Prohormones: How to Prohormones cycle Work?

It is curious how many people, having spent hours educating themselves as to the effects of different prohormones, fail to take the steps necessary to reap the maximum benefits from these powerful muscle building tools. In this guide we explore how you can utilise training, diet and PCT supplementation to obtain the greatest possible benefit from a prohormone cycle.

What are prohormones?

Prohormones are anabolic steroid precursors -substances that the body can use to make actual anabolic steroids. They exist for hormone creation, and will be used in the body as hormones.

Prohormones differ from steroids in that they are not actually hormones. Rather, they introduce a pathway for the body to create its own hormones naturally. Prohormones are only converted into hormones once they are inside the body and visited by enzymes.

Prohormones are also different from steroids because they are easier for the body to regulate. When the body is producing hormones itself, it knows when it needs to stop and when it needs to go. This is true even when prohormones are used to stimulate this production. On the other hand, steroids already come in hormone form, and are therefore harder for the body to keep a handle on.

What is a Prohormone Cycle?

Most commonly a 2 to 8 week regamin depending on substance and dosage, followed by a recovery phase of equal or greater time. During this prohormone cycle, calories are increased and training intensities are decreased to facilitate recovery.

Remember, after most prohormones cycles, certain substances are used to accelerate recovery of natural testosterone production such as Post cycle therapy supplements. These serve the dual purpose of decreasing estrogen levels that are commonly elevated after a cycle and signalling the body to produce more testosterone.

Effects from a Prohormone Cycle

Prohormones will act on your body in a number of unique ways, which means that simply training and eating as you normally would will cause you to miss out on many of the benefits prohormones have to offer. For a start, they increase protein synthesis in the body, which is the main mechanism by which they add muscle mass. We will list some more:

• Increase carbohydrate storage
• Increase levels of growth factors such as GH, IGF-1, MGF, etc.
• Enhance creatine synthesis
• Lower cortisol levels
• Enhance nutrient partitioning
• Enhance insulin sensitivity
• Improved ability to tolerate high work volumes
• Enhanced neural drive

On the other hand, prohormones have the potential to cause side effects related to excessive androgen levels, elevated levels of estrogens (depending on the type of prohormone taken), lowered cortisol levels, and actions on the liver and other organs. So, bearing these things in mind, how does one go about maximising the benefits that prohormones have to offer while limiting their potential side effects?

TIPS to train on Prohormone Cycles

TIP 1:

We should recommended that you schedule your prohormone cycle for before you hit the heaviest weights in your training cycle. If you periodise your training, moving from lower weights and high reps to higher weights and low reps, you would be best off using prohormones while the training weights are light.

TIP 2:

We should look to increase the overall volume of work we perform either by increasing the number of sets we perform and/or the frequency with which we hit the gym. In other words, if you are following a sample program like the one below you would make the changes indicated:

Week 1 – 3 sets of 15 off cycle>increase to 5 to 6 sets of 15 while on cycle
Week 2 – 4 sets of 12 off cycles off cycle>increase to 6-7 sets of 12 on cycle
Week 3 – 5 sets of 10 off cycle>increase to 8-10 sets of 10 on cycle
Week 4 – 6 sets of 8 off cycle>increase to 10-12 sets on cycle

TIP 3:

The key is that on a prohormone cycle the best way to take the advantage of their benefits is to avoid weight increases despite the temptation to do that and instead rely on increases in training volume to get the type of gains that would cause overtraining normally.

Conclusion

Finally, you can appreciate that there is more to maximizing the benefits of a prohormone cycle than merely taking the products according to the label and hoping for the best. Although even a poor training, diet and supplementation protocol will still deliver some measure of results, the effectiveness of prohormone cycles can be increased greatly with the careful application. Now, you can can gain more muscle mass and drive strength and performance increases whilst limiting side effects during your prohormone cycle.