Leaving that part out kind of killed the joke, such as it was. We move on.

Of all the personal details you have revealed over the years, this seems one of the more innocuous ones.

I haven't spent substantial time in Thailand since 2014. My take then was:

- Bangkok is good for a weekend but terrible to live
- Phuket is a hard pass for any length of time
- Look for the more off the beaten path islands for beach stays if you must have a beach, just don't go to Phuket.
- Pattaya if you want to monger and that's literally your only need.
- Chiang Mai was the absolute ****. I think it's grown tremendously since I was there though so it might not have the same quaint appeal that I observed. When I was there it was the perfect balance of amazing food, decent night life, mild/dry (for most of the year anyway) weather, and low cost of living.

I guess I should have been more specific, was referring specifically to schools who predominantly teach American expats. The teachers at those schools seem to do pretty well. Even better than teachers here (that what I meant by "Or even USA#1") For example if you could get a job at ISB in Bangkok, I think it would be hard to beat that (specifically that school).

Also, I think it would be rewarding from a teaching standpoint as you would get a high proportion of smart, motivated kids.

Guys my life is pretty uninteresting and I don't want to discuss it. I'm a pretty ordinary man who doesn't have any exceptional talent or intelligence besides being self-aware. I'm just a high school economics teacher and honestly living in China doesn't change much about it besides adding some difficulty and accompanying hazard pay.

I think bodybuilding is a lot more interesting than my mundane life and I'd like to keep my thread focused on that this time around.

Anyway, now to the cool stuff:

Androgens have a really profound impact on the gut microbiome and gut-serotonin axis. And then you have to add in the fact that you're dealing with people who have generally very high food intake with a lot of protein. Then on top of that you have a huge amount of stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system through training itself and in addition to creating large amounts of intra-abdominal pressure, GI issues become nearly inevitable, especially for bodybuilders over age 30. There's a whole online coaching industry and almost universally the most successful coaches are the ones that are able to get people increasing their food intake while minimizing GI issues; they basically optimize a combination of food choices, cyclical dieting, and OTC supplementation to make sure that people are actually able to eat the amount of food required to build muscle without destroying their digestion and failing to absorb nutrients. Ofc to naive it might seem like "whoever pushes the most anabolics is the best coach", but AAS ofc have a strong diminishing returns and can eventually become negative. Most coaches do pretty much the same damn **** WRT PEDs, with a few outliers who do push things really hard but don't end up getting significantly better results.

Two of the most successful coaches in the industry, Chris Tuttle and John Jewett, actually have a background as medical practioners (both are RDs) treating non-bodybuilders with gastric issues and selectively applying these methods to their bodybuilding clients. There's a fantastic interview with Chris where he talks about carbohydrate cycling and digestive optimization



The probable winner of this year's NPC USAs, Stuart Sutherland, was eating 950g carbs, 350-400g protein, and 60-80g fat per day offseason getting up to 280 at 5'8. His coach, Bleu Taylor, is actually infamous for using very low doses of steroids but employing long acting insulin (lantus) in fairly aggressive dosages and growth hormone since these are still muscle building PEDs, but unlike anabolics they tend to facilitate eating large amounts of calories (and actually absorbing and storing them in a favorable way, in the case of insulin) and do so with no or at least less disruption of the gut.

He's quite young at age 25 and still squats and deadlifts, has some crazy numbers like 585lbsx12.

Perhaps surprisingly, the formula for getting shredded is "simple". It's easy to coach, just difficult to execute. For offseason, it's both hard to coach and only slightly less hard to execute. The most successful coaches are the ones who do the best job with their guys in offseason, not the ones who have magic formulas for getting shredded. Getting shredded is a matter of eating less of the exact same foods you were eating in offseason, cardio, yohibimine, ephedrine, caffeine, clenbuterol, and optionally thyroid meds (for some people thyroid meds are counterproductive).

Ok, well to circle back to the topic. Although I have zero interested in using any PEDs, I'm curious about how people get them. Yeah, this is probably a pretty newb question, but I never really got a handle on it.

I suspect in China it's probably easier in some ways. But what about in the US? You listed a shitton of drugs. How does a BBer go about getting all of that **** in the US. It seems like mostly prescription stuff, so are they getting someone to prescribe it (or at least some of it). And if they don't get it above board, how worried do they have to be about the quality of the stuff. And how much does it all cost?

Most of that stuff is available OTC. Clen/T3/T4 (do people use this?) are via a sleazy doc or someone know smuggles drugs which no one really gives a **** about.

There is still a lot of prescription stuff in that post

-Variety of anabolic steroids
-insulin
-growth hormone
-thyroid hormone (I guess you could get some formulations OTC, but the good stuff is prescription).

underground labs. Steroids prohibitions are one of those laws that exist but are seldom/never enforced (for users, not domestic sales). I believe in Oregon the laws don't exist at all anymore. Illegal to distribute domesticlaly, obv. Can order from abroad.

Here, raw materials are explicitly legal for anabolics and home brew for personal use is fine. Distribution seems to be "fine until it's not fine". If oyu're making significant money and not paying taxes, then it's not fine.

So people are buying insulin and growth hormone cooked up in an underground lab. Man, I'd be really reluctant to inject that **** into my body.

Also what kind of cost per month are we talking?

what? no you can buy insulin otc just about anywhere. Ask for humalin R or Humalin N at walmart. And other countries sell all types of insulin so you just buy it overseas.

GH has a huge industry of people in China making generics growth hormone that usually works about the same as those made by more well equipped pharmaceutical companies. It's too complex to synthesize for all but a handful of very good UGLs. Usually Chinese GH only differs from big brands by the absence of any diuretics; so chinese gh causes more water retention. Usually something like humatrope by Eli Lilly will have a small dose of a diuretic included to offset the water retention. There's also a handful of Russian companies doing it. GH bodybuilders are usually able to get prescriptions for even at fairly high doses, and if they're not the same pharmaceutical brands are available otc elsewhere and can be imported. Turkey is especially robust for growth hormone.

I just use MK677 and ghrp6 instead because it's cheaper and works about as well if you're only going for moderate elevations in IGF1. If I wanted to be a hy00ge superheavyweight then I would have to use "real" gh at some point.

******s are paying $300/mo or so for their offseason cycles, but most of that expense is growth hormone and you could probably get that down to $50-100/mo and still have enough peds to be a very good bodybuilder or strength athlete. Gh/insulin aren't really needed for strength sports to the same degree. I'm at about $30 that since I brew up my AAS and my mk677, ghrp6, and CJC with DAC is a combined $14/mo. My doses are low enough to not need an AI in the offseason. People are probably spending way more on food and way less on PEDs per month than you might think... you really don't need anything expensive or complicated during the offseason. Contest prep might be a differrent ballgame, but they'd only need the expensive tren/mast/test/winstrol/halotestin/anavar kind of stuff for 1-3 months of a given contest prep toward the end. The stimulants and fat burners are mostly OTC and even the ones that aren't are very cheap.

Brewing is very easy and safe if you aren't a complete idiot and are willing to invest in time and money in a sterile lab environment. I literally used my previous school's chemistry lab for a few hours on a weekend because it was very well maintained and routinely sanitized and made a few years worth of stuff. My school's lab now is terrible and I would not want to use it. I haven't had any issues or even any exceptionally painful shots in my 6 years of doing it. I remember even just my 18 months of using UGL peds in America I had more issues.

But I heard insulin costs $1500 a month in USA#1?

How do people afford this?!?

I did some very rough math and for a 350 pound type 2 diabetic (which might not be that far off the weight average for the American WalMart crowd) even spending WalMart prices is spending $300/month.

Thanks for the detailed response. I had no idea that some insulin formulations were available OTC without a prescription in the US. Every diabetic I've known has had a prescription, so I just assumed it was necessary.

One other thing I'm curious about. Has your stance on GH changed since you left? I seem to remember you being anti-GH in the past (i.e., I thought that you said you wouldn't use it), but it's possible I'm just remembering it wrong.

Everyone in America is up sold to designer insulins. There are even adults with insulin pumps.

Where I live, all insulin is on a copay assuming you are covered by "universal healthcare", which obviously doesn't cover everyone. And "all insulin" literally only means regular normie insulin, strips, and needles. Also, you don't really get to doctor shop. You have a primary care physician that makes the decisions.

I was making meta-commentary about the weird situation with insulin in America where normal type 1 diabetics pay $1500 a month for insulin, and think living in Europe is going to be a death sentence, or that diabetes killed you until the 90s. It'd probably also be amusing to learn that the Mississippi "abortion ban" lasts 3 weeks longer than the median in Europe. Healthcare is wild when you learn about it!

I'd find it hard to believe that the prescription stuff doesn't offer some benefit to at least some patients. Is the benefit worth the cost? Maybe, maybe not. Same with pumps. Especially, if you have one that can adjust based on blood glucose measurements, I could see people preferring that to having to deal with injections. And of course there are others that would prefer the simplicity of injections over dealing with a pump.

If anything, I find that US diabetics think that living in Europe would be an upgrade to a free health care utopia. Of course, they probably (wrongly) assume that they will get the same insulin and other care that they would get here.

On the first part, they 100% offer a benefit. If you are an actual ******, or a child, etc. Pumps are pretty much near standard for children, but the issue is that someone who is in their 20s who doesn't want to prick their fingers and wants society to pay a 10x cost increase so they can have a slightly easier time. I'm not even gonna touch on type 2 beetus which is just a disease of gluttony.

And I agree with the whole USA#1 think Europe is a giant healthcare utopia. It is asinine quite frankly. I don't think many people actually understand how healthcare works and instead dream up insane **** to justify someone else giving them free ****. We all do this to some degree tho. However, imagine if you suggested that you needed to provide a photo ID to get treatment at the ER (or anywhere really) for non-life threatening anything, which is pretty standard across Europe.

An insulin resistant obese type 2 diabetic might need a total of 200-300ius of insulin per day. Bodybuilding doses are tiny compared to this.

A VERY aggressive protocol would be something like 30-100ius/day of long acting lantus and 6-10iu of humalog with pre and post workout meals. Just 6-12iu of humalog (fast acting) pre/post or 10 ius of humalin R with two meals per day are standard protocols, as is 0.1iu/kg of lantus as a prophylactic to prevent beta cell burnout and keep blood glucose controlled while getting some igf action. So thats another part of why diabetics might end up spending a ton more on insulin. Humalin R tends to be one of the "worst" insulins both for bbing and diabetics because it's not fast enough to kick in right away in a hyperglycemic emergency for diabetics, needs to be covered by 2 meals, has less stimulation of the IGF1 receptor than humalog or lantus, and generally since it doesn't kick in fast doesn't work well as a pre workout for promoting hyperameia. Most bodybuilders who know insulin well enough are also going to be taking berberine/metphormin to main sensitivty, and of course the act of training itself is very conducive to insulin sensitivity, so naturally their doses are much lower. Part of the reason many bbers reset and cut down at least once a year, even if they don't compete, is because dieting down and getting to super low bf with cardio+fat burning+lower carbs creates a massive amount of insulin sensitivity.

The most effective but also the most #yolo protocol seems to be stacking lantus with humalog, where the humalog can be either with every meals or just pre/post workout. Obviously this is also the most risky in terms of possible long term health consequences depending on dosing. Humalog and lantus have the most binding affinity to the IGF1 receptor.

The healthiest and safest is probably just the 0.1iu/kg bw of lantus approach and that's what I plan to do. Impossible to go hypo unless you inject your lantus while you are starving and don't eat for a few hours.

There are more types of long acting insulin besides lantus, but lantus seems to have the most binding affinity for the IGF1 receptor and variants like levemir don't do as great of a job, although hypothetically they'd be pretty close for blood glucose reduction.

Instead of being autistic about healthcare systems, I found this study: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/msystems.00129-22

Which pretty much lines up with your prior comments on GI health, except for jogging long distances. Seems to make sense to me since pooping myself distracts me from just about everything.

Sounds like the worst of times. Gl

You look strong in the 180 video. Great bar path - it almost looks like you're in a smith machine.

Usually people who squat wide raw are the ones with the worst hip issues. Your stance is not very wide, so I can't explain the hip issue without knowing more.

Overall your form is very good, but not perfect imo. With regard to the sore knees, the knees do come forward a bit, which is pretty standard for narrow stance, but I'd say maybe there's a bit of slack in your hamstrings, which might be causing you to bounce a little off the patella tendons a bit. If your hammies are tighter, they should take the load of the bounce in the hole rather than the patellas. That should also lead you to slightly improving getting your "belly through" when coming out of the hole - this puts your torso in a more advantageous position as the weight comes up. Overall, very impressive squats though.

Doing hamstring curls first is an excellent way to prepare for squats & DLs. You probably need to do just a bit more to get some more pump in them right before squats.

lol at getting old. Just keep moving and try to do some soft tissue work (lack of that could be contributing to both knee and hip issues?). You're a long ways from old.

I like bpc.

whoa cha, kind of a legend. Hope you're still lifting in your legitimately old age.

Yeah it was mostly the right hip bugging me that offseason. I was doing "normal" squats and plan on doing mostly pauses and we'll see if that changes anything. It was mostly the right hip and I'm pretty sure it's because my right quad is considerably weaker and my right ankle is less mobile than my left side. Years of split jerking left me with a much stronger left side. I was doing some KneesOverToesGuy prehab/rehab stuff that helped, but I need to commit to it harder. Now is kind of the perfect time cruising on HRT and not pushing the training or food as hard for the next ~7 weeks; can allocate more time toward unilateral right side strengthening and mobility.

Thremp, continue with the autism; I think the US healthcare system is very interesting. It sucks sometimes and it kicks ass other times and I doubt there'd be an improvement through just giving everyone free ****. Probably the best possible solution to the US healthcare problem is getting a larger portion of the population training with weights, doing somewhat taxing cardiovascular exercise, taking more steps throughout the day, and being aware of smart food choices. But solutions that require personal accountability are a lot less sexy than sweeping coercive government reforms.

Cycled 20km both of the last 2 days. Gotta get that VMO pump!

I'm kinda shocked 2p2 doesn't have a function to directly insert images into posts yet and you have to upload to some other website first. They added like buttons but not images???

Guy,

Yeah, basically we know what we need to do to avoid dying young. Don't be sedentary, don't be super fat, don't smoke. But actually getting people there is difficult. Eventually we end up with [redacted] policies like taxing all added sugars instead of just creating a healthcare system that doesn't treat people for the long term equivalent of sucking on a .38

As an economist, you might want to note that the gross expenditures between the US and EU are likely to continue growing since the GDP per capita of Europe (top tier countries) valued in USD is now basically flat over the last 15ish years. So there are obviously games to be played in how you present the data beyond just the basic fact that America spends more.

Thanks! Yes, I still lift. Despite aging, I pulled a PR 722 in a meet late last year. I have not logged a lot lately, but I still do sometimes and will more once I get into more of a DL routine. I have been dealing with a minor low back issue for a few weeks, but hope to get back into DLing shortly. I'm planning to DL only at my next meet in Nov. I hope to beat 722 someday, if not in Nov.

I haven't looked into KneesOverToesGuy yet, but some teammates have spoken highly of him and have been telling me a lot about the stuff he recommends. So far what they have told me makes sense.

GL on your rehab. Its always been a learning process for me. As you age and gain more knowledge, more **** breaks down, then you figure out how to fix it and more **** breaks down. I find that when I am inactive for whatever reason for any period of time over about a week, everything gets worse. Its challenging sometimes to find the right movements that do good without doing harm, but its very important to keep moving in some way that does not make injuries worse imo.

You can copy paste images directly into posts now. Or use the little mountain/image button in the toolbar.