieve if you had great genetics. And the top end here, your maximum muscular natural potential, which is estimated by the calculator, it is again not hard definitive proof. It’s an estimate based on the best available data. It’s quite good. A lot of individuals have used that calculator, and so far pretty much nobody has exceeded it at a low body fat level. Everyone that has exceeded that level of fat free mass and those stats has been at relatively higher body fat levels. Nevertheless, it is possible that someone will exceed those stats because they just have absolute S-tier, godlike genetics. But based on the available data, this calculator is probably the best bet you have to see what you could achieve if you had good genetics.
So go ahead to the website, click on the link in the description. Go ahead see how far along you are on your journey to reaching your maximum natural muscular potential. Put in the stats of your favorite YouTubers. Put in my stats, if you want and see what the proportion of individuals is that could achieve that level of muscularity to give you a reference of who is likely natty and what you could yourself possibly achieve. Again, though, what is really important is not what everyone else is doing, how big everyone else is. what you should be concerned about, is what you could achieve with your genetics and where you are in relation to your goals. If you like this type of evidence based fitness content, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe.