My position on steroid use in strength sports is pretty straight forward: I don’t care if people want to use them. They just shouldn’t compete in drug tested Federations.
I think the best way to look at drug use in strength sports is simply not to make the comparisons between drug using athletes and natural, drug free athletes. Steroid use just changes all the important variables, so there is literally no comparison. For example, steroid use will allow the athlete to perform more training volume, and to recover more easily from that volume. Steroid use will essentially switch on muscle protein synthesis 24/7, creating a permanent anabolic environment, where without these drugs, muscle protein synthesis is cyclical and of short duration, requiring the stimulus from resistance exercise to build new muscle proteins. Steroid use will literally cause the body to build lean muscle tissue, even without resistance training. Steroid use will help prevent the loss of lean muscle tissue when eating in a calorie deficit. When it comes to strength sports in particular, the single biggest difference between performance of similar athletes is the amount of lean muscle mass they carry on their frames. So the steroid user, even if all other things are equated, will have the advantage due to having more lean muscle tissue.
A former social media friend started a conversation I told him I didn’t want to have; i.e. that drug use provides about a 10% strength advantage. Although it wasn’t a conversation I was interested in having, and I said as much, I did state that if you only got a 10% bump in strength from steroid use, you weren’t doing it right. The debate continued, but the 10% number started to bug me later on. Is that really all one can expect from using anabolic steroids? It seems unlikely, as in the example I provided my former friend, i.e. if steroid use took someone’s Bench Press from 200 lbs to 220 lbs, no one would do them. He chose to poke fun at the “shit bench” but let’s face it; 10% is 10%. More to the point, he provided Greg Nuckols article about the difference between tested and untested records in Powerlifting that showed a roughly 10% difference in these records. So I decided I’d calculate what a 10% performance increase really means in practice.
Let’s take a hypothetical flight at a Powerlifting Meet in which the 6 lifters in the flight were so evenly matched, they ended up tied for the podium spots:
- Lifter A: 1500-lb Total for a 1st Place finish
- Lifter B: 1500-lb Total tying for a 1st Place finish
- Lifter C: 1450-lb Total for a 2nd Place finish
- Lifter D: 1450-lb Total tying for a 2nd Place finish
- Lifter E: 1400-lb Total for a 3rd Place finish
- Lifter F: 1400-lb Total tying for a 3rd Place finish
These lifters agree to meet again for another Competition, and agree that Lifters B, D and F will use a cycle of anabolic steroids during their preparation. 16 weeks after their first Meet, they compete again. The drug using lifters only got a 10% increase in strength as speculated above. Here’s the new results:
- Lifter A: 1500-lb Total
- Lifter B: 1650-lb Total for a 1st Place finish
- Lifter C: 1450-lb Total
- Lifter D: 1595-lb Total for a 2nd Place finish
- Lifter E: 1400-lb Total
- Lifter F: 1540-lb Total for a 3rd Place finish
The steroids literally knocked the former 1st, 2nd and 3rd place finishers right off the podium. Lifter F, who took 3rd Place in the original Competition had a better Total than the 1st Place finisher from the original Competition. That little 10% bump in performance sure made a difference.
Let’s also consider the fact that steroid use will allow one to build about twice as much muscle over a training career compared to a drug-free training career. So our hypothetical lifters who switched over to the Dark Side, should they choose to continue steroid use, will continue to build muscle well beyond just the 16-week cycle they did for this Competition. Over time they will become twice as muscular as their drug-free, former equals. More muscle will allow them to continue to get stronger at a rate that the drug-free lifters can’t match. At some point, our 3 drug-using lifters will not even be able to compete in the same weight class with their former equals as they will be carrying too much muscle to be able to stay at a similar weight.
When I said drug use changes all the variables, that was an understatement because it would also depend on which drugs one is using, and the dosage. For example, if I started using just a Testosterone dose of say 200MG per week, I would get a certain response to it. What if I took 600MG per week? What if I stacked other steroids with the Testosterone, like Deca-Durabolin, or Trenbolone? Like I said originally, the best way to compare drug using lifters with drug free lifters is just not to do it.
Do steroids provide just a 10% boost in strength performance? I think that’s an oversimplification, but even if that’s it, even if using all the drugs one was capable of using to increase strength performance provided no more than a 10% boost in performance, you would leave your competition in the dust.
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