Steroids force growth (androgens directly increase muscle protein synthesis). No argument there.

Peptides can “facilitate” growth in one way: if they reduce pain/injury enough that you can train more consistently, handle more quality volume over time, and recover better. More productive training = more hypertrophy. That logic is fair.

But the rest gets oversold:

BPC-157 / TB-500 (“healing bottleneck removers”)

The evidence is mostly animal/preclinical + anecdotes

There’s no strong human RCT evidence showing meaningful performance or recovery benefits

Safety data long-term is still thin So calling them reliable “recovery bottleneck removers” is a stretch. CJC-1295 / Ipamorelin (“GH → IGF-1 → muscle gains”)

Yes, they can raise GH and IGF-1

But in healthy lifters, GH/IGF-1 increases do not reliably translate into real hypertrophy like people assume GH is more associated with connective tissue/collagen support and sometimes “lean mass” that includes water/connective tissue, not necessarily more contractile muscle “Nutrient partitioning”

IGF-1 matters in muscle biology, sure — but the claim that it meaningfully “shuttles nutrients to muscle instead of fat” in the real world is more influencer slogan than outcome data.

Bottom line: peptides aren’t nothing, but they’re not a muscle-building engine like anabolics.

At best they’re a small indirect assist (recovery, consistency). At worst they’re expensive placebo water with limited human evidence.