What is a steroid cycle?
Anabolic steroids or anabolic-androgenic steroids are human-created hormones that cause the development of male sexual characteristics and body tissues to grow and develop faster, mimic the effects of male hormone testosterone. Usually athletes will use steroids for a certain period of time, then take a break to minimize negative side effects and allow the body to recover and natural hormone levels to return to normal. This is called a steroid cycle and usually has an athlete using a medicine for 7-14 weeks with a break of about 10-12 weeks.
If the use is continuous, the body stops responding to the steroid. Rather than increasing doses and seeing more side effects, cycling gives tissues and levels of hormones to return to normal and cause the body to be receiving again to steroid. The steroid cycle will often be stacked, which means two or more steroids taken at the same time to maximize the results.
Sometimes the steroid cycle will include themDay of Steroid Type at the beginning with other types collected in the middle and end of steroids. This is done to get more steroids in a single cycle. Cycling often follows the pyramid formula, which means that the dose is constantly increasing, culminating and narrowing down. During off-cycles, other drugs can be used to increase testosterone levels back to normal, act against other side effects of steroid and minimal muscle loss. Many professional athletes also take different substances during the period of shutdown to mask the use of steroids in attempting to pass a drug test that can be required by its specific sport.
Despite the negative physical and psychological side effects, the use of steroids is still popular, even among some amateur, secondary and university athletes. Many athletes feel under pressure to accept steroids to stay competitive with others who take them. Steroids are legally available for a prescription formedical use; All other uses of athletes or other individuals are illegal. Anabolic steroids are used medically to treat patients with low testosterone or tissue diseases such as cancer or AIDS.
side effects can be permanent, dangerous and even life -threatening if the use of steroids is not carefully monitored by a doctor. Some of these side effects include premature heart disease, acne, baldness of male pattern, gynecomastia or breast tissue development in men, testicular shrinking, reduced sperm number, aggressive behavior or liver cancer. Women taking steroids can develop masculine properties that can be irreversible, such as the deepening of the voice, elevated hair on the body and losing hair on the scalp.