Prohormones & Weight gainers

[Malack101]

Hey guys. Was looking for recommendations or personal experiences with prohormones. How effective have you found them to be, etc? I have tried a couple of products that sounded like they were close to prohormones with varying degress of success (fizogen's on-cycle). Not sure if the effects were actually from the product or a placebo effect.

Also, does anybody have any recommendations for a good weight gainer supplements. Something more for building muscle rather than just bad calories.

Thanks

[drew]

crap and crap.

stay away from both prohormones and weightgainers.

There are no prohormones on the market anymore that are worth a damn.

And if you want to gain weight, eat real food. Just eat more of it.

[inflated]

Originally Posted by drew

crap and crap.

stay away from both prohormones and weightgainers.

There are no prohormones on the market anymore that are worth a damn.

And if you want to gain weight, eat real food. Just eat more of it.

Spot on Drew--food is best, but adding a protein shake is ok for someone who has trained a lot, and is hitting a plateau. Good real food is the only way to get big.

[inm]

I'll join the NO! on prohormones. they are not tested for safety, they will give you all the sides of the real thing (while leaving you with no protection against them, since you falsely feel safe since 'this is not roids').

As for protein powders, I'll use the whey shake post workout, and as 'emergency' protein to take to places I cant take a cooler with food to, turning a regular meal to a 50-grams-protein meal with it.

Gainers are a waste: its protein powder, dilluted by cheap sugars and bad fats. if you need calories, and cant eat more simple food, just add quality fats (olive, fish oil, avocado etc) to your meals.

[Malack101]

Thanks guys. Pretty much what I figured. Just good to hear confirmation. I am taking whey protein to supplement meals. Guess its back to natural peanut butter and eggs.

[drew]

Remember, there's a big diff between protein powders/blends and weightgainers. Weightgainers are FULL of fats and sugars and are all about calories with no focus on whether they are useful or good calories. It's a product group based on 1970s-80s understandings of fitness and nutrition needs.

Empty calories almost never help anyone. Even really naturally skinny guys taking these things will tend to gain a little fat long before they actually get any muscle off them. Only if you flat out seem to be physically incapable of getting enough calories in your day should you look at something like these.

If you're truly bulking, you need 2-4 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight per day (the more lean you are the more you need to be toward the 4, if you're a bit flabby stay closer to 2-3). You also generally want to follow a 7:1 - 10:1 ratio of calories to g's protein in the foods you eat. Sometimes you can't but if you keep those numbers in mind you'll be ok. That said, to lose fat, you'd need to create a calorie deficit, but for most guys the best way to cut bodyfat is to bulk up muscle first to change your energy balance.

To gain some muscle while worrying about bodyfat, you probably need around 5000 calories a day. To truly bulk up and put on muscle, that number needs to be between 10000 - 15000. THAT is not easy to do and during a true bulking cycle most guys feel like all they do is eat and eat and eat.

Try to use actual real, food foods and think of things like protein shakes and bars and such as add-ins to your already holistic diet.

And if you're trying to build size, don't do that goofy dry tuna and boiled chicken breast crap! Just eat good food with lower carbs and lots of protein. If you want a cheeseburger, eat a cheeseburger. If you want tuna, feel free to make tuna salad. Just eat and make sure you create a diet you can live with and enjoy. Only when you start feeling your bodyfat is getting too high should you worry about doing the all super lean foods deal. And even then keep in mind that adding some unwanted bodyfat is part of the muscle building process.

And, when you do diet that away you get to enjoy the surprise of exposing that new muscle you've worked hard to build.

[Ragetiger]

Originally Posted by drew

And if you're trying to build size, don't do that goofy dry tuna and boiled chicken breast crap! Just eat good food with lower carbs and lots of protein. If you want a cheeseburger, eat a cheeseburger. If you want tuna, feel free to make tuna salad. Just eat and make sure you create a diet you can live with and enjoy. Only when you start feeling your bodyfat is getting too high should you worry about doing the all super lean foods deal. And even then keep in mind that adding some unwanted bodyfat is part of the muscle building process.

And, when you do diet that away you get to enjoy the surprise of exposing that new muscle you've worked hard to build.

Bout time someone got down and dirty! Got really tired of the old "eat real food" garbage. Though I like to spoil myself with cheeseburger (no more than once week, if i feel like spending a dollar) I prefer chicken salads when I wander into the dreaded fast food resturants.

I learned with my body type I cannot go "cold turkey" on certain junk foods. Doing so was not so good, body went into a total shock mode (keeping everything for itself). Do not overdue spoiling one self either, cause you won't go anywhere progression-wise. I tend to use Fridays as a spoiler day only when Saturday is available as a day to push some extra training. Only for one meal too, can't express that enough.

[BIGJOEY]

while i agree with some of what has been poasted in the last few poasting
i really dont know any bodybuilder who does 15000 kals a day including top level pros. you can have your cheat meal or your cheat day but its not an excuse to go crazy. we as guys tend to get number crazy. its not about how much you weigh hell anybody can be 300 lbs but that could be mostly fat. What is forgotten in the quest to get big is that we need to build muscle not get to 20-40% body fat and then we have to drop a shit load of weight to see what we made. Since most guys get caught in that number trap you need others to give you some indication that your on the wrong track if your body fat is growing to much out of control. Any thing else and you are self deulisional with respects to the sport and what you really look like. Hell i been heavy as 245 before but it took a good friend whos a pro to get the concept through my head and i been at this a while. I look bigger and better at a lighter weight . So just because your 250 or what ever weight if your 20% bf your out of shape. You can keep building quality size at 10% and thats where any person who is serious should be. if not you have a lot more work to do to cut and show off what you have done. So have your cheat meal but you are bodybuilding not fat building. if you want to build fat then go live at dunkin donuts. otherwise keep a eye on things you dont have to get too obsessive unless you compete. And it doesnt have to be boring. i have offered a cook book here that will help with that part if you want a copy in pdf format just let me know. it will make it easier.

[FuzzyKB]

Not everyone on this one is the same. Back in the 1960's the main thing that was done was that one would go into bulking cycles then cutting cycles. To this day, that remains the best for a percentage of people because it is the only way that a percentage of individuals can get what they need to burn to consistently increase the weight and build muscle.

I would agree that a 15,000 cal per day diet would be useless in about 90% of the cases. The exception would be an extremely thin individual who did not have enough fat storage to create expendable glycogen. That does happen, but those individuals are not the "norm".

Also the old rule used to be in the 1960's that we did not have the cut shredded look of today. While today's extremely low body fat level looks good on a stage, it is not necessarily healthy and a body fat level other than when cutting for a competition of about 10-15% is normal and not excessive.

If an individual is able to afford a great number of decent legit supplements (not junk) , they are able to maintain gain rates on lower calorie diets. If they are using chemical help, they again can do even more on a lower calorie intake as has been mentioned.

To me, and with years of experience, I have seen a number of different approaches work with different individuals. There is no one single approach.

The idea with weight and bulking is really not a number in the ways most think. The best way to judge what you are doing on a diet is the bodies response to the cardio portion of your training. Also, if one examines and sees changes in BP or resting heart rate patterns the gain of body fat is too much.

It is better to monitor via the body's own response than it is by any arbitrary calorie number or body fat percentage that is within a common sense level.

For a time in Temecula, California there was a restaurant that was affiliated with the owner of the Gold's Gym Franchise in that area. They had their standard menu and then there was a separate bodybuilder's menu which had pages dedicated to bulking diets, cutting diets, etc. There was also a page of healthy prepared salads, snacks and deserts geared towards the Iron game. I do not know if this restaurant still exists, but I kind of thought it was a great idea at the time.

[FuzzyKB]

[COLOR="Orange"]

The largest problems I see with these products is first what I refer to as "the great race". A supplement manufacturer works their ass of invests a considerable chunk of change in coming up with something new, and then it is a race to market the product and get what they can before the FDA bans it.

When it comes to what we now call "prohormones" this is the current status.

The manufacturers know that they will be losing products right and left and they also know that it will take the FDA time to initiate a ban on their products, so they go for it, grab the buck and then voluntarily pull things in order to keep the cycle going.

Under the revised guidelines now in effect the contents of a supplement (prohormone) do not matter. The definition is that if it has the ability to cause change or growth on a cellular level, it is now classified as a drug.
By doing this the FDA gave a gift to the major pharmaceutical companies in that anything a "little guy" comes up with can be taken away by a "big guy" if it proves effective enough. This allows a small prohormone manufacturer to sustain all the R&D and a big conglomerate to take it away and market it as a Rx drug should it be really great.

What they are doing now are "quick run" stuff.

The problem with this is that the guinea pigs are the general public and as a whole only about 10% of what is out there will have any benefit at all. If it does have benefit, expect that the production run of the product will be 6-9 months before the company voluntarily pulls it when the FDA discovers: "Hey, this stuff works".

Gainers and other products like this can be beneficial to a percentage of individuals, but the fact is that they are often used by people not needing them. The benefactor of a weight gainer would be an individual who is substantially underweight and does not have sufficient body fat to easily convert to glycogen which is burned by muscles as "fuel" in training.

Some individuals can benefit from these products, but, if the workout intensity and weight on each exercise does not begin to increase within about 2 weeks from the beginning of their usage, then the benefit is not there. The idea is not a gain of a ton of body fat really. If the weight one trains with goes up with a reasonable percentage of body fat to supply glycogen then they are OK, if the person using them does not benefit quickly in this way, then they are absolutely not beneficial to that individual.

Some may argue that the same can be done with food, but this is not true for all people, and the products have benefits IF and only IF they are used in the right way. [/COLOR]

[BIGJOEY]

while i agree with the last 2 post please dont forget its not just the supplement companies racing to get stuff on the market before the FDA bans it. Drug companies are doing the same things. The problem is theyare using chemists not nutritionlists to design these products with out fully knowing the interactions or reactions of these products. Supplement companies are not going to spend tons of money on research. Anybody can do a clinical stydy to support their supposed point of view. One has to be educated to study the lables and relalize that a good percentage is hype. 25% of all precriptions written in the united states in a given year are pleacobes. The vaccine you got for chicken pox when you were a kid will cause shingles when you get past 60 . Nobody knew that when they did the testing for it. You have to be smart and educated your your going to spend tons og cash for nothing.

[FuzzyKB]

Originally Posted by BIGJOEY

while i agree with the last 2 post please dont forget its not just the supplement companies racing to get stuff on the market before the FDA bans it. Drug companies are doing the same things. The problem is theyare using chemists not nutritionlists to design these products with out fully knowing the interactions or reactions of these products. Supplement companies are not going to spend tons of money on research. Anybody can do a clinical stydy to support their supposed point of view. One has to be educated to study the lables and relalize that a good percentage is hype. 25% of all precriptions written in the united states in a given year are pleacobes. The vaccine you got for chicken pox when you were a kid will cause shingles when you get past 60 . Nobody knew that when they did the testing for it. You have to be smart and educated your your going to spend tons og cash for nothing.

[COLOR="LightBlue"]
When it comes to prescription drugs I not only agree with Joey, but would add that people need to be very careful when it comes to prescription drugs.

Drug companies now use television advertising to promote their products rather than what used to be called "Detail Men". In the days of "Detail Men" your MD would be visited by sales people from the various drug manufacturers. These people would bring huge cases of samples and give them as "gifts" along with writing tablets, cases of ballpoint pens, and other trivia for advertising purposes. At that time "big business" was banned from "direct market advertising".

Now, under Direct Market Advertising Drugs are marketed to the general public through print and television advertising.

There are horrific drugs being marketed now. One drug is a treatment or cure for plaque psoriasis. One of the listed side effects of this drug is non-Hodgkins Lymphoma Cancer. Plaque psoriasis is not a fatal disease and at worst creates some minor discomfort and a blotch on the sufferers. The cancer on the other hand has a very high mortality rate and the pharmaceutical giant marketing this downplays the cancer while touting that this can end your problems. Today, MD's have been persuaded that Statin drugs are wonderful. They pass out prescriptions for Statins to people at an incredible rate with little to no encouragement to modify diet and exercise. In order to create a wider market the pharmaceutical giants are also beginning to change statistics as to what constitutes high cholesterol. I have heard of people being given Statin drugs with cholesterol numbers as low as 150. Your body needs a percentage of fats in the right places in order to make the hormones you need.

The real crock is that the pharmaceutical giants have in one of the greatest cases of marketing genius in most places eliminated most of the liability from themselves blaming instead the MD who prescribed them.

This is the reason they throw in the little disclaimer: "Ask your doctor if this drug is right for you."

Sadly, MD's are now being bombarded by requests for drugs which imply that the patient will be able to abdicate all responsibility for their own health throwing that over instead to a "magic pill".

"Guys, it's a trade-off, it all comes with a price and that price can be very high for a percentage of people.

In ten years or so I expect to see tons of commercials for class action lawsuits against manufacturers for a ton of the drugs being advertised on television. [/COLOR]

[viamanmax]

Originally Posted by BIGJOEY

while i agree with the last 2 post please dont forget its not just the supplement companies racing to get stuff on the market before the FDA bans it. Drug companies are doing the same things. The problem is theyare using chemists not nutritionlists to design these products with out fully knowing the interactions or reactions of these products. Supplement companies are not going to spend tons of money on research. Anybody can do a clinical stydy to support their supposed point of view. One has to be educated to study the lables and relalize that a good percentage is hype. 25% of all precriptions written in the united states in a given year are pleacobes. The vaccine you got for chicken pox when you were a kid will cause shingles when you get past 60 . Nobody knew that when they did the testing for it. You have to be smart and educated your your going to spend tons og cash for nothing.

By the way, it is not the vaccine itself that causes shingles but the virus that causes chicken pox.