Last night at my personal training studio, I was talking with one of my clients. I’m not sure how the discussion came up, we have conversations that fly from one topic to the next to the next and I don’t even know how we got down the rabbit hole, but somehow I was saying something to the effect of performance enhancement drug use was up in youth and I was disappointed by it.

This guy happened to have gained 25lbs of muscle in his first 12 weeks of training with me…drug free btw.

Anyway, I had mentioned that I know a guy that was offering me SARMS (Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators). Basically SARMS are the newest legal version of steroids and they claim its safer as well but that’s not something I’m interested in and try to get all of my people to stay away from as well.

I said to him, even if it is safe which I have significant doubts about, when you take it you won’t know how much of your gains came from you vs. the drugs. Its actually one of the benefits of training drug free is how it affects your confidence. I’ve alluded to this in a previous article about the mental health benefits but nothing proves your self efficacy like watching the numbers improve. Repping out with weights you previously couldn’t move proves to yourself, you are capable of hard things and that there is a direct correlation between hard focused work and improvement. If you were to do it with drugs you wouldn’t know for sure. How much were the drugs doing?

Second, when you gain muscle natural, it can be a slower process (but not as slow as people think) but it also sticks around longer. Some of my clients leave for the summer, or are snowbirds during the winter or are touring musicians, they train with me for a while and then they leave for significant periods of time. I can’t go with them to train and often they don’t even have time to train. But when they come back, I test where they are compared to their last session and none of the gains were lost.

Now that guy that was offering SARMS to me, back in Feb I saw him and he had told me that he had a bit of a health scare which I won’t go into here, but he said I have to quit it. When I saw him again back in September he had lost significant amounts of muscle. He hadn’t built it the holistic way. I on the other hand, maintain my level of muscle year after year.

If you are interested in getting stronger in a way you can maintain but need help, I offer a free trial at my personal training studio on Main Street in Boonton. Just text me at 973 476 5328 to get started.

Eric Moss is a personal trainer in Boonton and moonlights as a world-record-holding modern-day professional performing strongman, author, and motivational speaker. In the tradition of the strength performers more common during the turn of the century, he performs feats of strength such as bending steel and breaking chains as part of a live show and travels across the country doing presentations on goal achievement for conferences, corporations, associations, nonprofits, and government entities as well as for schools and universities. His personal training studio is located on Main Street in Boonton New Jersey and is close to Mountain Lakes, Denville, Montville, Butler, and Parsippany New Jersey.