Category Archives: Petptides

Shortlist Selection (which drugs should I try)

I thought I’d briefly outline a strategy I’ve been using to come up with a shortlist of potentially useful compounds. The issue is that there’s an extensive catalogue of performance enhancers and I can’t try everything; if I attempted to it would be forever before I’d likely have much of use to report. So I needed to implement some ways of thinning down the list.

Here are a number of reasons why potential drugs aren’t on my list to assess at this point, along with examples:

Because I’m looking at this from a bouldering perspective where explosive power and short bursts of strength are the name of the game, I’ve excluded a number of compounds from consideration which would be more appropriate for endurance athletes. A sport climber may benefit more from compounds such as Turinabol or Boldenone. A “trad” climber might benefit more from a fag and a pint of ale. For me though, there are drugs better suited to my objectives so they’re the ones which have made it into the shortlist.

Oxymetholone is a widely used and extremely effective pre-workout performance enhancer. It’s know to impart instant strength gains and obviously this could be very beneficial for bouldering sessions. However it is also associated with rapid weight gain and is totally counterproductive for a bodyweight-dependent sport such as climbing. There are many, many other compounds which fail to make the shortlist for similar reasons (Trenbolone is another example).

I’m obviously also limited by my ability to source the compounds in question. Stenbolone acetate for example seems, on paper, to be a potentially ideal compound for climbing performance. It might give me the strength enhancement I experienced with Masteron but without the muscle cramps and rapid fatigue. However I cant find it from a reputable, trustworthy source so there’s no point in considering it until that situation changes. Similarly Increlex is prohibitively expensive, even if I could find a trustworthy source for it.

Lack of proven efficacy is another concern and this is the case with many of the peptides and “sports supplements”. This is more of a grey area than an absolute criteria for me. For instance BPC-157 has pretty scant evidence in the form of clinical trials but there’s a large number of of positive anecdotal reports regarding it’s use. This could obviously be a placebo thing and I’ll attempt to control for that if I ever experiment with it. The price and other factors play a role here too; if it’s cheap and there’s no reason to worry about safety or side effects (as happens to be the case with BPC-157), I there’s a better case for considering it. A great rule of thumb turns out to be “is it banned by WADA?”. Strange as it seems, anti-doping institutions are the only funding bodies who have enough interest in performance enhancement to commission studies. If it’s not on the banned list then it either doesn’t work or hasn’t been fully assessed yet, in which case it probably will be on the watch list.

Based on the above criteria, an overall framework is starting to fall into place and this is something I’ll definitely go into in more detail in a future post. There are whole classes of compounds though, which just don’t fit into the emerging framework. This isn’t to say that I won’t look into them in the future, just that they aren’t currently my area of focus. SARMS (Selective Androgen Receptor Modulators) are the obvious exclusion from my current shortlist and in fact I have experimented with Ostarine already. There’s definitely space for consideration down the line but for now I have to limit myself to a manageable list of candidates so compounds which potentially show promise (LGD-4033, YK-11, S4, RAD-140, etc) will have to wait for now. This is no bad thing as they’re fairly new and could do with a few more years of clinical research and anecdotal reports.

Finally, for me to want to experiment with a compound, I don’t want it to be potentially dangerous. Most compounds have side effects which need to be managed and all can be assigned some level of risk. However if it was dropped from clinical trials, as happened to Cardarine because “animal testing showed that the drug caused cancer to develop rapidly in several organs”, I’m just not interested. Similarly DNP has caused multiple deaths, so count me out.

Now, onwards with experimentation…

Skin Doping (part one)

This is going to be a shorter post containing just a few quick ideas which will be elaborated on in the future. My skin happens to be pretty good. It’s not too thin or wet, and it’s not particularly susceptible to cracks or problematic callus buildup.

I climb on gritstone when it’s not raining (so about three days per year), and it’s particularly abrasive on the skin. The biggest problem I suffer is worn down, sensitive tips that need a few days to recover before I have enough skin to climb again. Occasionally when it’s really dry in the winter my skin will get a bit glassy and I’ll “dry fire” of holds; which leads me to the first product on this list…

Rhino Spit: I tend to train a lot on wooden holds. Humidity plays a big role in whether I can hang that fucking 45º sloper on the Beastmaker 2000 fingerboard. If the air is too dry, I slide right off. If the air is too wet, I slide right off. If it’s dry I can do something about it by breathing on my hands immediately before hanging, but this is approach is inconsistent and when it’s wet in the height of summer, chalk only works to a certain extent. Rhino spit really helps by extending this optimal window of humidity by a quite a bit in either direction. It feels like spraying plain water on your hands but when it dries the skin is more pliable and a tiny bit tacky. It makes the chalk work better in the summer and means I’m less likely to suffer from glassy skin in the winter. It can be applied mid-session and on top of chalk and when I’m climbing on slopers I might apply it three to five times during a session depending on conditions.

Growth Hormone: Experimenting with growth hormone secretagogues, I noticed that my skin healed remarkably quickly after an afternoon sessioning “Dry Wit in a Wet Country” at Robin Hood’s Stride. The night after climbing, immediately before going to bed I injected 300 micrograms of Ipamorelin and 300 micrograms of Modified GRF (1-29) subcutaneously into my belly fat. The next day I woke up and my fingertips were almost entirely back to normal; holding a hot cup of tea wasn’t painful and I felt ready to climb again. More research is needed on this but the results of this single experiment were promising.

Methenamine: This topical drug has been used for decades by climbers looking to toughen and dry the skin – most notoriously in a German product named Antihydral. Rhino Skin offer three products containing it. They are in order of increasing strength Rhino Performance, Rhino Dry, and Mikey’s Tip Juice. Dry and Tip Juice had absolutely no effect on my skin. Performance just acted as a very expensive, but pleasant smelling moisturiser. Methenamine is a very fragile molecule and degrades easily. My hypothesis that the Rhino products aren’t formulated in a way to preserve the activity of the active ingredient so by the time it’s reached me from the USA there’s no therapeutic potential remaining. I have some pure Methenamine I bought from eBay and I’ve been meaning to apply a 10% solution to my hands every night before bed for a week. I’ll report back with results.