People say doses these days have gone up because the quality of gear has gone down, that's just not true. Ptosis have gone up because word has gotten around that guys have been using big doses for a long long time. I remember back in 97 oh well known "guru" letting the cat out of the bag I bought most of the big guys running a minimum of 4 grams a week. And that 4 gram per week Mark being "where the magic starts to happen" and you'd see anabolic activity independent of the AR once ARs were saturated, (with AR supposedly being saturated at 3000-3500mg of test alone. If that were the case, there'd be no need to use anything other than 3500 (call it 4g to be safe) test per week, then add in GH, slin,& t3... And studies supposedly showing AR upregulation with higher doses, but I'm skipping ahead about 10yrs here)
..then maybe a year or so after that, another fella "in the know" making it known (to people nationwide/not in LA) that the common dose for the "big guys/freaks" at Gold's in Venice specifically, was 4 grams of test and 2 grams of deca, either year-round or offseason... "Offseason" being year round for most.
Keep in mind this was all years before the crackdown on the Mexican vet steroid producers and most guys...nearly everybody was still using non-ugl stuff.. Either "pharmacy" from Mexico/Romania/Spain/Brazil/Thailand, or vet stuff from Mexico and Australia... And the only concern about quality was if their Brovel/Tornel t200 was actually 200mg or 150mg/ml, or their QV or PetPharma Enan was actually 350mg or 275mg/1ml, or how much anadrol was actually in their QV tabs etc etc...
Then of course fast forward to a few yrs ago and you had bostin talking about his 10-13g cycles and a fella named O'regan and him helping a bunch of young guys turn pro with Cycles in the six or seven Gram a week range.
"Back in the day", say 98, guys not "in the know" would worry about using 3 primotestins per week vs 4, thinking 4 would produce more neg sides.
Now, with the internet and message boards, more people know what is possible and safe and what isn't. Just like with insulin when I started out. Everybody thought 15 IU's per day would either kill you or make you diabetic. Nobody really had an answer 2 certain questions, so some of us took it upon ourselves to experiment and disprove (or prove) a lot of the myths.
Do you "need" 3-5g test a week plus 1-2g "other stuff"? No....but does it make a difference? Of course. Even just 500 mg of testosterone per week by itself will produce a decent physique... But 5000mg just makes things a whole lot easier. At 4, 5, 6g EVERYTHING you do works. You can do everything "wrong" and get better results then a guy using one gram a week doing everything "right", and nobody really cares. There's no "honor" in using less and looking good... you just come off as a crybaby, like guys like Shawn Ray saying they're not winning shows because they're not willing to do the stuff other guys are. Nobody cares.. And usually nobody believes you anyways. It's more likely that the guys not winning are using the same amount of drugs as the guys who are winning, they're just not getting the same results. They don't have the same genetics. They don't respond the same to a drugs. Not everybody is born with the genetics of a guy like Kevin levrone or Flex wheeler. I remember back in the day a decade ago or more the rumor of flex wheeler just looked in her smelling a 10 mg tablet of dbol and growing like a weed... Come find out Flex wheeler was using enormous amounts of drugs just like everybody else it's not like he was using a gram and getting the results of guys using 6 grams.
If you can afford it, but say You're A supplier, and you have unlimited Supply, why wouldn't you use as much as you wanted? So long as your blood pressure wasn't Sky High you weren't getting nose bleeds tying your shoes you weren't covered in acne and your liver enzymes weren't in the 200s... Why not use as much as possible? As if there is some honor in walking around and telling people that you're only using a v the amount of the guy who won the super heavyweight class at the border states or Emerald cup or whatever mr. YMCA show or what the fuck ever..Nobody cares.
It's 2018 and it's been almost two decades or more that guys have been pushing the envelope as far as dosages and all the myths of our livers falling out and are kidneys disintegrating have largely been disproved.