5 Tips for More Comfortable Shots
Are You Needle-Sensitive or Needle-Phobic?
By William Llewellyn
The practice of placing a syringe in the freezer the night before your injection makes your shots pinch a bit less.
If you’ve been reading my articles, you’ve probably noticed that I like to recommend injectables like testosterone and nandrolone over orals, particularly for cardiovascular safety. Test and Deca don’t provide the same strong, negative impact on cholesterol values as tablets like Dianabol or Anadrol, and therefore, are at some level comparably much safer drugs. All anabolic-androgenic steroids have a tendency to negatively alter the HDL/LDL balance, but injectables like these are just so much less dramatic in this regard. It’s really hard to keep them in the same category of drugs, actually. If I had one piece of advice for long-term safety, it would be to stick with the shots and drop the pills. Drugs like Dianabol and Anadrol work very well, but a noncompetitive bodybuilder can make exceptional progress without them. Why risk it if you don’t have to?
Once you understand the difference, another problem may quickly arise. Many people just don’t like needles. Pills are so much easier and less invasive to deal with. Sticking yourself with the dreaded needle can be a difficult hurdle to get over, at least mentally. Realistically, you’re talking about a very small instrument and not one that really causes a lot of physical pain to the user. But that rationalization often does little to help. Most people expect the shots to be very painful and may react badly at any attempt to administer one, especially their first. Yes, there’s some legitimate discomfort with intramuscular injections, but it’s usually minor. Regardless, in an effort to reduce this minor irritation and help some people go in a direction they really want to but have been reluctant, I’ve assembled the following five recommendations for more comfortable shots. I hope they’re helpful.
1. Use a Vapocoolant
Vapocoolant is just a fancy term for a skin refrigerant. These agents are used to numb the skin before injection, so that the nerves near the surface are less able to send pain signals as the needle is inserted. For years, Freon (refrigerator coolant) was used for this purpose. It was prepared as a spray and would be applied to the skin for 10-15 seconds with the use of a cotton ball (it shouldn’t be directly applied to the skin). Given the damaging effect Freon has on the ozone layer, sprays of this type are now restricted. There are other agents that can be used for the same purpose and they shouldn’t be too hard to find. Ethyl chloride seems to be a popular substitute. Short of this, you can also hold an ice cube or two to the skin for a minute with a small hand towel or plastic bag. Remember to dry the skin and apply alcohol before injection. You should know that physicians generally don’t bother with this type of thing for small intramuscular injections. They’re viewed as unnecessary, and these practices tend to be reserved for much more invasive and painful injections. But for the needle-sensitive or needle-phobic, it just might do the trick.
2. Use Frozen Needles
Noting the success of vapocoolants with reducing injection pain, a doctor (Dr. Keith Denker) undertook an experiment to see if freezing a needle before injection would offer any anesthetic value. During the study, a total of 77 patients were given two injections each. With one, the needle was at room temperature (as injections are by default). The other injection was given with a needle that had been placed in a freezer overnight. Approximately three out of four patients reported less injection pain when receiving the frozen needle. It turned out that the cold needle instantly imparted a small anesthetic value to the tissues it came into contact with. The study was done with facial injections of Botox, but seems to work well (anecdotally) with other types of injections too. The practice of placing a syringe in the freezer the night before your injection makes your shots pinch a bit less.
3. Choose the Right Spot
Where you choose to inject may have some bearing on how much the shot hurts. The buttock (outer upper quadrant) is the preferred site for intramuscular (IM) steroid injections. This area of the body is less densely packed with nerve endings compared to other common injection sites (like the shoulder and thigh) and also has the benefit of allowing a comparably slower release of steroid. It’s tempting to try and use the shoulder straight off, as it’s more accessible. It is indeed an acceptable injection site if you’re familiar with the practice, but can be trickier to navigate if you aren’t. It will also not sustain a depot as long as the buttocks and may cause you to wind up requiring more injections overall due to frequency. And, of course, it will cause more pain for the needle-sensitive. Go with the butt first.
4. Use a Fresh Needle
No, I’m not talking about sharing needles or reusing old ones. What I’m talking about is replacing the needle with a fresh one after the steroid has been drawn from a vial with a rubber stopper. When I first read Dan Duchaine’s comments about a single pass through a rubber stopper dulling a needle considerably, I must confess I laughed it off. A needle is metal I thought, rubber is rubber. Metal beats rubber and is certainly not going to grind down the edge of a strong needle in one shot. It took trial and error before I realized Dan’s advice was right on. It’s not actually a matter of grinding away at the metal, but the very fragile nature of the fine point. It can fatigue under pressure and begin to curl back. This is often so slight that you can’t see it with the naked eye, but is very clear under a microscope. I wouldn’t advise going any larger than 22 gauge, and you might even want to find a 25-gauge pin. It takes a little longer to fill the syringe with the smaller diameter of this needle, but is a lot less painful going in. The true “pin connoisseur” will draw with a room temperature, 18- to 21-gauge needle and replace it with a frozen, 22- to 25-gauge pin right before injection.
5. Get a Little Help from a Friend
Many needle-sensitive people find it a whole lot less painful to let someone give the injection to them instead of doing it themselves. I know it sounds weird, but mentally, the pain seems to be more pronounced when you’re doing the insertion yourself – you’re feeling the skin as it stretches right before it breaks and providing each tiny bit of force that will drive it through the fat and muscle tissue. When you aren’t actually feeling and watching all those parts of the process, it can be a lot less nerve-wracking. This way, you simply wait for that small pinch on your butt while your buddy does all the work and drives it in (no jokes, please). Yes, you need someone competent for this, of course.
William Llewellyn is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the use of performance-enhancing substances. He is the author of the bestselling anabolic steroid reference guide ANABOLICS and CEO of Molecular Nutrition. William is an accomplished researcher/developer in the field of anabolic substances, and is also a longtime advocate for harm reduction and legislative change. He built the website anabolic.org, an extensive online database of information on anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs.
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