Does Anabolic Steroids Good for Building Different Muscle Groups?

Q: “I have some lagging muscle groups, particularly triceps, traps, and hamstrings. Do some anabolic steroids work better for some muscles than for others? Are there ones I should choose to target any or all of these?”

A: If there is a difference between anabolic steroids on effectiveness with different muscles, it must be small if it exists at all. I have never observed such an effect in myself or anyone.

What can be the case is that a lifter’s best bodyparts may respond well even to low doses of anabolic steroids, while for the weaker bodyparts higher doses are needed. If trying to balance out bodyparts, for the same amount of injectable steroids or oral steroids used per year it I recommend using higher doses for fewer weeks per year than using more moderate doses for more weeks per year.

Generally about a gram per week will be sufficient even for weaker bodyparts to respond well. I don’t have reason to believe that yet higher doses would continue to give more relative improvement for weaker parts than for stronger parts; I tend to doubt it. I wouldn’t use this as a reason to go about say 1400-1500 mg/week, if even about 1000 mg/week at all. See what happens at the more moderate dose, and go higher only if having reached a plateau.

A more important strategy is specialization training. In other words, in at least part of the cycle such as at least 2-3 weeks, really target a lagging muscle group. The body has only so much recovery ability, even with anabolic steroids. Training most of the body somewhat less than you otherwise might allows training lagging parts more, and getting better results from that training.

Conveniently, needing to bring up traps and hamstrings at the same time suggests deadlifts and Romanian deadlifts, both of which can really bring up these muscle groups. As well as barbell shrugs and DB shrugs, which allow a greater range of motion, consider doing shrugs in the calf machine. The pushing, rather than pulling, motion can allow even greater weight to be used.

There’s any amount of triceps advice out there, but briefly, do both heavy compound work and high volume work at about 20 reps. Very often triceps remain lagging when high rep work is not included, or is not included enough.

In terms of volume of training, when specializing for a bodypart there’s nothing excessive about for example 40 sets per week per bodypart, though for a given heavy compound exercise generally not more than 10 sets per week of that exercise.