Today we're going to be covering one of the most contentious of all topics in the fitness industry...and that is steroids! More specifically, should we, as natural lifters, even be taking training advice from people who themselves are not natural? The problem here stems from the fact that there is a big difference between training naturally and training enhanced, even just mildly enhanced, which is the zone where many of the supposed "fitness" influencers likely fall. And you know exactly who I'm talking about here: the fake nattys who look just good enough to amass a huge following and make you question their natty status, but not so good that their protests can't still create plausible deniability. This does not hold true with someone like, say, Mike O'Hearn, for example, who could produce a trillion consecutive negative tests for anabolics and still no one would believe he was actually natural.

But it isn't just young guys who fall victim to this either. There are seasoned guys pulling similar junk as well, for me Ryan Humiston immediately comes to mind as he is probably one of the more popular ones at the moment. But here you have a guy who has been in the game for a long time, has built a very impressive physique, and carries far, far more muscle than I could ever even dream of. However, he comes onto YouTube, amasses a huge following which by default is going to consist primarily of beginner trainees, and then goes on to basically discourage traditional progressive overload, essentially by straw manning the concept of adding weight to the bar - and dissecting that advice specifically is a whole other topic for another day. But in Ryan's case you've got a guy who is obviously very strong and who obviously built his base of strength and muscle using many of the very concepts that he now speaks out against.  He's also very obviously pushing the gas pedal pretty heavily. It doesn't a rocket surgeon to figure out that a big, strong, enhanced guy like Ryan is going to be able to get far more out of many of the unique techniques he currently espouses than a young, weak, inexperienced trainee with no muscle on his frame to speak of.

This is kind of the biggie right here. The next two red flags will kind of umbrella out from this, but this is the big one. If you take nothing else away from this article then this should be the takeaway point to remember: anyone who is fucking jacked as hell and telling you you don't need to do compound exercises in general, or that the tried and true basic compound exercises "suck" for some particular reason, or that you should exclusively be doing their novelty variations that are essentially futile attempts at re-inventing the wheel primarily for the sake of standing out from the crowd and gaining notoriety - then this isn't the person you need to be listening to or taking heartfelt advice from. The basics are the basics for a reason, and that is reason is that they work. They build size across the whole body, they build strength across the whole body, and they do so in the most efficient manner possible for the natural trainee.

Here, ask me if I'd rather lead off my leg workout with 4 sets of 10 on the leg press or 4 sets of 5 on the front squat. Go ahead I'll wait.

And finally, red flag number 3! And this one kind of piggybacks off the last point in that it's easier to feel the muscle working, and deliberately generate a lot of tension within the muscle and get a bigger, better pump by performing machine work and cable work, as well as isolation work. The problem with this, again, is that these exercises simply do not create enough of a systemic disturbance to impact very much meaningful change in the natural trainee when they are treated as the cornerstone of the training program. There's nothing wrong with getting a pump. I wouldn't call it orgasmic like our friend Arnold once did, but it's still cool. As well, there's nothing wrong with trying to enhance the so called "mind muscle connection." There really isn't, especially when using that philosophy merely as an adjunct to enhance the primary work, which is the big bang for your buck, traditional, compound barbell exercises. But focusing on pump work, and fluff work and just trying to "feel the muscle" working hard and doing so at the expense of actually working hard is the fast track to making minimal fucking gains.

But until that time comes you need to be leery of anyone who is spouting off this sort of advice because without that base and without the enhancement you might as well just perform Dr. Joel Seedman's air resistance training instead - the results you see are going to be about the same in both cases.