There is a concept of "borrowed physique" that some bodybuilders talk about. It is usually after a "cycle" when a bodybuilder starts losing his muscle mass that he goes through a difficult phase; some even suffer through depression.

Because it is inevitable that your body cannot sustain peak performance for a long time. Especially since you cannot afford to run that amount of gear all year. The smart ones know this and prepare for this in various ways, but no one will tell you that its easy, because it is a devastating experience to lose something that you have put so much effort to cultivate and are desperately trying to hold on.

Veterans will advise you to let it go - to accept that fact that you never own your physique. You merely borrow it for a short period of time. And you have to pay your rent - the damage and stress your body goes through, the stuff you have to eat, the stuff you have to inject, the stuff you have to give up, the stuff you have to go through. No sane man would want to do it.

but bodybuilders do not claim to be sane men.

I know because I have been lifting heavy weights since 2012.

What I have realized is that it is the same with a lot of other things. You can't expect to put effort once to achieve something and then claim it for life. To keep being good at something, you have to keep putting effort. If you don't pay your rent, your skill will be taken away from you. Nature is very forgiving in the fact that it does not take it away immediately like a landlord would evict defaulters. No, it is a slow, gradual decline.

One day, you are so good at the guitar that you start to doubt reality. A couple months later, you start to feel like Charlie Gordon.


Algernon