[Dan_O]

Love Draper and all but, that guy has eaten more Dianabol than I could possibly get my hands on right now. Same for Arnold, Franco, Lou, etc. Back in the 60's/70's gyms sold d-bols at the front desk.

Dianabol / D-bol (methandrostenolone)

Dbol - Methandrostenolone

This was more or less the second Anabolic Steroid ever produced. The first, as we all know was Testosterone, which was produced in the early 1900´s and experimented with by Nazi´s in WW2, in an attempt to produce a better soldier.

Russian Dianabol and Team Sports History

Russian athletes in the 1953 World Championships as well as the Olympic games then used testosterone with great success. After that, John Zeigler, who was a doctor working with the US Weightlifting Team, began a cooperative project with Ciba to develop an equalizer for US atheletes. Flash forward to 1956 and enter Dianabol ; the original trade name for Ciba´s Methandrostenolone... but called "Dbol" by athletes. The original package insert said that 10mgs/day was enough to provide full androgen replacement for a man and Dr.Zeigler recommended that athletes take 5-10mgs/day. Incidentally, this is also the dose that Bodybuilders were reputed to take from then until roughly the 1970´s. Yeah, this was allegedly Arnold´s dose, Zane´s dose, etc... simply stacked with some testosterone. (For any trivia buffs out there, Dan Duchaine´s mail order steroid business operated under the name "The John Zeigler Fan Club").

Dianabol Steroid Use

Enough with the history lesson, lets get into what this stuff is, and what it does. Well, first off, it´s usually found in pill form, though it can be found as an injectable also (Under the Trade name: Reforvit-B, which is 25mgs of methandrostenolone mixed with B-vitamins). It is a 17aa steroid, which means it has been altered at the 17th Carbon position, to survive its´ first pass through your liver, and make it into your blood stream. It´ll raise your blood pressure (4) and is also hepatoxic (Liver-Toxic), so be careful with it. Although I have known people to take up to 100mgs/day of this stuff and not suffer any ill-effects, and one study looked at that exact dose, and the people involved didn´t suffer any intolerable side effects ( 7). Lets examine this particular study a bit further, though:

In this study, done in the early 80´s, a very high dose of Dbol (100mgs/day for 6 weeks) decreased plasma testosterone to about 40% of it´s normal value, plasma GH went up about a third, LH dropped to about 80% of it´s original value, and FSH went down about a third also (these are all approximate numbers, for the sake of brevity, but you get the idea). Body fat did not go up significantly and Fat Free Mass went up anywhere between 2-7kgs (3.3kgs average gain). The researchers concluded that Dbol increases Fat Free Mass as well as increasing strength and performance. I can only agree, having found this to be the case for me when I did my first cycle (which was 6 weeks of dbol alone at 25mgs/day), I gained roughly 25lbs and kept nearly ½ of it. Since then, Dbol has always had a special place in my heart.

Dianabol Side Effects

As with many other 17aa steroids, Dianabol is also a very weak binder to the Androgen Receptor, so most of it´s effects are thought to be non-receptor mediated, and are attributable to other mechanisms (i.e. protein synthesis as indicated by the production of muscle tissue with very high levels of nitrogen, etc... which was indicated in the 100mg/day study). This also means it only has a modest aromatase activity (2).

How strong is Dbol? Well...on a mg for mg basis, most people agree that it´s stronger than A50...but the reason most people don´t get the same gains off of Dbol is that almost nobody takes equivalent doses (I mean...I´ve heard of people taking 150mgs of A50, but not Dbol, even though the dbol would probably provide more solid gains and be less toxic, I suspect).

So how do we incorporate this stuff into our AAS regimen? Clearly, the inclusion of Dbol at any point in a cycle would contribute to gains, however, I´d speculate that Dbol is most regularly used for 2 reasons:

At the start of a cycle to "Kick Start" gains
As a "Bridge" between cycles, to maintain gains