[PowerManDL]

It's a cause-effect thing.

No, steroids don't do it for you, but they sure do facilitate things.

You can 1) work harder w/o negative consequences and 2) get greater benefit per amount of work.

Whereas a one-hour workout might net 1 arbitrary unit of return and a two-hour workout would be too much to recover from, add in even a moderate dose of AAS and now you not only get 1.5 units of return from that hour in the gym, you can get 2-2.5 from that two hour session. Do more work, and recover from that work, and of course you'll see better results.

That's irrespective of the fact that androgens do Good Things (TM) to muscle fibers and protein synthesis rates (which is actually how they cause all this to happen).

To say that "it's not drugs, it's hard work" is dismissive of the fact that the drugs do indeed change the equation. No one is (well, I'm not) denying that you still have to work hard and put in the time, but deflecting the topic away from the drugs is pointless: people take them for a reason.