Name: What Happens When You Quit Steroids?
Uploaded: 2025-07-19T20:40:54.000Z
Duration: 5 min 56 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

3 million people currently use steroids to build muscle mass in the US alone and one survey found that 30% of gym users were currently taking steroids.

Taking ROIDs to get gains in the gym is clearly very popular but what happens to your brain, body, skin, and testicles when you decide to quit steroids?

Future perfect

After 24 hours of quitting steroids you will feel extremely tired and fatigued because of how the steroids have messed with your hormone systems, specifically your gonadotropin releasing hormone.

GnRH is released from the hypothalamus and through a series of chemical pathways stimulates your testes to produce testosterone and maintain size.

This is why steroids can shrink your testicles and why now with the lack of steroid consumption your body is lacking testosterone production on its own.

The steroids that you were consuming were mimicking the testosterone so now without the steroids you have lower testosterone.

This is known as hypogonadism and you start to lose energy.

At 48 hours of quitting you are extremely fatigued because of how low testosterone now affects the red blood cells in your body.

Your body relies on red blood cells to transfer oxygen as a source of energy throughout your  Testosterone binds to cells in the kidney to stimulate the release of erythropoietin EPO which promotes red blood cell production.

With the lack of testosterone from quitting steroids your body has less red blood cell production which means less oxygen and less energy for cells.

You might remember the discussion with Lance Armstrong and how he used EPO to increase his red blood cell count to win the Tour de France.

Here's a clip of him admitting it to Queen Oprah.

Did you ever take banned substances to enhance your cycling performance?

Live strong baby especially if you're on EPO.

So again at 48 hours you have lower EPO less testosterone and less energy from quitting steroids.

At 72 hours your sleep is now affected by the low testosterone.

The exact mechanism that testosterone affects sleep is not known but there have been plenty of research showing that poor sleep can reduce testosterone levels and vice versa.

One study showed that for every hour of sleep lost there was a testosterone drop.

Even people with obstructive sleep apnea which affects their quality of sleep have been shown to have lower testosterone levels.

So when testosterone levels are low this makes it harder for you to get a good night's sleep.

Not getting a good night's sleep makes your testosterone levels lower.

So you might notice that quitting steroids has affected your ability to sleep.

After a week of quitting you will feel muscle aches and joint pain because testosterone usually promotes the release of anti-inflammatory cytokines from your immune cells.

Now since the steroids affected your hormone system and you have lower testosterone the inflammation can accumulate in muscles and joints.

This is also around the time you may see that muscles are reducing in size because testosterone is less present to help with the maintenance of muscle.

So it is after a week that the gains start to noticeably go away.

At one month you may notice erectile dysfunction.

Again since the steroids decrease natural GNRH production this by proxy decreases the follicle stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone which help chemically message the testes to produce testosterone.

The lack of testosterone is now affecting these hormones to the point that it may be hard to maintain and get a boner.

After two months the acne that has been building up all over your face and body will finally start to disappear.

Testosterone stimulates the growth of sebaceous glands in your skin which produce acne.

The low testosterone would reduce the acne's presence.

After three months of stopping steroids depressive symptoms and mood changes may get worse without testosterone replacement therapy.

Some studies have shown a higher suicide rate in those that have previously used steroids and withdrawal can make suicidal ideation worse.

This has actually been shown to be the main reason why people start to use steroids again.

It's to deal with the depression and anxiety that they are now feeling.

At seven months you might notice that things are looking up as your boners erectile dysfunction begins to improve because the testes starts to produce testosterone on its own.

Seven months baby and the testes are back.

They're just getting back to creating testosterone on their own.

The quality of your sperm now starts to improve again because the follicle stimulating hormone and the luteinizing hormone are again being able to message to your testes to create sperm in a more significant way.

But it has been seen that erectile dysfunction can take up to a year to improve but for many people it starts at seven months.

After a year is when you start to see your testes begin to grow again after shrinking.

One study showed that after 15 months the testes size in former steroid users was 5.2 milliliters larger than current steroid users.

But the former users still had testes 4.9 milliliters smaller than non steroid users which means it could take well over a year for your testes to get back to normal size.

Clearly steroids have a negative effect on your body.

This video is important to understand what happens when you finally decide to stop using them because say you're sick of the acne or the tiny balls.

But it also explains why stopping steroids immediately could create many issues.

It doesn't really give your body the chance to start creating testosterone again on its own.

There may be ways to slowly reduce your steroid use in order to not create such a strain on your body.

Again you need to talk to a doctor about this or you just never start taking steroids in the first place and you don't have to worry about this as much.

Or this trend is just going to continue to grow because one recent survey found that 70% of steroid users were aware of the negative impacts.

Thank you so much for watching this video.

Maybe it will make more bros become natty.

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