Correct.

You can also go to a Testosterone replacement clinic and get an actual TRT prescription provided your T is actually low. If they are ethical, they will monitor to keep it within a healthy range so you don't go past an upper limit.

Your results will suck ass if you have low T.

However pump up the T and your hairline will run away from you fast, then your hair will dropset to failure.

Isn’t there something you can take to prevent that from happening?

Yes, it's not really the testosterone that causes hair loss, it's the DHT the testosterone is converted too and there are drugs and topical foams that can prevent that conversion from happening in the scalp. There are other medications and treatments that work differently as well. It's a complicated topic. Also some people just aren't very susceptible to hair loss.

Not really, finasteride with steroids will spike your estrogen and cause you to get permanent manboobs and other sexual issues IIRC, and if you use yet another drug to block this estrogen conversion it's even more dangerous.

Steroids are illegal in most countries. You don’t win an award by sharing your illegal hobby in the open. For perspective, if a top pro shared their exact stack, there would be tons of teenagers who have never lifted do the exact stack. Which, as you mention, would have negative long therm consequences.

I disagree. As it is now, they will strive to achieve a result that is forever unattainable without performance enhancing drugs. In my opinion, this is like people who make millions selling their how to make millions courses.

Yes, steroids are technically illegal, but they are typically Sch 4, and are just about the "softest" kind of illegal. As in, it's pretty trivial to find vendor willing to ship you a kilo of "cellulose" or other paper-thin cover for white powder that will easily skate through customs.

There's near zero enforcement for steroids, so yes it does end up as an open secret.

More people using steroids that not if YouTube or Instagram is any barometer.

This obviously leads to very unrealistic expectations for those that are natural.

The nattyorjuice subreddit is sobering material.

It’s an issue - a lot of people just want to be decently fit, so they look online for advice. But the people populating forums and putting up blogs are usually bodybuilder types who that are on steroids and have been lifting since they were teenagers. There seems to be a lot of body dysmorphia in the community as well (“The day you start lifting is the day you become forever small”).

The needs and goals of these two groups of people are going to be so drastically different that a lot of the advice is going to end up being counterproductive.

Imhv the bodybuilding/powerlifting community is pretty open about it once you immerse yourself there.

But, yeah, the non-initiated get a pretty skewed picture about how muscular one can get, naturally. That's a whole another discussion about body perception/dismorphia and societal idealizations.

It is also fairly easy to give an accurate estimation (esp. if fat percentage <10%) via FFMI.[0]

In some natural bodybuilding competitions anyone with FFMI >25 is ruled out automatically because of the high probability of steroid use at that point. Of course a non-trivial amount of natural genetic freaks certainly exist beyond this number and a case can be made that's the whole point of competitive sports: "freaks" competing against each other.

But then again once you are in the highly competitive game it is (nearly) impossible to resist PEDs.

I guess for that reason many different classes/federations exist to choose from.

[0]https://mennohenselmans.com/ffmi-calculator/