“You need to look good, so there’s no time off,” Steve says. Because of this, many have turned to what’s popularly referred to as blasting and cruising, an approach that could be described as doing steroids on steroids. In practice, blasting and cruising means that users “blast,” or take high doses of steroids to pack on additional muscle, and then “cruise” on lower doses intended to maintain that size and prevent the negative side effects of crashed testosterone, which can happen after abruptly stopping steroid use.
Blasting, Steve explains, is unhealthy, and cruising needs to be done to restore some state of health. When blasting and cruising, which Steve considers to be an outdated technique, the user is on steroids the entire time, prolonging their exposure, increasing their risk of long-term effects, and taking no time to give their body a chance to recuperate.
Both blasting and cruising and the polypharmacy are higher profile than they’ve ever been. With the advent of underground labs—black-market facilities ranging from home brew to small factories where raw materials are turned into injection-ready compounds—buying steroids went from a shady back-alley transaction to an easy online purchase. Selling steroids became just like any other online business, with sales promotions and buy-one-get-one-free offers. Compounding pharmacies, which offer custom formulations of drugs, provide a route for gear, sometimes incidentally—professional athletes have tested positive for PEDs after unwittingly taking prescription supplements contaminated with banned substances.
Men who want doctor-prescribed testosterone can still get it, thanks to online clinics that vary in their discretion. One doctor’s research highlights how dangerous that can be. In a secret-shopper study, Florida urologist and andrologist and host of the Man Up Podcast which focuses on men’s health issues, Justin Dubin sought out TRT from direct-to-consumer companies posing as a 34-year-old man who wanted to have children in the future. His blood work showed total testosterone levels of 675—an above-average reading and far away from 300, when most clinicians will consider TRT.
Based on his blood work and plans to have children, he was “clearly not a good candidate” for TRT, he says. Even so, six of the seven companies prescribed Dubin testosterone, and only three informed him of the fertility risks. Though TRT can increase libido and can treat erectile dysfunction in men with low testosterone, it can also cause spermatogenesis (the development of sperm) in the testes to sharply diminish or completely stop, resulting in infertility.
