The potential negative side effects of hormonal treatments like steroids, especially when not taken under doctors orders and supervision, are fairly well documented and it is not advised to abuse steroids or other hormones/PES.
That said-
Testosterone analog Steroid use does not shrink the penis. How or why would it?
In females it can actually cause clitoral enlargement (even growing to the size of a “micro penis” possibly)
In Males high doses of steroids can and likely will cause the testicles to shrink and COULD potentially lead to atrophy of the testicles.
The heathy endocrine system is largely self regulating. When a large external dose of hormones is provided, the body tends to reduce or stop production of that hormone to try and lower the levels to what it considers normal. Those abusing steroids are often dosing at several or even hundreds of times the bodies natural levels, so the body cannot possibly return to normal levels on its own.
The testicles “shrink” because they are no longer producing much or any testosterone as they don’t need to. Depending on the dose, duration of use, other factors, and the use and quality of post use care, the body may regain some or all of its natural hormone production when use is stopped or it may never regain full or effectively any natural production of hormones. So the effects can be long term or permanent and be partial or total.
Exercise in general can and often does temporarily decrease penis size in men- there is a high demand for blood flow to the muscles, joints, etc and exercise that builds muscle does so by damaging the body, so the body will prioritize repairs. The amount and duration of this reduction can vary but in general isn’t extreme or long lasting, and overall not only does exercise generally improve your performance in areas like endurance or increased circulation- but that circulation can increase the quality of elections and make it seem like the…
.. penis has grown due to increased blood flow allowing maximum expansion and maintaining of said expansion to the penis. Increased circulation from exercise can have beneficial effects for women's sexual response as well, and for both genders the overall health and slight uptake in hormone production coupled with potential loses in fat can cause physiological improvements as well as psychological improvements in drive, enjoyment, and performance.
It is also theoretically possible in extreme cases for the male penis to appear to lose size from certain types of strength training.
Most men have a strip of connective tissue from their abdomen to the end of their penis inside their body. This is why erections generally point upwards or forwards and not down at the ground.
The most common and lowest risk penile enlargement surgery involves severing this connective tissue inside the body to appear to gain length. This works because a generally small amount of the penile shaft is…
.. inside the body, the tension from the connective tissue generally pulls the penis back inside the body a bit when flaccid. Generally when erect the shaft inside the body, or most all, is able to overcome this tension and expose the full length which then usually gets longer as blood inflates chambers in the elastic tissues of the penis.
Such surgery will generally only improve the flaccid length of a penis and not the erect length- and the erection will then point at the ground as it no longer has support to point “up” when weighted down with blood.
Understanding how this works, we could then understand that it is theoretically possible for forces that push on the abdomen to pull that connective tendon and thusly have the opposite effect- making the penile shaft retract further into the body when flaccid and possibly causing the angle of inclination to increase when erect.
Those are just about the only common or semi common factors that might impact overall or perceived penis size outside of force trauma or temperature exposure.
So steroids can do ALOT of potentially gnarly things- they can give men breast tissue, shrink the testicles, cause severe acne or lesions or tissue necrosis. They can thicken the blood. Make you lactate, the heart is a muscle and they can enlarge that too- which coupled with thicker blood compounds the risks of death or serious health issues. Steroids can do hundreds of things from impacting your mental and emotional state to causing unwanted body hair growth in men or women, changes to the voice (commonly deepening in women), steroids can cause skin to thin, be some dry, like- so many bad things besides you know… kill you. You can have nasty cramps and other pains or discomfort from things like fluid retention and such.
Steroids can have secondary impacts- men and women both have more receptors in their upper bodies than lower bodies. Without planning and knowledge it is very easy to end up with “prison body” where your upper body is buff and your lower body isn under developed- an aesthetic concern but also a health concern because in fitness and strength- unbalanced strength is a way to end up injured. On that subject- when working out you are loading your bones and tendons etc. you aren’t just building muscles. Steroids can’t impact tendons and ligaments and bones like they do muscles. A person working out for 10 years works up from for example: only being able to life 25lbs when they start to being able to lift 300lbs after 10 years. Over those years of regular lifting and small increase their body adjusts to the increasing loads. A person who can only lift 25lbs and starts taking steroids may be able to rush and lift 300lbs in a year as an example- but they’ll be increasing the load much…
… faster and not giving their body the time it needs for bones and joints and connective tissues to grow stronger. It is very easy to injure oneself when abusing steroids for performance without already having years of experience and being established in their fitness routine. Torn tendons and damaged cartilage or broken bones from stress on parts of the body that don’t strengthen as quickly as muscles (even with steroids) not only hurts and can be costly- but for fitness or vanity goals those injuries can take you out of the gym for months, a year, or permanently injure you. If you blow out a knee trying to get beach ready using steroids- when summer rolls around the person not using who wasn’t injured and kept working out will be likely in better shape, and without a cast or injury likely look better and be able to enjoy themselves a lot more.
An average person can can put on a year or more of muscle gain in a few months of steroid use. This poses another big problem.
When starting out in fitness- especially weight training- form is CRITICAL. You start with little or no weight and master your form because dropping weights on yourself or moving your body wrong can kill or badly hurt you, even cripple you for life. Through many thousands of deliberate and correct repetitions of an exercise, the muscle memory and habits of good form and proper technique develop. When you don’t have that experience and you suddenly can lift your own body weight on a squat rack in a couple months- your chances of sustaining injury increase dramatically.
For those just trying to have a “Magazine body” or have an edge in performance or strength etc- steroids allow and even promote bad habits for proper fitness. Those muscle monsters that don’t look human usually started natural and went to steroids when they’d been lifting a decade or more…
… and stopped seeing gains. At the tops of competition like body building their regiments are usually as serious as any professional natural lifter- just more extreme. Bit because steroids have incredible potential for burning fat, shaping the body, gaining muscle, and metabolic processes- steroid users can see impressive results even if they eat poorly and follow poor recovery and training habits. Being a top title holding body builder generally won’t allow such poor habits- but being able to get a body like “Magic Mike” or a fitness bunny can be relatively easily achieved even with absolutely lousy habits and diet. What that means is that without the drugs and without experience, people don’t develop the skills to reach their goals and must rely on the drugs to maintain them. In other words- if the risks and such aren’t enough to deter, the fact that you’ll still spend at least the same amount of time and effort in the gym to get results but won’t take anything away you can use…
… to keep your training or looks should tell you that steroids are especially stupid for novices to training and people only looking for relatively small gains. 12-24 months of natural training done well will make most people in better shape than 90% of people they’ll encounter and dramatically change the body. Steroids could possibly achieve that in half or less the time- but you can’t keep it if you don’t know how to train without the drugs. That’s a major point. The effective training and diet regiment for anabolic steroid use is vastly different than a natural training regiment. When the course of drugs is through you will shortly be back to where you were before.
Steroids for mass are also a disappointment. Muscles usually grow by increasing the DENSITY of fibers and the fluid in the muscle. Steroids do increase density but much if the mass and the “hard” looks of the muscles comes from the fact steroids increase the SIZE of muscle cells and vastly increase the fluid retention.
When the drugs are stopped you can keep the extra muscle density UP TO YOUR GENETIC LIMITS as long as you maintain your training and diet etc, but you will lose the fluid retention and increase to cellular SIZE and so the muscles will appear much smaller and somewhat “deflated.”
Strength and other performance is likely to decrease as well, and as said earlier- it’s unlikely you’ll be able to maintain your workout because the optimal regiment for steroid use is different than natural.
The primary mechanism at work is protein synthesis. Your body can only process so much protein in to muscle- even if you ate 90000 grams of protein a day- you’d just likely get sick or die. Your body will only use up to the max it can process and it excretes the rest as waste which can tax the organs or cause deposits like stones.
Steroids can allow you to increase the amount of protein your body can take in and turn in to tissue like muscle. Your recovery times are faster- at a minimum serious weight training is usually advised for at least a day between session for the same muscles. Steroids can allow back to back sessions or even multiple sessions a day and benefit from gains where natural training such intense work outs would be more likely to cause a LOSS of strength. The increased red counts can increase oxygen in the blood and help with faster healing and recovery as well as increased stamina and energy. Feelings of general well being can increase from very high testosterone.
On the flip side- when you eventually stop using the drugs the drop in hormones and the loss of those benefits like the performance and feelings of well being can cause you a huge crash.
You likely will not even be “falling” to your pre drug use levels but to levels below those since your hormone production was stopped or reduced by the steroids. Depression, irritability, lethargy, all sorts of symptoms and feelings can come from the hormonal changes and if you add any of those unpleasant side effects Or bodily changes as well as the “deflated” muscles- often people just plain feel like crap when they come off the steroids.
So many people want fast results or short term goals and turn to steroids. It REALLY isn’t worth it for almost anyone in those situations. If you’re going to be trying to reach results that wouldn’t take more than a year or two to reach- why take on the risks and issues that come from steroid abuse?
Back to the subject of the meme- sex and the penis… steroid use can actually cause other issues.
It is likely, due to the smaller or atrophied testicles, that semen volume and consistency will change- usually for the worse. For those wanting kids, short and even long term or permanent sterility is possible. But maybe being ripped and having lots of sex and not getting anyone pregnant sounds good to you?
Well…. Bad news tiger. Your penis might (probably) not work. Yeah. So- at first, you might get super erections. Like- get erections all the time very easily, very firm and intense feeling ones. Sound cool? Well- sure there are some places that having a trigger like a pubescent boy could be embarrassing but overall that might sound fun for a bit…
But just like the testicles tend to shrink and stop making testosterone because of the super high amounts in the body…
Your body reacts in other ways and it is very common for male steroid users to find they are oolong muscular, feeling…
.. sexy and having increased sex drive… and unable to get an erection. Increased estrogen is one common reason, issues with blood flow to the penis can be another, and because an erection is a response to elevated hormone levels it is also possible for the body to decide that since you are always above that threshold it just will ignore it.
So impotence/infertility/erectile disfunction are all possibilities and common side effects.
So will your penis shrink? Almost certainly not. Your balls probably will and that is far from the only or worse side effects r you are likely to experience.
Hopefully this cleared up that common misconception and provided some fun facts and a whole lot of reasons why steroids just are probably not a good idea for most people despite their increasing popularity.
That said-
Testosterone analog Steroid use does not shrink the penis. How or why would it?
In females it can actually cause clitoral enlargement (even growing to the size of a “micro penis” possibly)
In Males high doses of steroids can and likely will cause the testicles to shrink and COULD potentially lead to atrophy of the testicles.
The heathy endocrine system is largely self regulating. When a large external dose of hormones is provided, the body tends to reduce or stop production of that hormone to try and lower the levels to what it considers normal. Those abusing steroids are often dosing at several or even hundreds of times the bodies natural levels, so the body cannot possibly return to normal levels on its own.
Exercise in general can and often does temporarily decrease penis size in men- there is a high demand for blood flow to the muscles, joints, etc and exercise that builds muscle does so by damaging the body, so the body will prioritize repairs. The amount and duration of this reduction can vary but in general isn’t extreme or long lasting, and overall not only does exercise generally improve your performance in areas like endurance or increased circulation- but that circulation can increase the quality of elections and make it seem like the…
It is also theoretically possible in extreme cases for the male penis to appear to lose size from certain types of strength training.
Most men have a strip of connective tissue from their abdomen to the end of their penis inside their body. This is why erections generally point upwards or forwards and not down at the ground.
The most common and lowest risk penile enlargement surgery involves severing this connective tissue inside the body to appear to gain length. This works because a generally small amount of the penile shaft is…
Such surgery will generally only improve the flaccid length of a penis and not the erect length- and the erection will then point at the ground as it no longer has support to point “up” when weighted down with blood.
Understanding how this works, we could then understand that it is theoretically possible for forces that push on the abdomen to pull that connective tendon and thusly have the opposite effect- making the penile shaft retract further into the body when flaccid and possibly causing the angle of inclination to increase when erect.
So steroids can do ALOT of potentially gnarly things- they can give men breast tissue, shrink the testicles, cause severe acne or lesions or tissue necrosis. They can thicken the blood. Make you lactate, the heart is a muscle and they can enlarge that too- which coupled with thicker blood compounds the risks of death or serious health issues. Steroids can do hundreds of things from impacting your mental and emotional state to causing unwanted body hair growth in men or women, changes to the voice (commonly deepening in women), steroids can cause skin to thin, be some dry, like- so many bad things besides you know… kill you. You can have nasty cramps and other pains or discomfort from things like fluid retention and such.
When starting out in fitness- especially weight training- form is CRITICAL. You start with little or no weight and master your form because dropping weights on yourself or moving your body wrong can kill or badly hurt you, even cripple you for life. Through many thousands of deliberate and correct repetitions of an exercise, the muscle memory and habits of good form and proper technique develop. When you don’t have that experience and you suddenly can lift your own body weight on a squat rack in a couple months- your chances of sustaining injury increase dramatically.
For those just trying to have a “Magazine body” or have an edge in performance or strength etc- steroids allow and even promote bad habits for proper fitness. Those muscle monsters that don’t look human usually started natural and went to steroids when they’d been lifting a decade or more…
Steroids for mass are also a disappointment. Muscles usually grow by increasing the DENSITY of fibers and the fluid in the muscle. Steroids do increase density but much if the mass and the “hard” looks of the muscles comes from the fact steroids increase the SIZE of muscle cells and vastly increase the fluid retention.
Strength and other performance is likely to decrease as well, and as said earlier- it’s unlikely you’ll be able to maintain your workout because the optimal regiment for steroid use is different than natural.
The primary mechanism at work is protein synthesis. Your body can only process so much protein in to muscle- even if you ate 90000 grams of protein a day- you’d just likely get sick or die. Your body will only use up to the max it can process and it excretes the rest as waste which can tax the organs or cause deposits like stones.
On the flip side- when you eventually stop using the drugs the drop in hormones and the loss of those benefits like the performance and feelings of well being can cause you a huge crash.
So many people want fast results or short term goals and turn to steroids. It REALLY isn’t worth it for almost anyone in those situations. If you’re going to be trying to reach results that wouldn’t take more than a year or two to reach- why take on the risks and issues that come from steroid abuse?
It is likely, due to the smaller or atrophied testicles, that semen volume and consistency will change- usually for the worse. For those wanting kids, short and even long term or permanent sterility is possible. But maybe being ripped and having lots of sex and not getting anyone pregnant sounds good to you?
Well…. Bad news tiger. Your penis might (probably) not work. Yeah. So- at first, you might get super erections. Like- get erections all the time very easily, very firm and intense feeling ones. Sound cool? Well- sure there are some places that having a trigger like a pubescent boy could be embarrassing but overall that might sound fun for a bit…
But just like the testicles tend to shrink and stop making testosterone because of the super high amounts in the body…
Your body reacts in other ways and it is very common for male steroid users to find they are oolong muscular, feeling…
So impotence/infertility/erectile disfunction are all possibilities and common side effects.
So will your penis shrink? Almost certainly not. Your balls probably will and that is far from the only or worse side effects r you are likely to experience.
Hopefully this cleared up that common misconception and provided some fun facts and a whole lot of reasons why steroids just are probably not a good idea for most people despite their increasing popularity.
:-)