We Asked A TRT & PED Expert all The Questions We Need Answers To...

"If you take 300-350 milligram of testosterone a week and try to claim it's TRT, and in your own head, you truly believe that's what you need, then you're abusing this drug. Your relationship with this drug is gone. You're no longer respecting what it can do and you're normalising a dose that isn't required."

Last week was a pinch me moment - Someone I've followed for around 12 years appeared on our podcast.

Dave Crosland is one of the UK's leading experts on TRT and performance enhancing drugs.

We've wanted to cover this subject on the pod, ever since we started over 2 years ago. There was a list of experts we had penciled down - Dave was top.

Lo and behold, I dropped him a message on instagram and within 10 days, there he was, sat opposite me, in my front room, about to blow the minds of two personal trainer's from Sheffield with his knowledge.

TRT (testosterone replacement therapy) is more popular than ever and around 20% of men over 50 in the UK, approximately 2 million, may be suffering from testosterone deficiency syndrome.

But there's an underbelly to the world of TRT.

The cost of TRT is high, and it's forcing men to take risks in a bid to get the product for a fraction of the cost.

As of today, the price for 10g's of medically prescribed TRT is approximately £700. However, 10g's off 'dodgy Dean' at the gym is approximately £40. A huge disparity in price.

Prescribed TRT is third party tested and comes with an assurance that what you're taking is exactly what it says on the tin.

The alternative is essentially low doses of anabolic steroids made in UGL's (underground labs).

The risk comes from not knowing what the exact dosages are, the conditions in which it was made and what other unwanted properties it may contain.

With the 'cost of living' crisis still very much felt across the UK, it's a growing concern which comes with a lot of adverse side effects to health.

Brad and I are very much wet behind the ears when it comes to anything PED's, so we asked Dave all the simple, basic questions. From what steroids are, where they came from and why TRT is so popular.

We wanted to quiz Dave on what the current landscape of TRT and where he thinks it's heading in the future

So here's some of the direct answers from our Q&A session with Dave Crosland...

Q: What are steroids and where did they come from?

So steroids are anabolic androgenic compounds. They're synthetic compounds. They're based on three base drugs, testosterone, nandrolone, and dihydrotestosterone.

They were developed in the most part for medical purposes to for treatments within muscle growth disorders or muscle wasted disorders, testosterone replacement therapy. The first steroid was actually extracted from 700 L of urine in 1931.

Now we as a species have always had a fascination with being more manly. Being alpha and all that is encoded into our genes really. Females have an unconscious drive towards a male that they feel will protect them and secure them and give them good offspring and all the rest of it.

Maybe in modern times, it's probably dissipated a little bit, but that's the baseline of it all. You you look at native Indians and they look to invite the spirits of animals to increase their manhood, their strength, their power. Historically we see tribes that have consumed human body parts or animal body parts.

In the 1800s even in Europe, men were consuming dog testes and bull testes in order to make themselves more virile and more manly. So we've known for a long time where the source of our manliness was. We just didn't understand that it was a hormone factor etc.

1931 was when the first steroid was extracted and then by the mid 1930s we have testosterone.

Shortly after that we see the nandrolone and dihydrotestosterone (DHT), which is just a downstream derivative of testosterone.

Most anabolics have been developed through medications. Deca was created to combat muscle wastage disorder disease. It was also used in treatment of osteoporosis in females.

DHTs were generally experiments to to try and develop a testosterone replacement compound that didn't have the same negative impacts in the way of prostate enlargement etc. So that's where the base of a lot of the drugs have come from.

Some were developed in veterinary husbandry. Trenbolone was used in cattle to increase muscle mass. It did have a short period as a human version but it was very short lived.

So that's where the background came from.

Q: How did steroids end up in sport and what was there impact?

1950s we start to see them creeping into sports.

There's a lot of folklore around this time about, but I think it's 1956 world power lifting championships where we see the Russians doing extremely well against the Americans.

Now the story goes that Dr. John Ziegler who coached the American lifting team approached the Russian coach, got him drunk (bit cliche I know), and he revealed that they were using testosterone but revealed that they were having some problems.

And the story goes that John developed Dianabol as the only steroid that was ever developed for sports performance.

There are other stories that that's bullshit, because there were other parties involved in the development of that drug and it was originally released by a pharmaceutical company called UPJ John.

But whether that's true or not, it's around this time when we start to see countries actively doping athletes. East Germans did a program for 15 years.

To say that anabolics aren't involved in professional sport is is laughable really.

It's widespread and has been for for a very long time. If you look at the Olympic Games in the UK in 2012, I believe there was something like 5,000 medical exemption forms authorised for people to use banned substances.

Athletes claiming they need some form of asthmatic medication. And the thing with asthmatic medications is they are in a large part pseudoephedrines. So they are stimulants and athletes say "it's because I've got sports induced asthma".

It's like when the hell did being an athlete become so unhealthy, that it gives you an illness. It's bullshit. A lot of the medical exemptions are never actually verified by a doctor. It's paperwork rather than an inspection of the individual. And that's just down to finances.

So the East Germans were probably the masters. There was a study done a few years ago by Tim Pawlowski, a researcher from Australia. Now he did research on on satellite cells. So one of the actions of steroids in the human body is that increase the proliferation of satellite cells. Think of these as precursor donor cells to muscle tissue.

It was sponsored by WADA (World Anti Doping Agency) and they were looking at how long after the administration of anabolic's did these satellite cells remain.

Now you want to put this in a real world example of the proliferation of satellite cells and how they remain?

Well, when you stop training obviously you lose muscle mass. When you start again, it comes back initially relatively quickly. We call that muscle memory. But that's actually satellite cells and the fact they are still there. So they recoup and redevelop very very quickly.

And Tim Pawlowski's studies found that even after 5 years there was still satellite cell presence that was elevated from the use of anabolics.

Now the East German's knew this so they would put their athletes on anabolics in the off-season. Then take them off (during the competitive season) so that when they came into the comps and tested they were clean but knowing that they had an advantage over a non previously doped athlete.

And when you're at the top of the game, that advantage only needs to be a fraction of a second or a couple of inches and you're talking world records.

Q: Why has steroid use increased over the past few years?

Over recent years, probably the last decade, anabolic's have become much more widely popularised.

Some of that's the internet, some of that's probably a desensitisation to anabolic's. And maybe you could even argue that popular media, social media, films have normalised muscular physiques to a degree.

But they're no longer the taboo subject they were when I first started talking about it openly.

I mean, Rich Piana talked about it a little bit, there was me, but and that was about it. Now pros are more open. You'll see pros discussing it within the bodybuilding community.

Maybe not so much the strongman world. They're still a bit timid. I think that's probably due to TV contracts. But in the bodybuilding world, pros are much more open and they've become quite commonplace.

There's a lot of discussion around the number of users in the UK and it's very murky water. Now when UKAD did their last survey, they came up with a number of around 500,000 to 600,000 users.

I personally think that's extremely skewed.

They tend to work mainly on needle exchange program data and the problem is that needle exchange programs don't engage with a large percentage of users because they're regarded, and excuse the terminology, but they're regarded a smack clinic. You know, their heroin clinics.

And though they do have a provision for needle exchange for steroid users, people are uncomfortable in going into a building which is used for drug addicts and alcoholics in case they were seen. Plus, Medisafe provides the world with needles. I mean, it's dead easy to get your equipment.

Now, as you alluded to in in the intro, I'm I'm regarded as an expert witness for the courts. So, I do a lot of defence (and some prosecution) work around supply steroids.

The number of steroid seizures (by police) just doesn't sit with that level of user community. It has to be much higher. I mean the police aren't catching anywhere near a large number of steroid dealers and yet the amount of volume of drugs they've recovered would easily supply in excess of 600,000 people.

There's probably 200 to 300 active underground labs in the UK supplying anabolic's.

Big ones, we might be down to 20, 30, 40, but across the different brands there's absolutely loads.

A few years ago, in the Northeast, they looked at the user population of anabolics within the Northeast per capita. They extrapolated that out across the UK and they estimated about a million UK users.

Now the northeast is a higher concentration of users. Wales is another higher concentration of users. Wales there's nothing else to do but lift, play rugby or sing.

Wales is it's a very rural community in the most part. There's not big urban centre's. So the vast majority of Wales is is rural. As a result, the gym culture is very local. So therefore, anabolics were quite open.

If it was big branded chains, you wouldn't get as much open conversation back then. So that drove usage because there was just a lot of communication about it. You know, you went and trained in your local church hall or wherever it was and people were talking about it.

So Wales actually was regarded, per capita, of the steroid user capital of the world.

Q: Why are more and more people are self administering TRT from underground labs, rather than going through the doctors/pharmacies?

When you start looking at things like self admin TRT, I think the number of users is probably over 2 million now.

In more recent years, you've had companies like Voy, HIMS, Manual and other companies that have been very actively promoting the availability of TRT.

There's been a massive boom in private. Bit it's expensive. Most people it averages out somewhere around £150-200 a month.

So people will go to a clinic, get the initial advice, start the initial programs, start to feel the pinch and they go online, they see 20 million sites advertising the sale of steroids and they just go "oh I'll just do it myself"

There's several versions of testosterone. The active ingredient is still testosterone, but anabolics have what they call an ester.

So when you hear the name of an anabolic, you'll hear the drug name and then you'll hear the ester name. So testosterone cypionate is testosterone with a cypionate ester. If you take pure testosterone, just raw, no ester, it will be in an out system within a matter of hours. So the esters slow down the biodegradability of the drug. They slow the rate at which your body uses it.

So test-enanthate and test-cypionate are relatively long esters. It ranges depending on who you talk to and there is some difference between how people metabolise of the drug but you're looking at somewhere around 10-12 days before you get to it half life. So the half life of drug is the time it takes for it to reduce by half within the body.

If you took 100 milligrams of testosterone enanthate 10.5 days later you're going to be at 50 milligram roughly.

Sustanon in the UK, which is a blend of testosterones that was developed for TRT and what it does is it raises levels plateaus them and then they drop off.

Normally for most people it will last about 14 days. Some it's less and it's only 10. Others it's longer and it can be as long as 3 weeks.

You'll buy that in the UK for £4.17 a milligram. That's one injection a fortnight £4.17 plus VAT. That's the trade price for sustanon.

Testosterone enanthate the UK is 96 quid.

But you can buy it from Europe for the same price as a sustanon. So companies like Voy, Manual, all these big TRT clinics, what they do is they buy it all in from Europe and it's £4 a vial.

What you pay for in TRT private prescription is doctor's consults, blood tests, and prescription charges, the actual drug element is cheap as chips.

But if you try and get enanthate as a British medication at a pharmacist, yeah, it's an absolute fortune at £96 per milligram.

And that's why people are driven into the black market for it.

Q: Is the quality of TRT the same on the black market as it is from a pharmacy?

Not in the slightest.

So raw powders for steroids in the most part are manufactured in China. That's even for the pharmaceutical trade.

So China is one of the biggest producers of raw raw chemicals for the pharmaceutical industry.

Basically the Chinese government didn't really give a naff what they did if it was going outside of China. So companies would have a license to produce certain chemicals, but they were manufacturing even the other ones and sell them into the black market. It was a lucrative trade. We're making a lot of money.

More recently, the government in China has gone, "Whoa, hang on a minute. We didn't realize how big a trade this was. We thought you were, you know, a couple of kilo here and that was the end of it. We want to cut this."

So now they've clamped down saying that all exports have to be paid for it in taxes.

They now enforced the taxes that should have been there in the first place. It was all black market. So before it was random parcels getting sent out by someone that works at the factory.

And the other thing they've done is say if you want to produce drugs, even if it is for the black market, that are not you're not licensed to, which is what they were allowing to happen before because they thought the quantities were small, you have to get a license because they've just realised they're missing a lot of income.

That's had a big knock on effect to the the market in a supply basis.

The biggest problem was that raw powders that were getting sent by China to UK to be made into injectable and oral steroids were agreed at a set price and China's like "oh we can't afford to do it at this rate". So prices have changed, availability has changed and India has also stepped in for producing raws now.

The difference is that when it goes into a pharmaceutical environment, it's batch tested, it's compliant to levels, it's got hygiene certificates, it's pure, there's no heavy metal contamination. That's all removed.

That doesn't happen in a UGL (underground lab).

UGL is basically a recipe of raw powder, benzyl alcohol, benzyl benzoate, which is a solvent (The alcohol is there to keep it sterile cuz it's a multi-dispensable vial) and a carrier oil. Which can be anything from rape seed oil, ethyl oleate in the more synthetic versions and that's it.

It's heated up, everything's dissolved, it's filtered, decanted into a vial, capped and sold.

There's no post test though some labs will send their samples to Janoshik which is in Eastern Europe which is a legit testing laboratory. But they really do that more from a point of view of a marketing ploy. So they can say, "Look, our testosterone is 96% pure or whatever more than they're actually concerned about pumping out genuine stuff."

So this is the first problem you see within the black market product is hygiene.

The second problem, is it genuinely the dose it's supposed to be or even the drugs it's supposed to be?

Now, with this recent shortage of raw powders, we've seen a lot of drugs not be what they're supposed to be. Now, I run a blood testing company called E-val.

I see probably 10,000 - 15,000 sets of bloods a year and in the last couple of months I have seen more under-dosed drugs through blood testing than I ever have.

People come in saying they wanted their bloods done, I'm on 250 milligram of testosterone a week and I look at the blood and go no you're not.

So you expect it to be in a certain range and they're not.

Even even when you accept a little bit of variation in the rate of metabolism of the drug, 250 milligram should put your testosterone levels, which is measured in NMOL, around the 50 mark.

If it's at 9, then there's something definitely wrong with what you're taking.

Q: How clean and sterile are these UGL's? I know some of them are in peoples front rooms, kitchens, commercial units.

This is something that people get very panicy about and and it's a little bit misunderstood.

The area needs to be relatively sterile, but the drug is sterilised by being filtered.

So even if you did get contaminants in the drug at the manufacturing process, the filtration system would remove those.

So, as long as it's filtered correctly and the vial it's going into has no bacterial load in the first instance, that's truly sterile. Then the drug itself should be relatively sterile, from a point of view of contaminants of that nature.

What it's not going to be sterile from is things like heavy metals or other compounds. But what it will be sterile from is things like bits of dirt. It is generally quite sterile.

The issue is other contaminants and other compounds when they come into play. But I have seen UGL's that were literally cooking their oils, in an oven tray, in somebody's kitchen. I've seen it that bad.

So it's so they're cooking food in it one minute, the next minute they're cooking steroids. I've seen it that bad.

But at the other end of the scale, I have seen some quite professional setups as well.

So a lot of that is scale of economies.

So when I talk about the sterility of a UGL, it's not about dirt contaminations in the compound, it's about other chemicals in the compound.

Q: When does it go from general TRT use to steroid abuse?

I think there's two two ways of looking at this.

One is unnecessary usage and this is particularly prevalent within the TRT environment.

The amount of people that are doing "TRT", but they're using doses that exceed TRT.

Now, TRT, the the clue is in the name, testosterone replacement therapy, you're replacing natural levels.

So, if you've been suffering with low test, bringing that up to a healthy level of say 19, 20, 22, 23, 24 and more, you're going to feel really good off the back of that. But that will normalize over a bit of time.

For example, you've probably done regimes within your own health where you've brought a supplement in and you've seen a genuine benefit from it, but then after a month of using it, it's like, I don't really feel that anymore.

It's not that the benefit's gone. It's just that you've adapted to it.

That's the same with TRT. So then what you start to see, is people pushing it a little bit higher because they want that initial feelgood factor again.

And you've got to be very disciplined around anabolics if you're doing them for TRT. This is a medicine. This is a treatment.

And in the same way, if you overuse painkillers long term, you're going to end up with issues. The same will happen with the TRT, particularly if you don't know the nuances of how these drugs operate within the body.

So, you've got that caveat of steroid abuse, where you're using it for a genuine purpose, but you're using too much or adding other things in that shouldn't really be there.

There's also a big psychological aspect which no one's really talking about.

When you take something that either improves your physical appearance or improves how you feel, you very quickly adapt to that being necessary.

No one likes going backwards.

So, let's say you do your first cycle, you've been training, you're natural, you've been struggling to make progress. You've made a bit of progress, but not where you see everybody online (And that's a big driver to into anabolic use)

So, you go on your first cycle and you put 15 pound of muscle on in 10 weeks and you're like, jeez!

You're stronger than you've ever been, fitter than you've ever been, sex drive through the roof. Life's amazing.

"But now you got to come off, mate."

"Argh, I don't want to do that."

I've always had the attitude of, be honest about what you're doing, because if you start to normalise doing 300 milligram, but TRT is about 100 to 120 milligram a week for most people.

"Yeah, I'm doing 300 milligram. That's my TRT."

Well, no, it's not. You've normalised it as being that. That's actually a low cycle.

When you start to normalise the drug and and start to normalise behaviour that isn't truly what it is, then you start to get a twisted relationship with the compounds. And that starts to sound a lot like addiction when you start to break it down.

If you take super high doses that you probably don't really need, which is what I did, then you could argue that's abuse. But if you're aware and conscious that this is a really high doses, I know I'm pushing the boundary here, then it's a conscious move.

If you take 300-350 milligram of testosterone a week and try to claim it's TRT and in your own head truly believe that that's what you need, then you're abusing a drug because your relationship with that drug is gone. You're no longer respecting what it can do and you're normalising a dose that isn't required.

I think for a lot of people, it's very difficult to keep that relationship of "this is a tool that I use for a purpose.This is not a requirement."

Yes, steroid users don't rob people, but I have seen dodgy financial decisions made around the fact that they need to buy their drugs. So then you start to get more of an addictive type behaviour.

Oh god, I wouldn't like to say a number, but the amount of people that I've worked with or I've I've had engagement with who have ended up with serious health concerns, but will not stop the anabolic's, because to stop the anabolic's for them, you're threatening their actual identity.

Because now they identify with, one, how they feel, but two, how they look. The amount of people within the user community, where all their confidence is is linked to the drug use. So anything that threatens that, or anything that requires that to be reduced, or pulled away from, or actually threatens who they are, it's very difficult for them to deal with that.

I mean I know people that have had heart bypasses, heart attacks, kidney failure.

I know a guy that was going onto his third kidney, and was planning his cycle of tren (trenbolone) which is the most toxic anabolic for kidneys there is.

"Oh, well, I've got a genetic disease."

No, mate. It's not frying your kidneys that fast. And you've been lucky that you've had two family members have been able to donate direct to you. So, you haven't sat in a waiting list for a donation.

Now, yes, he had a genetic condition, but it was doing nowhere near the damage. The damage was because he would not stop abusing anabolic's.

And that's an extreme example. But I know someone else who who had a heart bypass, again, can't leave the anabolic's alone, because it threatens who they are.

You can listen to the full podcasts below....

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Or watch the full episode on YouTube Here...

https://youtu.be/WkFtxW-rImI?si=8xjTbGAIrstDrYZ1

Ryan Dutton

Personal Trainer Sheffield

Online Coach