Here’s something the fitness industry doesn’t want to say out loud: a massive chunk of the advice you’re taking from YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok was built for a body running on performance enhancing drugs. Not yours. In Episode 20 of the Kraken Power Podcast, Josko and Brandon break down exactly why that matters – and what natural training actually looks like for real people in Burnaby and beyond.

Table of Contents

Why We’re Talking About Steroids
How Steroids Actually Change the Body
The Advice That Doesn’t Apply to You
What Naturals Actually Need to Build Muscle
How Much Should You Actually Train?
What Are You Even Training For?
FAQ
Ready to Start?
Listen and Watch
About the Author

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Why We’re Talking About Steroids

Josko did steroids. Not for years, not as a lifestyle – for one bodybuilding competition, and then he got off immediately. He’s said it publicly before, and he says it again here. That experience gives him a perspective most coaches can’t offer: he knows what it feels like to train both ways.

The reason this episode exists is because the fitness industry has a massive, mostly unacknowledged problem. The people giving the loudest advice – the ones with the biggest followings, the best physiques, the most convincing transformation posts – are largely enhanced. Some are openly on steroids. Most aren’t saying anything either way. And the people watching them are naturals trying to follow advice that was never designed for their body.

This isn’t about judging people who use performance enhancing drugs. It’s about understanding that their experience of training, recovery, and nutrition is fundamentally different from yours. When you know that, you stop blaming yourself for not getting the results they’re showing you.

How Steroids Actually Change the Body

The main mechanism behind most steroids – particularly testosterone – is increased muscle protein synthesis. That’s the process your body uses to repair and build new muscle tissue after a workout. On steroids, that process runs significantly faster than it does naturally.

In practical terms: a natural person after a hard leg session needs roughly 48 to 72 hours to fully recover. Someone enhanced can recover from the same session in 24 hours or less. That’s not a small difference. That’s the difference between training twice a week and training every day.

There’s also the cortisol effect. Elevated testosterone down-regulates how the body responds to cortisol – the stress hormone that breaks down muscle tissue. An enhanced person in a calorie deficit can actually maintain or even build muscle while losing fat. For a natural person, that’s nearly impossible. The average natural loses roughly 25% of their total weight loss as muscle. An enhanced person can lose almost none.

Brandon’s factory analogy is useful here: their production line is simply running faster. The same inputs – food, training, sleep – produce more output on an enhanced body. You can’t replicate that by trying harder.

The Advice That Doesn’t Apply to You

Chicken, rice, and broccoli six times a day. 300 grams of protein. Six training sessions per week. Two days on, one day off, two days on. This is the standard influencer playbook – and it was built for a body on steroids.

The 300g protein recommendation exists because enhanced muscle protein synthesis can actually absorb and use that much. A natural person’s kidneys are working overtime processing protein their body can’t even use. The six-day training split works because enhanced recovery means each session is mostly cleared within 24 hours. For a natural, stacking sessions that fast just accumulates fatigue without the muscle-building payoff.

The influencer eating plain chicken breast every meal gets away with it because steroids protect against the hormonal and metabolic effects of a low-variety, low-nutrient diet. A natural person needs actual nutrients, not just macros. Sleep deprivation barely dents an enhanced person’s muscle mass because testosterone blunts the cortisol response that would otherwise eat into it. For a natural, consistently sleeping poorly stops muscle growth almost entirely.

None of this is the influencer’s fault, exactly. They’re telling you what worked for them. The problem is it worked for them on a body you don’t have.

What Naturals Actually Need to Build Muscle

Sleep is non-negotiable. For a natural person, poor sleep doesn’t just slow progress – it can actively reverse it. Cortisol rises when you sleep poorly, and without the hormonal buffer that steroids provide, that cortisol breaks down muscle tissue. This is why someone can train hard four days a week, eat decently, and still not build muscle if they’re sleeping six hours a night.

Nutrient density matters more than macros alone. Chicken breast has protein. It doesn’t have much else. Naturals need the full range of micronutrients – vitamins, minerals, antioxidants – because their bodies don’t have pharmaceutical help managing inflammation, oxidative stress, and recovery. Eating the same four foods every day for aesthetics is an enhanced strategy, not a natural one.

Stress management is training load. This is one of the most underappreciated points in the episode. Brandon puts it plainly: recovery is just recovering from stress, whatever that stress is. A stressful job, a tough week with the kids, a bad night’s sleep – all of that counts as load your body has to manage. When you add gym sessions on top of an already-stressed system, you’re not building muscle. You’re digging a hole.

Realistic muscle gain for a natural person is 1 to 2 pounds per month in the early stages. After the first year, that slows significantly – maybe 5 pounds per year, maybe less. That’s not failure. That’s biology. The people posting 20-pound transformations in 8 weeks are either enhanced, carrying a lot of water weight, or both.

How Much Should You Actually Train?

This is the part that surprises most people: for a lot of naturals, especially those with busy lives and real stress loads, training one to two days per week is not just acceptable – it might be optimal.

Most online advice says four, five, six days per week. That advice is calibrated for someone whose only job is to train and recover. If you have a demanding career, kids, and a full life outside the gym, you are already carrying a significant recovery debt before you even walk through the door. Adding more training sessions doesn’t fix that. It makes it worse.

Josko makes a counterintuitive point here: if you’re training three days per week and not building muscle, the instinct is to add a fourth day. But the right move is usually to look at sleep first, then stress, then diet. If all of those are dialled in and you’re still not progressing, try reducing to two days before adding more. More training on an under-recovered body doesn’t produce more muscle. It produces more fatigue, more injury risk, and slower progress.

Brandon’s framing – “there’s no such thing as overtraining, but there is definitely under recovery” – is the most useful way to think about it. You’re not training too much. You’re recovering too little. And for a natural, the solution to under recovery is almost never more training.

What Are You Even Training For?

Josko and Brandon get a fair amount of comments about their size. People show up to a fitness podcast expecting bodybuilders and find two coaches who are honest about the fact that they’re not enormous. Their response is worth repeating: if that’s what you came here for, this is the wrong podcast.

The vast majority of people who exercise – Josko puts it at around 80% – are not trying to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. They’re training to feel better. To be strong enough to play with their kids. To have energy for the rest of the day. To be the 75-year-old who can still pick something up off the floor.

Josko trains because strength improves his posture, his mood, and his ability to move. He thinks about what it looks like to be 65 and still fully functional – still capable of the basics without help. That’s the goal. Not a number on a scale. Not a certain amount of muscle mass. Just being strong, healthy, and capable for as long as possible.

Brandon trains for jiu jitsu performance and longevity. He literally can’t gain too much muscle – he’d move up a weight class. His goal is strength without size, which is the opposite of what bodybuilding-focused fitness content teaches.

The point is: define your own goal, then find advice that was built for that goal. Not advice that was built for a competitive bodybuilder on performance enhancing drugs.

FAQ

Are most fitness influencers on steroids?

Many are, yes – whether openly or not. The physiques, training volumes, and recovery speeds shown online are often only achievable with performance enhancing drugs. This doesn’t mean all fitness content is useless, but it does mean you need to filter advice through the lens of who it was actually designed for.

How much muscle can a natural person realistically build?

At the beginning of a lifting journey, roughly 1 to 2 pounds per month is average. That rate slows after the first year – maybe 5 pounds per year, possibly less. Progress varies by genetics, age, sleep quality, stress load, and consistency. Anyone promising faster results as a natural is likely enhanced or exaggerating.

How many days per week should a natural person train?

It depends on your life load. Two to three days per week is realistic and effective for most people with full lives and real stress. More isn’t always better – under recovery, not under training, is the more common problem. If you’re not progressing, fix sleep and stress before adding sessions.

Why doesn’t the chicken, rice, and broccoli diet work for naturals?

Because naturals need actual nutrients, not just protein. That diet was designed for enhanced athletes whose bodies are hormonally buffered against low-variety eating. Natural people need a broader range of micronutrients to support recovery, hormonal health, and muscle building.

Does sleep really affect muscle building that much?

Yes – more than most people realize. Poor sleep raises cortisol, which breaks down muscle tissue. For a natural person without the hormonal buffer that steroids provide, consistently bad sleep can stop muscle growth entirely and even reverse it. Sleep is not optional. It’s part of training.

Ready to Start?

If you’re in North Burnaby and you’re tired of following advice that wasn’t built for you, Kraken Fitness is a different kind of gym. Real coaches, realistic programming, and a plan that fits your actual life – not the life of a full-time influencer on performance enhancing drugs.

Give ME a FREE Week!

Listen on Your Favorite Platform

YouTube – https://youtu.be/yB_EEhT2m9A
Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/episode/50mWX2yiEsQX4E4MpfRTWa?si=4ec2ffeea2ac4735
Apple Podcasts – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/your-favorite-fitness-influencer-is-on-steroids-ep-20/id1769000945?i=1000766445620

About the Author

Josko is the Founder & CEO of Kraken Fitness in North Burnaby and co-host of the Kraken Power Podcast. He’s been coaching for over 12 years and has competed in bodybuilding – which means he can speak to both the enhanced and natural experience from the inside, not just in theory.

Brandon is the Co-Owner & COO of Kraken Fitness and co-host of the Kraken Power Podcast. He brings a kinesiology background to the show and trains for jiu jitsu performance – which gives him a perspective on strength and fitness that has nothing to do with looking a certain way.

[Josko]
I’ve been in the fitness industry for over ten years now. Like our first hour as a personal trainer, it was about 12 years ago. So I’ve gone through many phases and I’ve experienced many phases of the actual fitness industry as well. And so way back when, when I was competing in bodybuilding, I actually did steroids. I didn’t do it for the length of time that like a typical bodybuilder’s doing it – potentially years. I did it for a bodybuilding competition and then immediately got off. And so although I do look like a small little man now, it’s not my goal to get as big as possible anymore. That was for the bodybuilding days. I competed. I decided I never wanted to do it again, didn’t like where it took my health and how I felt. And also the imposter syndrome that came along with it as well. Like you’re telling people like…

[Brandon]
Be healthy, do this. You know, you got to sleep better.

[Josko]
You got to eat better. And then meanwhile, you’re like injecting synthetic hormones into your body. So the way that I see steroids has completely changed over time. And the reality is that right now, there are tons of people that are taking advice from people on steroids, whether the person is actually completely open about their steroid use or whether the person is, as they call them, like fake natty, you know? So this episode I want to just really talk about this, and I want to just let people know it’s like all these people that you’re listening to are likely on some sort of performance enhancing drug, whether it’s a peptide, whether it’s a steroid. So I just want to break down exactly why these people see good results, which is mainly the fact that they can recover insanely fast, twice as fast, even faster than that compared to a natural person, and the fact that they can hold muscle despite being in a deficit – meaning like despite eating less – they can still hold muscle and in fact even build muscle. So let’s get into it.

[Brandon]
So when we say steroids, this is kind of just a blanket term for a lot of the main kind of like testosterone that people are taking. But it also can include other performance enhancing drugs. But let’s just kind of talk about testosterone first. So when people are taking exogenous testosterone – more than what is actually physically capable of producing themselves, especially at a later age – your body is going to have an increased sense to muscle protein synthesis. And so muscle protein synthesis is going to allow you to recover from your workouts, build new tissues, and this is going to happen at a much faster rate that the normal person would. So let’s just say, for example, you go into the gym and you totally destroy yourself, like you go through a killer leg workout. A normal person, a natural person would probably recover from that fully if they’re doing things well, probably a 48 to 72 hours.

[Josko]
But…

[Brandon]
A person who is enhanced, they could probably recover from that in 24 hours or less.

[Josko]
Yep.

[Brandon]
So as you can imagine, the name of the game in the gym is basically go through a vigorous workout and recover from it. And through that recovery process is where you’re going to be building muscle tissue and either growing or just recovering and being able to redo that bout of exercise again.

[Josko]
And the thing is, a lot of these people on steroids, they’ll say like eat tons of protein. Like they’ll say like eat like 300g of protein. And it’s because of this muscle protein synthesis that their bodies can actually use up that protein to rebuild muscle. But your body just can’t do it. Like, you shouldn’t even be eating that much protein. Your kidneys can’t even handle it. In fact, their kidneys probably can’t handle it either. And that’s why you see such an increased risk of kidney disease with people that are on steroids.

[Brandon]
Totally. And you know, just think about it as like a factory. Their factory belt is just moving at a faster rate than yours really is. So the input that they can put in is going to give them much more output in comparison to a natural person. Now, in regards to the science in maintaining lean muscle mass – increased testosterone is actually going to down regulate how your body reacts to cortisol. And cortisol is going to degenerate and be more catabolic, which breaks down the tissues. And so they’re going to be less sensitive to cortisol. And so they’re going to retain more muscle mass through, like you were saying earlier, a caloric deficit. So most people when they’re in a caloric deficit, they’re going to lose some portion of fat, but they’re also going to lose some portion of muscle. And the name of the game in the bodybuilding world is to maintain as much lean muscle mass as possible as they’re losing total body weight. And so compared to a normal person, this person is actually going to lose probably up to around 25% of their lean muscle mass of their total body weight loss. Where a person who’s enhanced, they can lose almost like none.

[Josko]
In fact, they could probably even build muscle while they’re losing weight, which is pretty much impossible for somebody who’s natural.

[Brandon]
Yeah. The only people who really do that naturally are people who are just starting off, like the people who have never done any strength training before because they have so much more headroom to actually grow. So those people, they might put on 1 or 2 pounds of muscle per month, but that is like an extraordinary pace – the more experienced lifter will maybe put in a quarter of that in a month. So now you kind of understand a little bit more of like the context of how fast a natural person can grow and how fast an enhanced person can grow. How does this kind of change your view of the advice that you’re seeing online?

[Josko]
So you’ll see a lot of people that preach the chicken, broccoli and rice, protein shakes. All of that stuff. And the reality is that you can get away with building muscle when you’re eating plain chicken breast and rice and broccoli. But when you’re natural, there’s so many more factors that are going to come into play like your sleep. Like if you do not get enough sleep, you will not build enough muscle. Whereas somebody who’s on steroids, because of that effect on cortisol that you were mentioning, they can still continue building muscle even if they’re sleeping like four hours per day. And that’s where you’ll see a lot of these guys on steroids who are spending a lot of time partying, who are drinking every single weekend, and yet they still maintain a significant amount of muscle mass. It’s literally impossible for somebody to do that unless they have elite genetics, which is likely not the case for the majority of people that are watching this podcast. Like I’m just being realistic. Like that’s just not how most people’s bodies function. Those are the people that you see online that are like the 1%. Right? So that advice that they’re giving you – it’s like, oh yeah, this worked for me. You know, I eat chicken rice and broccoli. I had six meals per day. I slept for hours. I trained every single day for this entire week, like six days a week, one rest day. And I also went out on the weekend. That lifestyle is not real. That’s not real life for you as a natural. It’s like you need your eight hours of sleep. You need to make sure that you’re eating high nutrient dense foods – not chicken breast. Chicken breast has no nutrients inside it. It has protein. That’s pretty much it. And you need to make sure that you’re watching your cortisol levels. Make sure you’re not stressing your body out, both in terms of mental stress. You know, like people who are going through tough jobs are not going to be able to build as much muscle as somebody who has a chill life. But also just physical stress on the body – you’re not going to be able to train as much as somebody who’s on steroids.

[Brandon]
You may only be able to get away with…

[Josko]
1 or 2 days of training per week. I know this sounds so crazy to people, because most of the advice that you’re seeing online is train push pull legs, push pull legs, train six times for the whole week or four times in the week. You know, like a lot of people say two days on, one day off, two days on one day off. Right? That’s just not realistic for most people. Most people can only train maybe two days per week on average. And the reason why is because they have all this other stuff that’s going on in their life, and that’s going to prevent them from being able to build muscle and recover, which is the most important thing. So you can’t take advice from somebody who’s on steroids unless they really – I’m not going to say that every single person on steroids doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Right. There’s tons of people who are taking steroids who legitimately know what it’s like being a natural, but they’ve just decided not to be natural themselves. But you still need to understand that their advice is probably wrong.

[Brandon]
Maybe their advice isn’t wrong, but they’re just on a totally different playing field than you are. You can’t compare their situation to yours. Like you’re a dad with two kids and a stressful 9 to 5 job, and they’re an online fitness influencer whose job is to workout, eat chicken, rice and broccoli and do steroids.

[Josko]
Yeah, totally.

[Brandon]
So for you to go and be like, oh, I don’t understand why that workout that they’re doing isn’t working for me – you shouldn’t blame yourself. And being like, my genetics are predisposed to me being fat and overweight all the time. It’s just maybe not set up for what your ideal situation is.

[Josko]
So let’s talk about what’s realistic for somebody who’s natural. What’s realistic, what kind of results can you see, how to build your program and all of that stuff. So the one thing that you have to just respect is that at the beginning, people are going to be gaining about like 1 to 2 pounds of muscle per month. You know, I said at the beginning, there’s some genetically gifted people – let’s say there’s a 1% of people who can gain 10 pounds in the first month. But for the vast majority of people, building 1 to 2 pounds of muscle per month at the beginning stages of your lifting journey is probably about average. And then after that, it starts to plateau where potentially you may be lucky if you’re gaining 5 pounds of muscle per year, or maybe even like a couple pounds of muscle per year, or even potentially none. And we see that in the gym all the time. Like we can go in and train people and teach them how to do the proper form, put them on the correct programs, give them the proper nutrition. But then if there’s still other factors going on, like their hormones, their previous health – there’s so many different other factors that could be preventing them from gaining muscle. This is where you have to find the perfect balance for yourself with training. I was mentioning before, like potentially training only one time per week or two times per week if that’s where your body can handle. A lot of people, when they’re training like this, they think like, oh, the reason why I’m not building muscle is because I’m not training enough. I only train two times per week. I need to start doing three times per week. I need to start doing four times per week. And then what ends up happening is they end up gaining less muscle. In fact, they end up losing more muscle and getting weaker. And the reason why is because they’ve now crossed that threshold with their bodies – so much stress that it can’t even build muscle anymore. So if you’re not building muscle training three times per week, the first thing you should be looking at is fixing your sleep, fixing your stress, fixing your diet. If those things don’t work, then you have to reduce a day, not increase the amount of your training. It’s actually going the other way, which is crazy for a lot of people to think about. A lot of people would just think like they’re not doing enough. So you’re probably doing more than enough because you’ve been listening to all these people who are enhanced, who can get away with doing a lot, which is not the reality for most people.

[Brandon]
Yeah. And the one idiom that I kind of like to follow is like, there’s no such thing as overtraining, but there is definitely under recovery. And so for the natural person who’s working the 9 to 5, it’s more so like less is more a lot of the time – making sure you find that sweet spot of what you can do in the gym and what you can recover from, because you have to take into account not only just the things that you do in the gym, but the volume and the intensity that you live your life as well. Because recovery is just recovering from stress, whatever that is, whether that’s stress in the gym, whether that’s stress in your life. And so like when you’re picking your kids up from work and you’re stressed off from your job, that is stress that your body has to recover from. When you add that third or fourth workout, that’s just more stress that your body has to recover from. And if you dig yourself into such a deep hole that your body’s just having a hard time rebuilding from that, you’re just not in an ideal situation to build muscle.

[Josko]
We get these comments all the time on our YouTube channel and they’ll say, like, oh yeah, but look at your biceps. How much can you bench, listen to you when you have only 14 inch arms, you know? It’s like, first of all, they’re 15 inch arms. Okay. But it’s like, do you not realize that 80% of the people who exercise are not exercising just to build muscle mass and to look like a Rich Piana or like an Arnold Schwarzenegger? Like most people who are exercising are exercising for health, for building a little bit of strength to be able to play with their kids. What are the reasons why you exercise?

[Brandon]
Just feeling good and being able to feel capable throughout the day. The reason why I exercise is to get my mind right for the rest of the day, and honestly give myself a longer runway so I can live a long, healthy life. Also, I would love to perform better at jiu jitsu.

[Josko]
Yeah, okay, so you have longevity, health, and also performance. Yeah, it’s the same thing for me. I want to feel better. I feel better when I’m stronger. I feel better when I’m lifting. My posture improves automatically as soon as I start doing more weight training. And I want to be strong for my kids. I look at some of our older population and I’m scared of not being able to move my body when I turn 65. I don’t think that 65 is that old. I think in the future we’re all going to be able to live potentially over 100, right? And I don’t want to be the 65 year old who can’t lift the box off the ground, who can’t bend down. I don’t want to be the person who needs help from my family members just to do basic things in life. So that’s the reason why I exercise. And that’s the target market that we have. If you’re watching us on YouTube and you’re watching us on Instagram and you’re judging us for our lack of size, you’re watching the wrong podcast.

[Brandon]
Just a little tangent here. Like, I just don’t understand why the fitness industry has gone that way, where it’s like you’re only working out to be a bodybuilder. But there’s so many other reasons. Like if I go back to my jiu jitsu example – yeah, I’m working out, but I have a weight class. I don’t want to be a bodybuilder. I literally can’t gain weight.

[Josko]
Yeah, exactly. If you’re at the top of your weight class right now, if you gain an extra 5 pounds, you’re the smallest guy of the next weight class.

[Brandon]
Exactly. It’s a detriment to me. And I know that a lot of people think that muscle mass is easy to lose. It’s not. Muscle mass is actually hard to lose, especially if you continue eating healthy, sleeping well and exercising a little bit. If you gained 5 pounds of muscle, it’s going to take you a year, it’s going to take you two years to lose that. So you can go back into the previous weight class.

[Brandon]
But that’s why there’s weight classes. And this is a perfect example of how we can put a bow on this podcast, because in jiu jitsu there is no real regulation against steroids. And these guys are training multiple times per day, 2 or 3 really hard sessions, doing it every single day. And you as a natural being like, hey, I can only get in like one session before I feel like I’ve been in a car accident. And these guys are just like getting after it. So you’re just not getting the advice from the person who can realistically be in your shoes.

[Josko]
Totally.