To be honest I thought spurfy said var was better than ALL drugs for bulding muscle.
I need to go re-read the thread.
I stand by this statement. On a mg/mg basis, oxandrolone is the most anabolic of all the AAS. The problem is that most oxandrolone users' dosages fall well-short of an anabolically equivalent dose of an alternate AAS.
So if Tren is 5X that of T, and Oxandrolone is (on average) 6X that of T (while being only 3% less bio-available), then doses of oxandrolone need to be about 17% lower than those of Tren to reach anabolic equivalency.
Couple this with:
1. The fact that, apparently, a very large amount of what is sold as oxandrolone is either not oxandrolone or highly underdosed
and
2. Total weight gain on cycle is almost never precisely quantified as to what exactly is water, muscle, fat and glycogen
and
3. AAS users mistakenly think oxandrolone is a "finishing" drug and run it for short periods of time at the end of a cycle
and
4. Oxandrolone users run it during the daytime, which creates problems in AR/GR cross-talk -- causing loss of appetite, fatigue, etc, which directly sabotages efforts at muscle building. (Of course you're going to build more muscle on tren if you're eating more calories than on an equipotent dose of Var)
So we end up with people horribly overestimating the muscle building effects of tren, using oxandrolone improperly (should be run for entire cycle and taken as a single dose in the evening, around 6:00 PM, *not in the morning*), using bunk/under-dosed product, and then seeing "only" 5-10 lbs in weight gain with oxandrolone vs. 20 or more with tren, and then this misconception persists about oxandrolone being "weak" especially when compared to trenbolone.
Take two guys, put one on 500 mg/week Tren (and nothing else) and the other on 500 mg/week oxandrolone (and nothing else). All other things being equal, the guy on Var will build more muscle as measured via muscle biopsy, not "Brah, I weigh 220 now. Dem gainzzzz!"
Oxandrolone appears to be unique among AAS in that it actually stimulates the growth of new myocytes, an effect shared with rHGH, and not just hypertrophy of existing cells. This is why oxandrolone produces lean, "dense" gains -- total muscle *size* changes less than with tren or T, but actual muscle *mass* gains are greater due to a denser packing of myocytes.
Oxandrolone also shifts cross-talk between AR/GR in a manner that is highly favorable to anabolism in muscle tissue with simultaneous catabolism of adipose tissue. This means that total fat loss must be taken into consideration when looking at weight gained during a var cycle as well.
Pharmacology and the scientific method don't care about your experience with one versus the other, what you think, how you feel, or that one thing "should be" a particular way -- oxandrolone is still the most powerful anabolic drug available right now, and whether this fact is believed or not changes nothing.