A Part issuing a note of caution is in order before we move on to Part 2. While the primary focus of this book is training, at this point I want you to clearly understand what role, if any, anabolic steroids play in building muscle and why they pose a health risk, so we can put the topic behind us.Bear in mind that steroids don’t represent the whole of bodybuilding drugs and are only one class of such substances. However, steroids are so much in the public eye these days that they warrant a preliminary presentation devoted to what they are, what they do, what they don’t do, and whether their supposed benefits outweigh their obvious risks.
TWO CLASSES OF BODYBUILDERS
In the course of my career as a bodybuilding journalist, I came to be disabused of a great deal of my naïveté about the sport—or so I thought, until one memorable day. During an interview for an article, I casually asked a bodybuilder what drugs he took in preparation for a contest. In response, he picked up a pen and proceeded to write out a laundry list of substances, including Dianabol, Clembuteral, Halotestin, Fastin, and others— noting whether each was taken daily, every other day, during the off-season, or right before an event.
The roster he provided stunned me. Despite my supposed enlightenment, I still believed that bodybuilding was about training intelligently and building the body through scientific dietary practices. Evidently, though, there are two classes of bodybuilders: “real” and “professional.” The real bodybuilders are from the old school and develop hard, honest muscle through their efforts in the gym. Far too many professional bodybuilders compose the other class. They inject all sorts of bizarre substances into their bodies, causing their muscles to become swollen or “puffy,” and they are paid big money to risk their lives to look this way.
Small wonder that most of the bodybuilders who are heavy drug users end up looking like hell. The vast majority of the competitors of the 1970s and ’80s have suffered serious coronary problems and/or look as if they never touched a weight in their lives. Some look considerably older and worse for wear than most beginners to the sport. Contrast that camp with champions such as Steve Reeves, John Grimek,
It’s no secret that anabolic steroids abound in the sport of bodybuilding, not to mention most other professional sports, including baseball. Many champions won’t train unless they are on “roids,” “the sauce,” “the juice,” or whatever hip label they apply. Some swear that you can’t expect to compete without them, and some have recently gone to jail for peddling them to aspiring bodybuilders just like you!
That “juice” has been with us, in greater or lesser amounts, for decades. After the 1988 Olympic Games fiasco in
Does this scenario imply that everyone in the sports of track-and-field and body building is on anabolic steroids? No, but it does mean that athletes will now have to seriously calculate the consequences of using the drugs should they be caught—and with effective drug tests they probably will get caught. (I say “probably” because most athletes know ways to beat the tests.) A
more urgent question is, will the athletes who use anabolic agents cause irreparable damage to their bodies or, perhaps, die from their ingestion? This is where the picture becomes very murky indeed. The issue of whether steroids are as dangerous as some reports allege rests largely upon the individual response and dosage. This leads us to the exploration of just what anabolic steroids are and how this whole mess got started.
THE ORIGINS OF ANABOLIC STEROIDS
Anabolic steroids are synthetic derivatives of the male sex hormone testosterone. There are two components to any male sex hormone: androgenic and anabolic. The former refers to the masculinizing effects, such as facial hair, deepening of the voice, and aggressiveness, while the latter refers exclusively to the drug’s tissue-building properties.
Anabolic steroids have been described as the “scourge of bodybuilding”—ironically, by a bodybuilder who later developed severe gynecomastia (a condition, resulting from steroid use, that develops breast tissue in males). (Who ever said that to be a bodybuilder, one must first renounce hypocrisy?)
Several international medical societies and sports organizations have also taken strong positions against steroid use, citing what they deem to be unsportsmanlike conduct and health hazards. This message, however, is ambiguous on both fronts. First off, competitors in a sport are expected to direct all of their energy toward being successful in their objective, and the use of steroids is viewed by many members of the athletic community as simply another means toward the attainment of this end. Meanwhile, the health-hazard threat has not been backed up conclusively, owing to a paucity of long-term experimentation in a controlled environment.
Athletes taking drugs is certainly nothing new. In 1879, the famous Six-Day Cycle Races were held for the first time, and even then, the coaches and trainers were known as drug mixers and “medicators” and were mixing some fairly potent potions—primarily derivatives of cocaine and heroin.
The term doping first appeared in English dictionaries around 1889 and referred to a mixture of opium and other narcotics used for horses. The root word can be traced to a Dutch word dop, which was a beverage given to Zulu warriors prior to battle. The word was subsequently adopted into the Boer language, and an e was eventually tacked on, resulting in dope—the slang term for
Regarding the activities and properties of androgens, some connection between the body’s muscle mass and the activity of androgens had at least been suspected by the medical community for many years. The limited muscular development of eunuchs, for example, has been known since antiquity.
The first real report on the effects of androgens injected intramuscularly was the Borgrows report of 1981, which revealed that protein was spared when synthetic hormones were injected. Forty-six years prior to this, German physicists had discovered that pure crystalline hormone could be both
The research of these and other scientists allowed relatively safe steroids to be marketed to the general public, meaning people who had a legitimate need for these substances. These initial steroids were never intended for healthy people! In the Second World War they were used for the treatment of burn victims specifically because of their tissue-building, or “anabolic,” properties.
They were also employed by the various hospitals in order to treat patients who, for whatever reason, were unable to manufacture their own testosterone and consequently lacked the benefit of the hormone’s androgenic properties, the male secondary sexual characteristics necessary for normal and complete physical development.
It wasn’t long afterward that athletes, hearing of the drugs’ muscle-building properties, decided that since the male sex hormone testosterone was responsible for the development of sex characteristics such as increased musculature and reduced adipose storage, it followed that by increasing the ratio of testosterone within their own bodies, they would achieve a corresponding increase in their muscle size and strength. That would be a definite plus for their athletic endeavors. Ben Johnson is proof that, on the surface, their assumptions were correct. Bodybuilders in particular exploited this new drug. There are accounts of bodybuilders using steroids for the purpose of increasing their muscle mass as far back as the late 1940s.
THE SIDE EFFECTS
The bodybuilder who considers using steroids is immediately faced with an ethical decision: is the end really going to justify the means? Does a moment of fame and a medal really compensate for possible liver impairment, heart disorders, and sterility? The attitude of athletes is already well known: for the most part, they develop a tunnel vision about victory; they feel they must win—at any price. What is less known is what price this attitude carries with it in terms of the physical and often mental aberrations that can be engendered by anabolic ingestion.
Since steroids act directly upon the nervous system, your personality—being a product of your nervous system—is the first noticeable area of change. The many psychological symptoms noted while people are on steroid therapy range from fluctuating libido to headaches, lethargy, and aggression. Research also reveals that these side effects are dose related and are reversible on cessationof the drug.
REALITY
The reality of the situation is that steroids, like most other things, have the potential to do the user much harm if they either are abused or are ingested by someone who is genetically susceptible to certain medical conditions such as liver tumors and heart disease. That detail alone should give one pause. The central problem is that an accurate assessment of how steroids will affect you can be made only in retrospect, and by then it might be too late. Too little is known of both the effects and the side effects of steroids to make experimenting on yourself and becoming an anabolic guinea pig worth the risk.
Besides, take a gander at the sort of physique that anabolic steroids produce and ask yourself if looking bloated and undergoing frequent liver, blood, and serum testosterone tests (a regular battery is recommended for steroid users) and footing a monthly bill of $300 really justifies the final result. (That dollar figure, by the way, is low. I know of a Masters Mr. Olympia competitor who spent upward of $80,000 in anabolics while preparing for the contest.)
Then look at the physique of Steve Reeves, with his flawless proportions and bona fide, drug-free, eighteen-and-a-half-inch arms, which he obtained by training properly. To my mind, there’s no comparison. (See, you’ve already saved yourself a minimum of $3,600 a year!)
All this is not to take anything away fromour current crop of champions. I just think that they would look much better than they currently do if they dropped the synthetic chemicals that have altered their appearance into something other than human and tried instead to look the best they can with their own natural human physiologies via proper training.
1 comments:
Ignorance of steroids is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.
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