This is a big month, because I’m going to do something I said I would never do.

When I started writing for Performance Menu a couple of years ago, I made a decision that I was never going to write an article about steroids and performance-enhancing drugs. The subject was obviously tempting because it’s one of the most controversial issues in sports, especially weightlifting. The drug issue is all around us, whether you’re a competitive lifter, cyclist, or a baseball player. It generates a lot of attention and buzz among practically every athletic community, and it’s just a really juicy subject. But still, I told myself that I wasn’t going to write about it for two reasons. The first reason is that I have no personal experience with steroids. I have never taken any kind of steroid in my life, so my expertise in the area is limited. The second reason I decided not to write about drugs is that I didn’t want to drive away readers from the magazine. I have some confusing opinions about steroids, and twenty years in weightlifting has taught me that many people disagree with me. I would hate for people to cancel their PM subscription because that Foreman guy is such a jackass.

However, most of the good things that have happened to me in my life were the result of taking some kind of risk. Knowing that, I think it’s time to examine the subject of performance-enhancing drugs, which we’ll abbreviate to PED to save space in this article. There as a million different directions we could go when we talk about PED, and I would like to touch on as many of them as possible.

Basics...

First of all, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page about steroids and how they fit in with our society. In a very basic way, steroids are testosterone-derived drugs that are designed to increase muscle mass and strength. Aside from medical uses of steroids to treat patients with some kind of hormone deficiency or other physiological problem, athletes have been using steroids since approximately the 1950s (and some say much earlier) to make themselves bigger, faster, and stronger. There are dozens of different types of steroids that can be administered in various ways (orally, injections, topical creams, etc.). Steroids, in most cases, are extremely effective. But when the Anabolic Steroids Control Act of 1990 became a federal law, possession and distribution of steroids became a crime. Steroids are a Schedule III Controlled Substance in the United States, which means that simple possession is punishable by up to one year in prison and a $1000 fine. There are a lot of technical details in this legal area that deal with states’ rights and United States Sentencing Guidelines, but the basic skinny is that steroids are illegal in this country and you can go to jail for being involved with them. Furthermore, steroids (along with dozens of other PED) are banned in all Olympic sports and most other professional sports organizations such as the NFL and MLB. If you are drug tested in these sports and you test positive, you will be suspended from competing. Suspension length varies from sport to sport, however. If you test positive in an Olympic sport, you could be looking at an automatic four year suspension. In Major League Baseball, I think you have to test positive seven or eight times before you miss a game. Nice, huh?

One of the reasons for the hysteria surrounding steroids is the issue of health risks. Steroids have been linked to problems with cholesterol, blood pressure, heart disease, liver damage, and various other physiological complications. Men often experience testicular shrinkage, women often experience clitoral enlargement, both sexes get acne, men lose hair on their heads and women grow hair on their faces, and a variety of other yummy side-effects. I’ve personally seen these side effects in many steroid-using athletes that I’ve trained with in my career. Not everybody encounters the same problems, though. Some men lose their hair, some don’t. Many women get voices deeper than Barry White, others don’t. And it’s also important to acknowledge that there are dissenting voices in this conversation. Many experts in the fields of medicine and sport science have asserted that the health risks of steroids have been greatly exaggerated by the media. Authors and physicians like Charles Yesalis and Mauro DiPasquale have stated that steroids are practically harmless if administered intelligently by a doctor. Powerlifting guru Louie Simmons states that he has taken steroids continually for over thirty years with no health problems.

If you do enough reading, you’ll continue to hear conflicting views on the health issue. I don’t pretend to have a scientifically backed-up opinion in this area. But without a doubt, the biggest negative side effect I have most definitely noticed with steroid users is the psychological aspect. Steroids, from what I’ve been able to see in my lifetime, can potentially do one hell of a job on your personality. The increases in rage, aggression, and mood disorders can be startling. The chance for psychological dependence is heavy and there’s a high risk of depression when the athlete quits using. In the interest of fairness, however, I should also mention that I’ve known some steroid users who maintain fairly normal, balanced temperaments. There doesn’t seem to be a 100% certain guarantee of roid rage. But I would say the ratio I’ve noticed is probably somewhere around 70% psycho and 30% normal. Almost every male steroid user I’ve ever known has been involved in some kind of assault at some point, usually beating up girlfriends. Not all of them have done it, but many have.

Do people die from taking steroids? That’s a tricky question. Over the years, the media has sensationalized some specific situations where athletes passed away and their demise was attributed to steroids. The most famous case of this was when NFL legend Lyle Alzado died of a brain tumor in 1992. In the months prior to his death, Alzado publicly insisted that his brain tumor was a result of his steroid use, which he claimed had been going on uninterrupted for twenty years. One of the fastest growing strength sports in the world is strongman competition, which most people know from the World’s Strongest Man contests on ESPN. Almost all strongman competitions in the world are not drug tested, which has allowed an uncontrolled steroid rampage in the sport. Several famous strongman competitors have died prematurely and almost all of the deaths have been heart related. Heart complications are one of the most common problems associated with steroids. However, does that mean that these men died from taking steroids? Not necessarily. As far as I know, there has never been a single death directly attributed to steroid use. But I also think common sense would have to bring some heavy questions to the surface in these cases.

They will make you strong though, no doubt about it. I mentioned earlier that I have never taken any kind of steroid. However, my long career as a strength athlete has allowed me to train and form close relationships with several athletes who have taken them. The results are astounding. Obviously, there are different levels of effectiveness in PED and some of them aren’t going to produce the same dramatic gains as others. But for the most part, an athlete who takes a potent anabolic steroid or PED will experience shocking increases in strength and muscularity. I obviously won’t mention names in this article, but I’ve seen some of these increases first-hand and they are incredible. Every serious juicer I’ve ever known has verified that they got at least a 10% gain in their max lifts through steroid use, and many of them say the number is more like 20%. That’s just what I’ve heard, man...

The times, they are a-changin’

The world of PED has evolved quite a bit over the last thirty years. Back in the 70s and 80s, athletes who wanted to use steroids had to talk to a doctor or go on the "black market" and look for anabolic substances with names like dianabol, winstrol, or deca-durabolin. These days, however, there are various supplements that contain some kind of PED and they can be bought at a health food store or ordered on the internet. Dozens of companies have found ways to design "sports performance supplements" that look and sound just like any other protein powder or amino acid that you would buy at GNC. But these companies are putting various kinds of testosterone-boosting ingredients into their products and selling them as legally as apple fritters. There is no risk of arrest or jail time by using these products, and many of them have impressive levels of effectiveness. Nobody goes to prison and your lifts still go up. Sounds great, right?

Now, the International Olympic Committee isn’t stupid (just morally bankrupt). The IOC has given their drug testing responsibilities to an organization called the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and WADA has placed all of these testosterone-boosting ingredients on the banned substance list. So if you’re an Olympic athlete and you take one of these supplements I’m talking about, you’re still going to test positive and get banned. Over the last fifteen years, I have personally known a few athletes who tested positive and were suspended from competition because they were using some of these legal supplements and there were banned substances in them that they didn’t even know about. Now, the American branch of WADA is the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and they have a drug hotline phone number that you can call to find out if a particular product is on the banned substance list. This is supposed to give Olympic athletes a way to verify that they’re not going to get busted by making a simple phone call and checking out their supplements before they take them. I’ve used this hotline myself, and it’s about as useful as putting a styrofoam cup to your ear and asking to speak with Jesus. If you’re being tested by the USADA, the only safe bet is to avoid taking any supplements other than the basic ones like fish oil, creatine, and protein powder. However, non-drug tested athletes can use as many of these products as they want and there will certainly be some gains.

Passing tests and ethical dilemmas

Let’s make sure we’re clear about one thing. There are a lot of athletes in this world who take steroids and do not get caught when they take their drug tests. They beat the test. How do they do this? There are several methods. Some athletes take human growth hormones that are undetectable in urine tests, and they get regular check-ups from a doctor to make sure they are keeping their body’s testosterone/epitestosterone (TE) ratio below the legal WADA limit. Some athletes have medical staffs working with them that create "designer drugs," which are anabolic substances that blend with your individual body chemistry to make the substance undetectable in a urine test. The infamous BALCO scandal from 2003 was a good example of this practice. These two methods aren’t the only ones, either. The drug users have it down to a science. They have to, because top athletes in Olympic sports are required to take part in random drug testing. This is where a USADA drug testing official shows up at your house with a drug testing kit and requires you to give a urine sample on the spot. Well, not exactly "on the spot." It’s not like they make you do it in the doorway. They let you go to the bathroom, but they watch your equipment the whole time you’re urinating. Talk about performance anxiety.

On top of all this, it’s a commonly known fact in Olympic weightlifting that most of the top weightlifting countries in Europe and Asia are extremely lax about their random drug testing. In 1997, I personally heard one of the highest ranking officials of the International Weightlifting Federation tell my coach that random drug testing was not being conducted in China because it was too difficult. A former world-level lifter from Russia told me that drug testing officers in his country could easily be bribed with a little cash. In other words, most of our international competition is juiced to the gills, and they’re getting away with it because of shoddy drug testing. But for better or worse, random drug testing is a serious reality in the United States. I was on the US random testing list for over ten years, as were most of the top athletes on my team, and we got the knocks on our doors pretty frequently. If you’re a top US lifter, you get tested all the time. This is the catch-22 of being an American weightlifter. You can’t take drugs because of the stringent drug testing in our country, and most/all of your top competition at the international level is taking drugs and getting away with it. Sounds frustrating, right? Buddy, you don’t know the half of it.

Now, some US athletes have simply decided to take the plunge and start juicing anyway, hoping to get away with it. Most of them have been caught and suspended. Some of them haven’t. I knew a top US lifter a long time ago who took PED and got away with it for seven years before he finally tested positive. I know others who never tested positive. It can be done, and the interesting thing is that I’ve heard several voices over the years who say that it SHOULD be done. These voices say that American weightlifters should start taking PED and finding ways to beat the tests, just like Russia and China have done. If we say we want to get to the top of the world and win Olympic gold medals in weightlifting, then we have to level the playing field and start taking the same drugs as our competition. Drug testing has not eliminated drug use in sports, and it probably never will because of the sheer determination of the drug users to beat the tests. Knowing this, we have to start juicing if we want to compete with the best. That’s the philosophy that I’ve heard over the years, and the sentiment seems to be growing.

Let me make it clear that I don’t agree with this argument, but I can understand the different sides of it. My life in weightlifting has been one long string of conflicting feelings about this issue. First of all, I don’t believe in cheating. I know, I know... Call me a boy scout, call me a puritan, whatever. I just can’t find a way to convince myself that it’s okay to knowingly lie and break the rules. But then I have times when I’m reading about the American Revolution and how one of the major reasons why our colonial forefathers defeated the British was because our troops resorted to using guerilla-style sneak attacks instead of standing in an open field and fighting "by the rules." They learned how to fight dirty. In other words, they cheated. And they won. Their victory gave birth to one of the most successful countries in the history of civilization. So were they wrong because they simply did what they had to do for victory? Does the end justify the means?

I’ve been tempted over the years. I remember one night when I was sitting in a bar having a beer with an extremely successful American weightlifter from the 80s who openly told me that he used tons of PED when he competed. It didn’t bother me to know that, which is another strange contradiction. I’m strongly against steroid use, but I don’t have a problem with people who have done it...weird. Anyway, I was talking to this lifter and he asked me what kind of drugs I was taking. I told him, "Nothing, I don’t take anything." He was shocked, and he asked me what my best official lifts were. I said, "155 snatch, 185 clean and jerk." He sat there for a second and I could tell he was doing some quick math in his head. Then he said, "If you started juicing, you’d do 170 and 205 in six months. In two years, you’d be closer to 180/215, guaranteed."

That conversation was strong bait, definitely. 180/215 wouldn’t have made me a world champion, but it probably would have got me on the Olympic Team. Now, those numbers were just talk. There’s no guarantee that I would have done them even if I had juiced. I probably would have got caught at some point, and then I would have had the wonderful opportunity to look my mother, my father, and all of the high school kids I coach in the eyes and tell them that I was a suspended drug user. Sorry, I just couldn’t live with it. So I made the decision to stay clean, and I’ve held to it all these years.

But how about you?

Many of you aren’t competitive athletes. Many of you are just trying to get as strong as possible and now that you read my section on legal testosterone boosters that can be bought on the internet, many of you are probably speed-reading the rest of this article so you can hurry up and start googling. Hey, more power to you. You won’t be breaking any laws or federation rules, so what’s the harm in sampling the wares a little bit? I personally wouldn’t have a problem with it. I’m a drug-free lifter, but I’m also a big believer in freedom and I don’t like to judge people or cop some kind of holier-than-thou attitude. The only time I have a problem with it is when the personality changes become too intolerable. Roid raging psychos aren’t fun to be around and they make our sport look terrible.

Just remember a few things. If you start taking PED, you’re taking some risks. You’re most likely going to make some big gains, sure. But when you stop taking them, you’re going to lose those gains (or at least a large portion of them). That’s going to be rough on your ego. You could always handle that by just taking the PED forever, and you have to accept that you’re rolling the dice with your health if you do this. If you’re somebody who already has a high sex drive, taking testosterone boosters is going to greatly accelerate it and you might wind up with some "stiff" problems (oh lordy, I crack myself up). Any hereditary health problems that you might be facing in the future (liver, kidneys, heart, depression, etc.) could be worsened if you dabble in the wrong PED. Even the legal, internet-bought testosterone-boosting supplements out there can still cause acne, gynecomastia, increased anger tendencies, and the whole gamut of other hazards. Long story short, it’s a gamble. But so is marriage.

There’s always one other option, and this one is really wacky. If you want to get really strong, you could always follow the Foreman Five-Point Plan (not to be confused with the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique). Here it is:

1) Set some realistic goals for yourself
2) Make a commitment to your training
3) Eat a healthy diet
4) Train hard
5) Train smart

Like I said...wacky.