Tableted steroids are popular with athletes. Find out what path they make in the body in order to understand the mechanism of their action. Most athletes have never thought of the oral steroid pathway in the bodybuilder's body. In principle, this can be understood, since the main thing for them is the result. But not everything in this matter is so simple. It's not enough just to take pills and wait for the muscles to grow. For some athletes, pill steroids may not have any effect at all. This is what the conversation will be about today.
The biochemical mechanism of how oral steroids work
Almost all medications affect the body at the cellular level. As you know, cells are composed of a membrane, a nucleus and protoplasm. The drugs interact with the cellular substance and change its chemical composition. As a result, the work of cells also changes, after the attack of medications. The changes that have occurred at the cellular level are transmitted to the entire body.
All chemical reactions occurring in the human body obey general laws, among which two can be distinguished:
- The reaction directly depends on the concentration of the drug;
- Two substances are able to interact only if certain proportions are observed.
One of the most important indicators is the concentration of the drug in the tissue on which it is supposed to affect. Thanks to this indicator, it is possible to determine with what interval, and in what quantity, this remedy should be taken. However, the concentration of a substance in the body depends not only on the dosage used. The rate of absorption and excretion from the body is also of great importance.
When the drug enters the body, the concentration of the active substance in the blood begins to rise rapidly. After reaching the peak value, this indicator decreases.
When the concentration of the drug is inferior to the effective one, then the desired effect cannot be achieved. At the same time, an overdose of the drug is also dangerous, which leads to the manifestation of side effects. In medicine, there is the term "therapeutic breadth of action", which defines the difference between a toxic dosage and an effective dosage. There are times when even an experienced doctor finds it difficult to determine the required dose of the drug. When the biomechanics of the effect of tableted anabolic steroids has become more and more clear, we can talk directly about the path of oral steroids in the body of a bodybuilder.
Barriers to Oral Steroids
Until the moment when the steroid is at the point of destination and a sufficient concentration of the drug is accumulated to affect the body, it must overcome a large number of obstacles. First of all, the substance must be in the bloodstream, then overcome the walls of the blood vessels and enter the tissues. After that, the steroid must bypass the cell membranes and interact with the protoplasm.
On this path, the drug must avoid meeting the molecules of all kinds of protein compounds, erythrocytes and leukocytes. The main task of the above substances is to prevent foreign molecules (and such for the body are any drugs) to the target tissues. There are also a large number of different enzymes in the body that also prevent oral steroids from reaching muscle cells.
Stomach
Once in the stomach, the tablet begins to swell when exposed to liquids and eventually disintegrates. It is to speed up the process of dissolving the tablets and it is necessary to drink them with water. Some of the drugs are absorbed into the bloodstream already in the stomach, but most of them are absorbed in the intestines.
It should be noted that some tablets have poor solubility and pharmacologists are forced to look for various ways to speed up the dissolution process. The stomach is the first major obstacle to the muscle tissue of a bodybuilder's oral steroid route. The process of digesting food for a pill is tantamount to destruction.
If you take oral medications at the same time as food, then most of the active substances will be destroyed and will not be able to have the expected effect on the body. For this reason, the tablets should be taken at least 30 minutes before eating.
Blood and liver
When an oral steroid crosses the gastrointestinal tract, it enters the bloodstream and ends up in the liver. These organs are the most dangerous part of the movement of the pill. Any foreign substance is perceived by the liver as a threat and every effort is made to destroy it. Very few substances are able to overcome this barrier.
When, nevertheless, this is done and the pill passes through the liver, then the blood carries the active substance throughout the body. From this we can conclude that the concentration of the active substance should be approximately the same in all tissues. In practice, however, this is not the case. Some organs are able to store more drug than others. Of course, the chemical properties of substances are of great importance here, for example, the indicator of their solubility in fats and others.
Only by overcoming all of the above obstacles, oral steroids will produce the desired effect on the body. However, at the same time, mention should be made of the elimination of the substance from the body. Quite often, this process begins almost immediately after using the drug.
Various substances are removed from the body in their own way. The most important organ responsible for this process is the kidney. Most drugs leave the body in this way.
In second place in terms of importance for excretion of drug metabolites from the body is the intestine. Other methods of elimination, such as sweat, are not as effective.
You will learn more useful information about the effect of oral anabolic steroids on the bodybuilder's body from this video:
