People will go to great lengths to achieve their goals.
In the pursuit of becoming bigger, faster, and stronger, there are thousands of supplements and a handful of steroids fighting for attention, with the promise of better and faster results. From college freshman to professional athletes, and everyone in between, there are very few people that approach this journey without the help of some type of supplementation.
The pull of better and faster results has always appealed to me. For the majority of my adult life I've researched and experimented with hundreds of supplements and research chemicals. Some of them were well tested and known to be safe, while others were relatively new, and taking them presented more of a risk.
At one point, I actually tested new supplements for a popular company before they were released to the public! Which seemed like a great idea at the time, because I was in college and the supplements were given to me for free. But it turns out popping pills out of an unmarked container with no label or list of ingredients is not the best idea in the world... lets just say I didn't have that "job" for very long.
Now that I'm many years older and hopefully wiser, I spend more time weighing the pros and cons before turning myself into a chemistry lab. Which brings me to one of my latest experiments:
Ostarine (MK-2866)
Ostarine, also known as MK-2866 is one of the most interesting and intriguing compounds I've seen in recent years. Ostarine belongs to a novel, and relatively new class of drugs know as SARMs, which stands for selective androgen receptor modulators. They work by targeting the androgen receptor, but unlike testosterone and other anabolic steroids, they are selective in nature. Instead of targeting all of your androgen receptors, they mainly attach to the ones in your muscles, and bones. In theory this would give the benefits of more strength, lean muscle, fat loss, etc., but without the side effects that make steroid use so controversial and potentially dangerous.
Luckily, since Ostarine was developed to prevent and reverse muscle wasting, there are actually clinical trials involving real human beings and not mice or single celled organisms. Because these trials showed promising results, with relatively few side effects, I took the plunge, sourced some credible Ostarine (I think), and began popping pills and hitting the gym harder than ever, determined to become the biggest, and baddest version of myself possible.
Did it work? Actually, I think so!
Here is what I noticed over those 8 weeks:
- My confidence and sense of well being were increased. I'm not sure if this was physiological or psychological, but I definitely felt it, and more so as time went on.
- Strength and size went up noticeably from about the third week all the way through the 8th. I set a personal best in the bench press and deadlift during that time, and felt pretty damn good about it.
- Another thing I noticed was the will to push through fatigue more than usual which was actually my favorite benefit, it just made me feel unstoppable at times.
Overall, I felt pretty great while taking Ostarine and the confidence, energy, and sense of well being made it a little easier to roll out of bed at 7am every day to head to work. It wasn't all fun and games though, because a lot of my friends and family thought I was crazy for taking a research chemical not FDA approved, etc. Lesson learned not to tell the whole world the next time I start ingesting a magical supplement that is foreign to 99% of the human population.
The other downside is that despite all my research, I can't say with 100% certainty that what I was taking the entire time was actually the chemical compound pictured above. Supplement companies are notorious for putting less of the active ingredients in their products than what's on the label, or something entirely different, so there is always some risk, even with a well known company with a great reputation.
So would I do it again? Probably.
Placebo effect or not, it was eight great weeks, and my mission to become bigger, faster, stronger felt like a complete success.
*Images are from wikipedia and pixabay*