Natural Bodybuilding Versus Steroids: What's the Difference?

Bodybuilders using steroids trained with more volume and used more advanced training techniques resulting in greater physiological stress on the body. It can be suspected that the enhanced recovery allows steroid users to train with more volume and recuperate faster from workouts compared to natural lifters.

For those that were confused by the word natty, the slang natty meaning someone who does not use anabolic steroids or all-natural. I had to laugh when researching the topic of natural or “natty” that over on Google last week, 8.3 million people searched, “Was Arnold Schwarzenegger natural?” No, Arnold has openly admitted to using anabolics while competing.

There are intense debates on discussion boards about what is natty and what is not. If a person uses pro-hormones such as testosterone boosters, are they still natty? Many people claim to be natty yet use injectable peptides and other drugs to enhance their physique. There is also a fake natty in which someone says they are natural but are using anabolic steroids.

When you are a natural bodybuilder, you have to do things differently from those that are enhanced.  By enhanced, I mean using anabolic steroids. Previous research has shown that testosterone has benefits for increasing muscle mass and preserving muscle mass while dieting. Animal models have also shown that testosterone can enhance muscle recovery.(Beiner et al., 1999; White et al., 2009) Natural bodybuilders need to pay close attention to how hard they are training because a natural bodybuilder is much more likely to overtrain (Too et al., 1998).