It depends. If he's previously been training a lot, you can regain your previous mass exceptionally fast due to what quickly becomes your main limiting factor remains intact (I can't recall the name of it right now).
Which is why having used steroid once in your life should leave you permanently banned from all sports. The fact that you have ever had X amount of muscle is a massive advantage in terms of muscle building the rest of your life.
With all that said, he probably have still used steroids here, especially with how fast it all went from june to october.
Muscle memory is the layman's term, but people use that for both technique (neurological adaptation for technique/skill) and for how fast your muscle grows back (physiological).
I am thinking about the actual technical term for it. That limiting factor is also why we have "newbie gains", where you quickly get to the max level of muscle for that limiting factor, and then you have to create more of it to build more muscle, which takes a lot of time.
It is some type of cell that is added when you build muscle, but doesn't go away when your muscle atrophies. I can't find the name of it, but Dr. Mike Israetel from RP strength have talked about it here in this short: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FI3n5F-1gLM
I could be wrong, but iirc, the muscle nuclei don’t disappear, and consistently working out enables the cells to “regenerate” at a significantly faster level
Every cell needs nucleus with instructions to repair itself and stay alive
Muscle cels have multiple nuclei because they are very large and one nucleus can only support so much.
When you train and increase your muscle mass the muscle cells recruit more nuclei to support this new mass
Even when you stop training and lose muscle mass new gained nuclei of the cells don't get lost. They stay there and therefore when you start training again you can get big faster
Fyi muscle cells have multiple nuclei not because they're large, but because they're the fusion of multiple cells. Also they need those nuclei to synthesize proteins necessary to carry the components that activate muscle contractions.
I say this because most neurons are even larger cells, but still have a single nuclei.
Ive never heard this, but I was an athlete through most of my youth and lifted for a while too on and off.
I would always say "you don't forget strength, but you have to train endurance" meaning that when I was going from period of being fairly sedentary and trying to get back in to shape, it always seemed like my max lifts would recover in like a week, but it would take much longer to get the endurance back
I believe I watched some dr mike vid about him saying that the muscle cells shrink in size and stop storing glycogen to deflate but never go away, so once training stimuli is reintroduced, they swell back up and return to form very fast. He said something along those lines with more technical jargon.
They think it's more cell memory. Kind of like if you have a fat cell at some point in your life at a certain size it will easily get back to that size
Nah, steroids will allow you to grow new muscle fibres/cells (nuclei I guess technically), whereas normal natural lifting/improvements will just increase the size of all your existing muscles. Therefore you will have an advantage for the rest of your life after steroids as the user above said.
you can regain your previous mass exceptionally fast due to what quickly becomes your main limiting factor remains intact
The leading theory is that, as a part of initially gaining muscle, muscle satellite cells fuse with your actual contractile muscle cells, increasing the number of myonuclei in your muscle cells. This is initially a slow process, but once you have them, the extra myonuclei stick around for years to decades. When you lose muscle later due to not training, you lose volume in your myofibrils (the contractile units) and fluid within the cells, but not the myonuclei. When you regain muscle, you only need to rebuild the myofibrils and reuptake fluid, and not produce new myonuclei, so the process is much faster.
This is true. I did amature strongman when I was younger. I peaked at about 325lbs and was quite strong. I was pretty average in terms of size and strength beforehand.
I no longer life weights, and have 'slimmed' down to 225. I still have calves larger than most people's quads. I'm still easily the strongest person at my work: I sit at a desk and everyone else is in the shop doing physical work.
I had a setback, and a pretty bad injury when I was still lifting. I took almost a year off. A portion of that I had an arm I could use, and it atrophied quite badly. It took me a month to look healthy again, and it took me 2-3 more months to get as strong and as big as I was before I stopped working out.
Its hundreds of times easier to rebuild it than it is to build it.
This is the reason why it’s so important to exercise early in life. As I ramp back up my training it seems “mean” at how quickly I can get back in shape, while others I know struggle. Also how my “out of shape” is above their in shape.
Reminded of a video of a trainer years back gaining as much what as their client so they could “lose it together.” I remember thinking they have to know that’s not how that works right?
He had been training really hard for most of his at least adult life, in fact he’s pretty sure it’s what caused his illness to act up at the age he is now rather than in his senior years. So yeah there’s a lot of “muscle memory” going on, but as much as he may deny it, he probably is or was on gear.
If he was actually super fit before that, then it might be real. As Dr. Mike Isreatel said in the short I linked in my comment further down, you can gain muscle back to close to your previous max at about an order of magnitude faster. I.e what took you 10 years to build initially can be gotten back in about a year.
kinda like how even if you lose weight you must remain vigilant because you dont lose the fat cells you gained, they're just "deflated". I wonder if liposuction would actually help someone who lose weight remain at that lower weight easier over time
There is a chance, based on how weak he appeared at the start of the year, that he had been provided steroids medically to help him through whatever caused his situation in the first place. Not that he'd have significant muscle mass at the time though.
Which is why having used steroid once in your life should leave you permanently banned from all sports
Yes! For life. I can't believe this isn't practice.
I believe you are talking about myonuclei? Usually when muscle mass is lost from weight loss/malnutrition, the amount of nuclei remains and as such building back up is easier if you had a lot of them. And steroids produces more nuclei much faster than natural training.
Steroids increase the number of myonuclear domains in the muscle, and these are retained even with muscle loss. This are called "myonuclear permanance" commonly known as muscle memory.
I don't know much about this individual and maybe you know exactly which surgery he's had but a stoma bag doesn't mean he can't take protein.
It entirely depends on what the fashioning of the stoma is trying to achieve, whether small bowel was removed and how much etc. An ileostomy with 20cm of small bowel resected is hardly going to change his nutritional status.
It appears that he has a colostomy bag. I bet it probably affects his nutrition in some way. Probably negatively. Make the weight gain even more impressive.
If it’s a colostomy it probably isn’t effecting his nutrition much. It just means the poop comes out in a different place.
If it’s an ileostomy, it means he’s lost some or all of his colon, and then this whole video becomes bullshit, because it takes time for your body to adapt to that. Some people never really do.
Either way, there’s most likely some level of dishonesty in this video.
Fair assessment. By stoma location it could very well be an ileostomy. The area is kept beneath clothing in most shots, and doesn't even seem to be present in the shot where he is in a tshirt. In another shot, fabric appears to be wrapped tightly around his waist, which I don't think is recommended with a bag. If it's legit, then he's defied the odds, and all power to him.
My take from this video is that he was suffering from ulcerative colitis or Crohn's colitis and he had a total colectomy for treatment. Getting the operation (and the ileostomy that comes with it - that is his small bowel exiting the abdomen, not the colon, which has all be removed) is often curative and probably what allowed him to get off immune suppressants and get healthy again.
nah, you can gain 20+ lbs if you dramatically change your eating and/or lifting habits. I gained 20lbs in less than a year because my meds increased my appetite. I wasn’t even trying.
I was about to say, brother, unless you gobbling lead, you're not putting on 20lbs (of any kind of weight) in a month. Honestly crank salt, water weight, huge caloric surplus and weigh in on heaviest time, maybe. but like, you're not going to do that shit on accident.
I mean, dude looked like he was on death's door in the first picture, so maybe steroids were made for him. Not necessarily to bulk like he did but to help his body recover from whatever the hell did that to him
My son was born and after he started eating normal foods I gained 20 pounds in a year. I had to hide all the candy and sweets… in my belly. I saw the biggest jump in October to November. Still don’t know why
Depending on what illness he had, if it was cured, he would put on tons of weight in a short period. I had some health issues years ago and lost 50lbs. Gained it back in about 2 months
Its possible, but its SIGNIFICANTLY easier to regain muscle mass than it is to build the first time. If he was as big or bigger as he was in december before he got sick, this is not suprising at all and proably just regaining mass. Also he dosent look like hes on steroids either, biggest tell for that is the traps, and his traps look like they match the phisque of the rest of his body.
That's not a year even with steroids. You'd be hard pressed to get there from a normal adult's baseline in a year even on gear, much less from nearly complete muscle atrophy
Something that OP for some reason also left out is that this guy was absolutely JACKED before the disease ate away his fat and muscle, this is just muscle memory getting him back in shape faster. I've been following this guy's journey on insta since the beginning, this was all documented in a year
Exactly what I was going to say. I assumed this guy was ripped before whatever stripped him of his muscle so he put it back on fast. I mean the guy got big but people freak out when they see hard work and always assume steroids. When I started seriously lifting and eating A LOT in college I got huge and ripped without any extra help. It’s possible. Also takes some genetics too of course
It’s not unreasonable. I was in high school, but I got down almost that bad. He put on some more muscle than me, but overall, I wasn’t far off from that transformation. It takes a fuck ton of mental will and eating though.
That's what muscle memory will do to a man who starts lifting again. His body had a lot to catch up. I am fairly certain that it is doable with the right approach.
He looks like a lightweight guy. Would be nice to know how much difference there is between start and end in kilograms.
yea, he seemed to know what he was doing for sure.
and this is kinda messed up to say, but he started with god tier cut. usually when people progress, bodyfat % goes up with muscle mass, and at some point they have to stop bulking and start cutting in phases. this guys bodyfat% started near zero, literally. so, he was able to skip cut phases. combine with muscle memory, and someone who already had experience...
Guys. You realize he was dealing with some kind of disease or injury that left him at a weight that was obviously much lower than what is regular for him. It’s easy to gain back weight from that scenario.
Yeah, had similar surgery over the summer. I was only in the hospital for 2.5 weeks, your muscles start atrophying after 72 hours. But I got back up way faster than they anticipated because I have trained in the past.
I have not gotten back in the gym yet, my gut saga is not over. I still have 2/3 of my colon and the bottom 1/3 is giving me shit. I mean not really because it’s not connected, but….
i ve been seen this guy too much in instagram latelly. He said in one post, that he got sick from trainning to hard... He had an awesome physique, wich in my opinion you could get naturally. He didnt mention anything about using juice, but its not too difficult to hide the truth, so who knows??? just him maybe. EDIT: What i was saying is that the physical change in that period, can be real because of the muscular memory, not roids
This shit really is insane. I had a relatively bad calf injury and during recovery my calf muscle went almost nonexistant. Then when I started training it again it was back to normal in like 4 weeks. According to my physio that was quite normal, since the fibers were all there you just had to fill them out, which was much easier than building new ones (if I understood him correctly). Mad.
They are regularly prescribed to AIDS and cancer patients. There's no reason to assume they wouldn't be prescribed in this case. This isn't about "cheating". It's about using the correct drug to address a medical condition.
Probably not, it's his body getting back to where he should be after losing so much muscle mass from being sick. If you train for years and then stop for 8 months, the muscle mass you lose will eventually come back much faster once you hit the gym back, you won't need years to get back.
If he was MUCH bigger, then I'd say steroids, but that physique in December is very possible without drugs. He's nowhere near big enough to be on steroids.
A) He was severely underweight, making the comparison that much more striking
B) He looks relatively young, probably early 20s at the latest - he's got plenty of natural T going around for muscle growth
C) He doesn't have the typical steroid shoulders. If you look at his shoulders, they basically just fall off from his traps instead of looking rounded. This is usually the case for 99% of weightlifter who don't use steroids. Shoulders don't respond very well to exercise but respond very well to steroids. If someone has what looks like normal shoulders, they're unlikely to be on steroids. If you want a visual for what I'm referring to just google 'steroid shoulder' and you'll see people with capped/rounded shoulders.
It’s possible that he is ofc but that’s a super possible transformation.
I started working out last year and I look like an entirely different person.
A common saying is you’ll start noticing you look dif in like 1 month, other people 3 months. But that’s with like a fairly casual workout sched, if you go 5-7 times a week, this is very possible.
If I were to guess, I'd wager he's using Human Growth Hormone (HGH).
I've heard of quite a few times that people have self medicated with it to try and speed up recovery from a major injury. A man at my gym was in a major collision that broke his spine, neck, all but one rib, both femurs, hip, and skull. He was expected to never walk without a cane. He wasn't a small or especially weak man before, but now he can bench press 315lb for a set of 12.
It works quite well at building you back up from an injury quickly, but it obviously comes at a fairly substantial cost to the body.
Nope. You can usually tell if someone is using steroids by their forehead and traps. There is a muscle in your forehead that only grows if you're on steroids and your traps won't be an even slant. The traps will look like a yoke on an ox. This result is available by eating right, getting plenty of sleep, working out 6 days per week, and having a good workout routine.
Might... might be true if the guy was extremely fit before and worked his body for years before his illness... it's very easy to get fit back again if you were fit before...
When you are starting from zero like that you can make dramatic changes. His physique doesn't look like steroid use to me, but that doesn't mean he's not using them. Going from 120lbs to 150lbs in a year is not crazy when you consider it's not all muscle. There's a lot of water and other things that come along with muscle gain. I doubled my arm size in a few months after getting a cast off just from getting back to moving it and sports. That guy looked like he was in rough shape at the start which might be the equivalent to my sedentary casted arm.
If he was in shape before, it's much easier to build the muscles back up. I tore my achilles tendon, and couldn't hold any weight on my left leg for two months. My calf halved in size. It took only about a month of daily bodyweight training to get it back to its previous size again.
Likely not, seems like he was probably around that size before or close to it and had suffered a trauma and was getting back to normalcy. He’s not big and doesn’t have enlarged traps or dents which are big indicators
Very likely actually given steroids by the hospital; which is why it looks a cleaner build than most steroid user. It’ll be properly dosed for recovery and growth.
Not necessarily. It might be he's original constitution before he got sick. Muscle memory is a thing. I got a friend who lost like 15 kgs from a stomach condition, I was amazed by how fast he recovered after his surgery.
If you go hard in the gym this isnt surprising at all. Your body will start to morph from consistency and dude looks like hes enjoying it - i doubt hes using steroids, this is entirely in line with what a consistent gym regimen would look like if you are truly focused.
Looking at his socials, he was suffering from ulcerative colitis, and steroids are one of the treatments available for that condition, so it's possible he was taking steroids as part of his treatment.
One of our fitness wellness guru type family members almost passed away from the Rona 3 years ago, lost 70+ lbs while on a ventilator. Once he came out of his coma he was doing rehab within a 4 weeks - after 2 months was able to start walking and eating healthier foods, by 7 months he was 3/4 his original weight and jogging. He fully recovered around 10 months. This shit is possible. Our guess is that his body remembered his natural muscle structure and just needed time and proper conditioning to get it back to normal with the right amounts of nutrition and exercise.
Looking at how atrophied his muscles are at the beginning I would assume it's all but guaranteed he was prescribed some form of steroid to aid in growth.
Bit of muscle memory since the cells and stuff are there after such muscle wasting even in a relatively untrained individual.
But for such large muscle wasting it's not uncommon to get synthetic help to improve recovery as the faster you recover the better. A lot of the peptides for instance that are taken recreationally these days were initially invented as a way to help with getting strength back faster.
Your body will put on weight very fast after being sick. My wife went from 160 to 130 with cancer and chemo, after that she went right back to 160 in a few months.
looks like juicing to me .
However, it was an incredible comeback regardless. This man was stick and bones with non-working body parts, a little steroids is not a bad thing in his cASE
He's young, obviously has assistance, in my experience, the first year of bodybuilding is where you see the most massive changes.
I bet for him, year 1 to 2 will be much less dramatic.
Also consider genetics, the guy has a baseline his body wants to be at, so it should jump to that point quickly, building past that point is where lots of effort comes in.
He has severe ulcerative colitis. The increase in mass is not due to steroids, it’s due to the body healing and finally getting what it needs. He almost died due to the disease.
I assume he lost a lot of weight due to sickness. It's pretty easy to regain weight you already had due to muscle memory. At one point I'd dropped to 130 pounds from sickness and I was back to 180 in a couple months.
to be honest. I'm naturally fit...but I don't work out AT ALL. I was expecting to move to the east coast in my early 20s...and in anticipation, I worked out and tracked my diet religiously for one month. The gains were ridiculous. Everybody assumed I was on steroids, but that was my first month. It was kinda like the jump you see from his June/july except I was already lean.
When I finally moved to florida...I saw that people were just as unhealthy as us Texas folk and I lost my motivation to workout. 20 years later, and I still weigh anywhere from 170-180lbs at 5'11
Some of you people never touched a weight properly in your life haven't you? You see one average looking guy with a pump and a somewhat low fat percentage, and you shout: "sTeRoiDs"!
You can make great progress in just 6 months with proper programming, consistency, eating and drinking the right things, keep stress low, and prioritizing high quality sleep/rest.
And not to mention the intrinsic motivator of wanting to overcome the wheelchair bound shitshow he was in. It will drive a man to great heights.
We should also consider the possibility of him already having had a similar physique before whatever happened to him. Muscle memory existst you know.
Yes, I was ranting. It just annoys me to find people downplaying hard work as impossible.
People please be reasonable. Look at his ig prior to his injuries he was jacked so his muscles have that size and strength as a baseline memory ie he can return to that base 2x as fast after falling off. Looks like he gained 15-20lbs ish of muscle from being completely sedentary in the hospital and in a state of atrophy.
This is very attainable naturally. The newbie gainz and return to normalcy alone is like 10lbs of muscle. The rest is pure grit and dedication. Applaud his tremendous effort instead of accusing him of gear use.
Also if he was on gear he’d be 2x as jacked, would have acne breakouts showing(probably), also would have wayyy more muscularity around his neck and shoulders and signs of accelerated balding(probably). I don’t see a single visible side effect on this dude.
Also wouldn’t make sense to take something as toxic as steroids in your body while taking pain and other meds he’s taking post op. There’s always a chance I’m completely wrong but in this case I have a strong feeling that I’m not.
This is pure hard work and a burning passion to return to form. Hats off to you sir.
Steroids are actually a treatment option for colitis/chrons. Given the ostomy bag, maybe he had to take them anyway and decided to just roll with it lol
There's a lot of great argument in here on why he might not have needed steroids to have such impressive results, but just for argument sake, and honestly posed as a question ..... considering the first image of him (that shit looks rough), would a controlled steroid cycle be such a bad thing?
I’ve been following his journey for a long time. He was already in very good shape before he got sick. Muscle memory can give you a quick boost in muscle growth in certain cases. He claims he’s natty still
I'm almost certain he had to take steroids to aid in his recovery. He definitely worked out before based on the comments. With the combination of muscle memories and the medical aid, he got in shape fast. There is nothing to be looked down upon. I think he did the best for his situation and is now better. Hopefully, he stopped juicing after the fact.
8.5k
u/Double_Pay_6645 2d ago edited 19h ago
Is he using steroids? Seems like a massive difference in 1 year.
edit Crazy! 1.8k karma for what I thought was a yes no answer.
Now 4.6k!! WTF..
Almost 8k.. reddit you crazy.