The 411 on Building a Cycle

The more people you talk to about this that have experience, the more dumb shit you will hear. But here’s the basics on putting a cycle together:
1. Always wait to start a cycle until you have all the gear you wil need for that cycle, to include: the steroids themselves, anti-estrogens, post cycle therapy, and needles.
2. Always have an anti-estrogen or an aromatase inhibitor on hand. These help keep the side effects to a minimum should they occur. Without them you may have water retention, mood swings, acne, night sweats, bitch tits and all the other awesome stuff that gets brought up whenever someone talks about how bad steroids are for you.
3. Always end a cycle with Post Cycle Therapy (PCT). This will bring your natural hormone levels back up to where they should be. This helps increase the net muscle you will get from each cycle. You loose a little bit every time you end a cycle b/c your body doesn’t have enough test in it’s body to maintain more than normal amounts of muscle.

Each liquid AAS is mixed with some kind of ester. The only exceptions are Testosterone Suspension and Winstrol which are water based and are 100% in their form. They are also extremely expensive and require daily injections at a minimum. The ester is what keeps the substance active in your body. Some esters are as short as a day like Acetate and others are as long as a couple weeks like Decanoate. Most everything you will use will need to be injected weekly and if it’s a pill, taken daily. The longer or heavier an ester, the less of the actual AAS chemical is in that substance. Take for instance different types of test:
1. Test Suspension needs to by shot no less than every day and contains 100% test.
2. Test Prop needs to be shot no less than every other day and contains 83% test.
3. Test Enan needs to be shot every 3 – 7 days and contains 72% test.
4. Test Cyp needs to be shot every 7 days and contains 70% test.

PCT is also a major part of the cycle because if you don’t time the start, dosages, compounds and end correctly, it wont do it’s job. This all has to do with the half lives of each AAS and how long and heavy or mild the cycle is.

As far as cycles go, first you start with a mild cycle. Most commonly some sort of "maintenance" cycle. It usually consists of Testosterone Enanthate only.

On a second cycle you may want to increase the amount of test and run it by itself again or maybe add something else to it and run the same dose as the first cycle or increase the test dosage and add something to it. It all depends on how you react to the substances you have ran before. Some people respond better to low doses, some to high doses, some to short cycles and some to long cycle. The only way to find out is to run one and see how it goes. I personally respond better to long heavy (high dose) cycles. Unfortunately it means a lot more money. Usually the older you get, the more you respond to low dose cycles.

Some of the most common substances used for bulking (anabolic) are, Testosterone, Deca-Durabolin, Equipoise, Anadrol, Dbol and Trenbolone. The most common for cutting (androgenic) are Masteron, Primobolan, Trenbolone and Winni (both pill and injectable).

The most important thing to remember when doing all this, and the hardest to grasp, is that even though you have all this help from hormones and pharmaceutical compounds, it still takes time. Nothing, not even the results from using steroids, happens overnight. Consider that most of the pro bodybuilders had to run cycles for up-words of 10 years at a way more intense rate and heavier doses than you will ever run. Keep in the back of your head the fact that you may gain 10 lbs on a 10 week cycle, but your probably only going to net 7-8 of that once all is said and done. And because of that, it’s a long process to build up and maintain a lot of muscle. Maybe you want to only gain 25 lbs overall. That’s perfectly fine. But it’s probably going to take 2-3 cycles to do so.