2 On 2 Off Experiment

Pharma
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[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
WyldFlower wrote:
Hi Bill,

I based my statement on various articles and studies that i’ve read on running and knee problems. There was a 2008 Stanford University study that came to the conclusion that running slowly over long-distance on concrete actually PREVENTED knee injuries.

The study looked at regular joggers over a 20 year period. It found that:

“The dire injury predictions other scientists made for runners have fallen flat. Fries and colleagues published a study in the August issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine that showed running was not linked with higher rates of osteoarthritis in older runners. Runners also did not require more total knee replacements, Fries said.”

I also read, last year, a peer-reviewed scientific study conducted by the Radiology Department of the Danube Hospital which came to similar conclusion:

“Non-physiological maximal loads secondary to the marathon race do not cause any permanent damage in the internal structures of the knee joint in individuals without significant pre-existing damage. A disposition for premature arthrosis was not registered in the population investigated.”

I don’t want to spend much time going through that as I fully expect it is unnecessary and better left to you to find the reasons yourself why neither shows what you think they do. It is rather like getting references for a claim that the Earth is flat… one really doesn’t want to slog through it.

Taking just a glance at the first, here are the reasons I immediately see why your conclusion does not follow:

  1. OsteoARTHRITIS is not what was being talked about, but is a disease condition.

  2. Rate of total knee replacement not being higher, to statistical significance anyway (which might allow a wide range: I didn’t check) does not show that damage to the knees does not occur.

  3. The group of runners had a selection bias: these were individuals that, still being distance runners at 50 years of age, may well be more resistant to knee damage from running.

I would ask that you try to find reasons like this yourself. After having thoroughly done so and still not finding any, then I’ll spend time going into detail on your second reference for this, IMO, flat-Earth theory that chronic long distance running on pavement is harmless for the knees for people in general, or in general for let’s say individuals over 200 lb (this being a drug-enhanced bb’ing forum.)

Because there are countless individuals who ran on pavement, their knees started hurting, they quit, their knees slowly got better, they went back to it, their knees started hurting, etc.

I only went through two bouts of that. Knees were a real problem at age 30; after totally quitting running on pavement, were fine for the next 15 years. Stupidly started doing some HIIT on pavement at age 45, knees started hurting. Stopped doing that, knees got better. Sprint now on grass, barefoot, and there are no knee problems.

That is only a single example, which itself would prove nothing except what is true in my own case, but the thing is, there are MILLIONS of example like this in this country alone.

Yes, some people can get away with it. Nowhere did I deny that.[/quote]

Cool, I know my study of this is cursory. I’ve been doing “roadwork” as part of my MMA training for a while now, which mixes concrete and track running, and i needed to be sure there was no permanent damage being done - particularly because i’ve been given such mixed information over the years. At 195lb i’ve never had any problems, however.

But, of course i don’t have the scientific background that you have, so i’m sure i’m not being discerning enough in my reading of these “studies” that i’ve linked to here. Maybe i need to delve into this more.

Thanks for your time.

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But i will not give ground on the fact that hominids evolved to track animals over VAST distances to exhaustion. No other mammal comes clsoe to our ability in this :wink:

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Also also, sheep are not/were not indiginous to Africa at the time! They “evolved” as domestic animals in West Asia before being introduced to Africa waaaaay later in human evolution.

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I’m glad you’ve had no problems on pavement and hope that will continue to be the case. It may well be.

It is an important thing in reading and understanding studies to differentiate between exactly what was shown and what was not. There can easily be a tendency to conclude much more than was actually shown. (The authors usually don’t do this themselves in the article: ordinarily their conclusions are very carefully couched, and usually one should not go further than they do with what ought to be concluded.)

For example, in that first study, we can conclude there is evidence that, among individuals who are still distance runners at age 50 and continue with it, they don’t have higher rates of osteoarthritis than non-runners. But not extrapolations.

Also, for example, without having read the study in detail (it may be covered: it really should be) the reader should consider questions such as, Well, of those individuals who do have osteoarthritis before age 50, may they be more likely than those without osteoarthritis to QUIT running and therefore we should be wondering why the running group didn’t have a LOWER rate of osteoarthritis? That would be a reason, if not properly addressed in the study, to consider the finding only to be evidence towards, rather than being much conclusive even on the osteoarthritis point.

On your statement on tracking, at least if limiting to “many individuals in many populations”: yes that is true :slight_smile:

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God dammit I knew everything i “thought” about science would start to fall apart if i started talking to you!

:slight_smile:

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Sorry for hi-jacking your thread OTS1

ahem

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[quote]WyldFlower wrote:
God dammit I knew everything i “thought” about science would start to fall apart if i started talking to you!

:)[/quote]

I found when teaching pharmaceutical analytical chemistry lab (as a TA) to the pharmacy students that in general their biggest difficulty was really making the distinction between what was shown by some evidence, and what in fact isn’t shown at all though it is in the same neighborhood.

Everyone gets it after a bit, but apparently it’s not routinely taught and so it is easy for people to see for example an abstract of a study, and while the authors themselves make quite limited and usually justifiable stated conclusions, people draw from it much more than what is actually said or actually shown.

An example of this occurred when some folk from some other forum came over here for the purposes of defending a hero of theirs with regard to his claims on chocolate milk being superior thanks to the added HFCS to any post-workout meal or other post-workout drink including unsweetened milk; of attacking the I Bodybuilder program; and of implying in a cowardly manner that Christian Thibaudeau is a drug user by citing something they call “Butt’s Ceiling” that, according to them, enables one to prove that a specific person is a drug user due to having too much LBM for their height.

They cited a study where something like 70 (actually fewer I think) non-drug-using athletes were evaluated for their lean-mass BMI, and none were above or perhaps not substantially a value of 25 by this measure, while they measured steroid-using athletes as commonly being above this value. The study authors concluded that use of lean-mass BMI “may be” a “useful screening tool.”

But these folk interpreted it as proving that anyone with a lean-mass BMI of over 25 MUST be a drug user, and should be accused by them of such.

There was nothing wrong with the study. It shows just what it shows. But one should not conclude from it more than what it shows. For example, it does not show that in a population of over 100 million adult men, none will be above a lean-mass BMI value of 25 without drugs while in lean condition. Or that a specific gifted individual who has exceeded what anyone in that small group achieved must have used drugs to do it, rather than it being attributable to training harder, more intelligently, and more knowledgeably for many years, as well as likely being more gifted.

I would bet that you will have no trouble, now having seen an example of this sort of thing, seeing for yourself where while something seems to fall into a general category of interest, actually it may prove or support only a quite limited point that may be of no use to some other question.

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Yeah, to be honest i only read the abstract of those studies, hehe.

I have a social sciences background, not a science science background. So while i know that i have a fierce intellect when it comes to analytical thinking, i’m a complete dunce when it comes to scientific methodology.

Lots to learn!

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OP, excellent thread! I’m delighted to hear of your sucess.

I was planning an 8 week Test prop/Tren Ace/Mast Prop cycle @ 70/40/50mg ED. However i travel a lot at the moment, prob on a plane once a month. So your 2 on 2 off cycle is something i’d like to try. I think it would really suit me. I also love the idea of the easier recovery and the chance to try out different combinations of anabolics.

I have actually ordered some Dbol and oral Winny which i have not yet used, i will incoporate one or maybe both of these into one of the mini cycles.

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Hijack away. I’m not zealous over my threads on teh interwebz. I very much enjoy such intellectual discussion, both in person and on the web. In fact, the intellectual nature of the posters here is why I am a regular here, and not on other boards.

MR. ROBERTS however, has offended me with his “soft science” remark. As a graduate student myself, I prefer the term “social science”;.

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:slight_smile:

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[quote]OTS1 wrote:

MR. ROBERTS however, has offended me with his “soft science” remark. As a graduate student myself, I prefer the term “social science”;.[/quote]

Me too! :stuck_out_tongue:

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[quote]bushidobadboy wrote:
I’m actually questioning the merit of running high doses during the 2 weekers. I mean how much can the body actually grow during that time (taking into account the lag time to activate the AR)?[/quote]

While this makes a lot of sense, I think he isn’t yet in the vicinity of the dosages where diminishing returns would be a factor. I’m fairly sure that I’ve read somewhere that more steroids = more gains was a bell curve that topped at around 2,000-2,500 mg or total gear per week and then the law of diminishing returns would become a factor. Perhaps, Mr. Roberts might know something about this. I can’t remember where I saw this info but it was several years ago.

From personal experience (quite a few 2 on/4 off cycles), I’ve discovered that I can go with much heavier dosages on a 2-week-long cycle and heavier dosing does provide more muscle gain (as well as more water gain, hehe). As an example, I once gained 24 pounds on a 2-week cycle after I added Anadrol to the stack of 6 other steroids. Naturally, only about half of it was muscle, but on the plus side, you lose the extra water even quicker than you gain it. (Obviously, I’ve never tried that again.)

My point is that you could turn your 2 on/2 off series of cycles into something heavy-duty if you wanted - something very much on par with any heavy 8-12 week cycle. There exists a certain bias that the 2 on/2-4 off is very mild “useless” cycle among some macho 12-week advocates, but do remember, that on a 2-week cycle, your dose can be sky-high - only limited by the size of your wallet and gear availability - without serious negative implications (although that’s very individual). I think a series of heavy 2 on/2 off cycles can produces extremely impressive results in terms of mass, if that’s what you’re after.

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I can’t be certain but i am pretty sure that even 12lbs of dry tissue in 2 weeks is a physiological impossibility…

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What does “dry tissue” mean?

What the muscle would weigh if removed from the body and dessicated?

If you mean, change in LBM for same amount of bodyfat and with no bloat, of course it is possible. Even if starting the count a few days in, so as to not include initial rapid gain from increased glycogen and glycogen-associated water (which isn’t bloat.)

Not for someone who is already near their homeostasis point for a given hormonal environment and training regime, but for someone that is far away from it, definitely.

That usually means using steroids when way below, for whatever reason, what one has previously achieved.

However, even when at a plateau as a natural, on doing really solid steroid cycle with everything right, even past the initial weight from added glycogen and glycogen-associated water, it’s not unusual to add 5 lb muscle per week for at least a couple of weeks without adding fat or any more water.

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No - by dry tissue i meant primarily sarcomere hypertrophy.

I mean muscle tissue that isn’t pure swelling of intracellular water that is soon dropped after discontinuing the drug.

I mean not fat, not sub-c water, not intracellular fluid… just muscle tissue that is kept long after the drug is removed from the equation.

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Well, as for sarcomeric hypertrophy, and how much that is, who knows.

We have no way, at least that is every practiced, of measuring sarcomeric vs sarcoplasmic in lifters.

And asking for “long after” the drug is gone seems to add confusion (other factors) to the equation, rather than simplifying.

I find it simpler to compare either starting point to shortly after the drug has cleared (but long enough for glycogen beyond what is normal to be burned), or early in the cycle after glycogen has already increased to some point late in the cycle, where bodyfat isn’t changing or if there is some small change, making an estimated correction. And where there isn’t visible bloat in either instance.

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Personally, I find it next to impossible to compare an 8-week cycle and a 2-week cycle. It’s just such a different experience for me.

A 2-week cycle has always produced very rapid (and rather solid) gains for me because of the massive amounts of steroids I use. Nothing beats personal experience in this regard, as we can see from this thread. For example, for orals alone, I would usually use 50 mg of D-bol, 50 mg of Stanozolol, 50 mg of oxandrolone and 20-40 mg of Proviron every day. Sometimes, I would even add 400 mg of Andriol for good measure (one 40 mg pill every hour for 10 hours), after all, it’s cheap and it’s a unique mode of action, so I’ve always felt it might provide something other steroids don’t. And that’s not counting the injectables. For anything other than a 2-week cycle, I would call that an almost insane - and certainly unsafe - dosage. But that’s the beauty of a 2-week long cycle.

On an 8-week long cycle, the dosage is much lower and frankly, around week 5, I just start feeling the strain of it all. I can’t describe it, but my body seems to feel that it’s in total overdrive and it gives me various small signs that I’m doing things to it that aren’t particularly healthy. By the end of week 7 I can’t wait for week 8 to be over. It’s an odd feeling that I call “the sick Superman effect”.

On the one hand, after 7 weeks on steroids, your whole body feels incredibly powerful. Every second of the day, you’re just so full of strength, you feel like you can grab a car by the bumper and trow the damn thing 50 feet forward like a cardboard box. (I’m sure you guys know what I’m talking about.) But on the other hand, alarm bells are going off all the time - your body INSISTS you’re doing things to it that it’s not really meant to do. Don’t know how to explain it, I just feel STRAIN. And then there’s the recovery period to look for…

That’s why I prefer a series of 2-on/2-4 off cycles. To me personally - and you may well be different - the risk to benefit ratio is beyond compare.

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I can’t say steroids make me feel like any of that!

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Really? Interesting. I guess variability is really a major factor. My first real experience with this was when I found out my ex-girlfriend could not sleep at night if she had one large coffee at 3 pm. For someone like me, who drinks around 8 cups a day it sounds unbelievable. But I guess it really shows you how different we all are. As another example, I can ingest huge amounts of caffeine or ephedrine, drink Spike by the bucket, but I can’t bear any bromocriptine at all - gives me the headache of the century and a running nose, even in the smallest doses. Go figure.