If you are using steroids, or considering the use of anabolics, there’s probably a very good chance you’re doing your homework. If you’re not, you should be. The decision to use steroids is a very serious one which should never be taken lightly. The decisions you make regarding your cycle will affect you for the rest of your life in many ways. You could shut down your own natural testosterone production permanently. You could lose your ability to reproduce. You could end up losing your job because of a positive test because you didn’t understand how long a drug would be in your system. You could end up with a damaged liver because you didn’t grasp half life times. You could end up in prison because you abused or cheated prescriptions or ordered from an overseas source. There are many factors you need to consider before considering hopping on the steroid wagon.
Okay, now that you are a little bit scared, and aware of the seriousness of using steroids, you may be a bit more receptive to the information you currently may casually scan about steroids. You know the listings of each drug online. You might glance at things such as dosing sizes, side effects, half lives, and more, never really grasping just how important an understanding of this information is. You need to know everything about every drug you place into your body. There is just too much on the line for you.
One such aspect of drug listings which is often completely ignored by steroid users is drug lives. There is the active life, and the half life. Most bodybuilders focus more upon the injection information on each drug, and then forget about the things that happen inside their body once they inject that needle. Don’t make that mistake.
The active life of a steroid is the amount of time that the drug is still delivering you anabolic effects in the body. For some orals, active life can be just a few hours. For some oil-based testosterone esters, it can be weeks. The amount of time can vary from person to person, based upon metabolism and a wealth of other factors, so active life should never be the sole determinant in any decision making regarding steroid use. What is important to you are a person injecting testosterone and maintaining artificial T levels is to know that you need to make each injection just before the effectiveness of a drug stops. At that point, your testosterone levels will plummet, estrogen levels will fluctuate, and you’re in for a world of lost muscle and energy and the potential emergence of gyno. Know your active lives, and plan your cycles accordingly.
Half life is much easier to understand. Its use isn’t as dire as active live, but it is very useful when making calculations for knowing when drugs will be out of your system so that you can be clean for employment or competition testing. The half life of a steroid is the amount of time it will take for the active life to be halved in the body.