I’m a bit surprised how little is being talked about this in the SARMs communities online. China has banned the production of SARMs. As 90% of the world SARMs are made there, it doesn’t take a genius to work out what happens to prices, and supply.
But it’s not all bad news, and the chatter out there about SARMs being banned in China is not entirely accurate.
Plus, there are alternatives you can look at personally. And, SARMs retailers are looking at alternatives as well.
So what I’m going to do here is talk you through everything you need to know about the SARMs ban. I’ll talk you through what’s happening with the Chinese ban on SARMs, and what you can do about it.
Why SARMs Are Worth Using
Before I tell you about SARMs and their availability at the moment, let’s just re-cap on why SARMs are worth adding to your bodybuilding armory.
SARMs are selective androgen receptor modulators. They selectively activate androgen receptors in bone and muscle tissue. This allows faster and stronger muscle growth, faster recovery times, increased strength, and better motivation.
If you work hard and eat well, SARMs can increase your output and results by about 25% in my experience. That’s significant.
That’s why the demand for SARMs is increasing, especially as many people are seeing that the risk of using them is apparently very low after 20 years of anecdotal experience.
But that’s not the whole story about SARMs, and is definitely not the whole story about the ban on SARMs. It’s not as bleak as people are making out for several reasons I’m now going to explain.
China Has Completely Banned SARMs
China banned SARMs at the end of 2020. This was allegedly done under pressure from the USA as part of the trade deal, to stop the influx of cheap unregulated SARMs into the USA.
China banned the manufacture and export of the following SARMs:
- MK-2866 Ostarine
- SR-9009 Stenabolic
- RAD-140 Testolone
- GW-501516 Cardarine
- S-4 Andarine
- LGD-4033 Ligandrol
- S-23
That’s every main type of androgenic SARM. Which means, supplies of all of those are now finished.
What the USA retailers (and pretty much every retailer in the world) has in stock now, is all they are going to get. That means supplies available to buy are lessening, and prices will go up until low supplies are exhausted.
The Small Print On China’s SARMs Ban
So, the bad news here is that throughout 2021 the supply of SARMs globally was slowly dry up. Prices will increase, and eventually some SARMs won’t be purchasable at all.
But that’s not the entire story here, and most people are missing the bigger picture. Instead, they are proclaiming the end of SARMs as a bodybuilding supplement. That’s not the case at all.
Look at the list of the SARMs that China has banned. It’s only the anabolic ones. MK-677 and YK-11 are not on that list. Because they aren’t androgenic, they avoid the ban.
It’s the same with a lot of other metabolics as well. Although GW-501516 Cardarine is on the banned list, a metabolic very close to it in structure, GW-0742, isn’t on the list.
So the truth is the Chinese SARMs ban is a headline banned. They are just knocking out the main anabolic ones. But the non-anabolic SARMs, and closely related metabolic supplements, and not banned at all.
Which means that although you might have to switch and experiment, you will be able to swap to similar supplements even after the ban. There’s no suggestion supplies of those will dry up as they aren’t listed, so there’s no reason to stop making money from making them.
What About SARMs Made Outside China?
Right now, very few SARMs are made outside of China. Handfuls are made in the USA, some in India, and some in eastern Europe. But it’s less than 10% of the total output each year, so almost meaningless.
What I do know anecdotally, is that some of the Chinese SARMs producers are already in talks with Indian factories to produce SARMs there instead. So they will get around the ban by producing the SARMs in a different country, where SARMs production and use isn’t regulated.
In my opinion, by the end of this year those third-party factories will be up and running, and production will start. Once the pandemic is out of the way and India has recovered, I suspect in 2022, they will start to become the world’s dominant SARMs producer.
Also, there will also be more incentive to make them in eastern Europe where use isn’t banned or regulated, and even in the USA where you can produce them as long as it’s not for human consumption.
Again, the takeaway here is that SARMs might be banned, and supply might be difficult for a year, but if you stock up now, and research switching to other metabolics, then you may not even notice.
Then, a year down the line, other countries will have picked up the slack, and anabolic SARMs will be easy to buy at reasonable prices again.
So Should I Use SARMs?
I see no reason to not use SARMs. They really do work, are low risk in my personal opinion, and are still easy to obtain.
Don’t let the fact that China has banned them worry you. You can switch to similar metabolic substances, and (my strategy) you can stock up on the main SARMs from your favorite supplier as well.
Science.bio is where I buy my SARMs, and they still have plentiful stocks of the anabolic SARMs, such as Ostarine, Testolone, and Cardarine.
After what I bought is finished, I’m also going to try some similar chemicals to see how they work.
Plus, I’m going to use natural bodybuilding supplements more, things like the natural anabolic steroid alternatives from Crazybulk.
So there’s a way around this, and you just have to ride the wave until production picks up in other countries. I estimate that will happen within a year, and that’s not long to wait. For most people, it’s only actually going to be three SARMs cycles, which you can easily buy the chemicals for in advance.
Consider Using Different Supplements To Maintain Your Bodybuilding Goals
The anabolic SARMs may be difficult to obtain over the next few months. Get in quick and buy them now. Science do a deal depending on how many you buy, and you can also buy metabolic packs which lower the price even further.
But once those stocks are dried up, you can always look at alternative bodybuilding supplements instead.
If you love using LGD-4033, then you can switch to LGD-4. It’s very similarly named, because it’s very similar in structure. Not identical, but the benefits of Ligandrol are still in there. It’s a derivative, and because it’s not on the band SARMs this, it’s perfectly legal to make and export from China.
You could also try BPC-157. It’s a peptide, short-chain amino acid that been synthetically produced. It increases growth hormone receptors, reduces inflammation and promotes cell growth.
Science also sell ACP-105 and AC-186. Both of been shown in studies to mimic testosterone in a classic non-androgenic SARM manner, reduce anxiety, and to have potential neuroprotective properties.
So as you can see guys don’t think that anabolics are going to go away. Already similar structured chemicals are being constructed to those on the China banned substance list. This allows people to get around the ban supplying pretty much the same thing with a different name.
It’s exactly the same as what happened in the UK with legal highs. Whenever substance was banned in parliament, they would just alter the chemical structure and call it something else. You’d be getting the exact same thing pretty much, but with a different name and structure that wasn’t illegal.
What the UK government then did was to produce the “psychoactive substances act”, which was a blanket ban on anything that hadn’t been through the medicines regulator that had an effect in the body of getting you high.
But that’s not happened here with SARMs. The China ban specifically bans certain named substances. As long as it’s not that chemical structure exactly, it gets around the ban.
So the takeaway here guys is that SARMs might be banned, but they aren’t really banned that much in reality.
In addition, the chemical producing companies in China are already trying to get around the ban by getting Indian companies to produce the SARMs that they can’t.
The end result of all this is that once we are out of the woods with Covid, SARMs production will be back to normal globally, and the strong retailers in the USA who keep going, will reap the benefits.
My advice to close here is buying some SARMs now. Enough for three cycles, which will get you through a year. That way you should be able to completely avoid any consequences from the Chinese SARMs ban.
