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There is no way to know for sure how much muscle it’s possible to build drug-free. It’s naive to assume that pre-steroid era bodybuilders reached the absolute limits of drug-free muscularity, but now that Pandora’s box is open, we can never be totally sure about modern lifters who claim to be drug-free. We’ll never know for sure where the limit lies.
Instead, we can estimate the likelihood that someone is drug-free or not based on their degree of muscularity. How? Math, of course. Don’t worry, we made some calculators that do all the heavy lifting for you.
Over the course of a training career, it seems like steroids allow you to build about twice as much muscle as you’d be able to build drug-free.
This article seeks to shed some light on a common question: It’s obvious that steroids help people gain more muscle than they’d have been able to gain drug free … but how much more?
I want to make it clear from the outset that I’m not going to attempt to answer this question in the common (and quite frankly, lazy) manner people attempt to answer it.
The most common approach is simply to compare bodybuilders before the steroid era to bodybuilders today.
On its face, this seems like a pretty reasonable approach. However, upon closer examination, there are two fatal flaws with this approach:
In nearly every other sport in existence, results of the very best improve over time as the sport gains more exposure and as incentives increase.
This approach only tells you about the difference between drug-free muscle growth and muscle growth with every drug under the sun. Most people who use gear are never going to run a drug cycle comparable to today’s top bodybuilders, and this type of comparison doesn’t tell you what would be reasonable to expect from a more restrained approach to PED usage.
The first critique is very straightforward. When the talent pool in a sport grows, freakier freaks come out of the woodwork. The top performers get results several standard deviations better than the average person. The further you move from the mean, the lower your odds of finding someone with that level of talent in a given talent pool. The more athletes you have in a sport, the higher your odds of finding someone a bit further from the mean.
This is easy to see if you compare pro athletes in the 1940s and 1950s to pro athletes today. Here’s the best running back in the NFL in the 1940s vs. the best of this generation – Steve van Buren vs. Adrian Peterson.
Has Peterson had better training than van Buren? Almost certainly. Is there the possibility that Peterson used pharmaceutical enhancements than didn’t exist in van Buren’s day? It’s certainly possible. But I don’t think anybody would seriously contend that van Buren could compete in today’s NFL (even if he had all the advantages afforded to modern players), or that Peterson wouldn’t have made the NFL of the 1940s his stomping ground.
This trend is clear across the board in the NFL. This site has a neat illustration showing the average size of NFL players over time.
This trend is also true in essentially every sport. Very few pro athletes in the ’40s and early ’50s would even beat the top high school athletes today. This is subjective in team sports, but you can compare the high school track records to the world record progressions in the same races; most world records “passed” the current high school records in the mid-’50s to mid-’60s. Heck, Doug Hepburn became the first 400lb bencher in the early ’50s, and there are plenty of high schoolers who can bench press over 400lbs now.
As sports grow in popularity and as incentives increase, more people compete, so the best of the best keep getting better and better.
Before you cry that all of that progress is due to drugs, let’s step back for a moment. Drug testing in the Olympics didn’t start until 1968, and the World Anti-Doping Agency wasn’t created to combat the ongoing problem of drugs in the Olympics until 1999. Drugs can certainly explain some of the progress since the advent of steroids (first used widely in competitive sports by the Soviets in the 1952 Olympics), but if they were the key factor, you’d expect the records from before 1968 to be untouchable, and you certainly wouldn’t expect people to keep setting records after 1999.
In fact, likely because steroids would be expected to give women a bigger boost, the female shot-put record set in 1987 is almost a full meter farther than any throw since 1999, and 22 of the top 25 throws of all-time occurred before 1999. WADA certainly doesn’t catch everyone, but that’s solid evidence that it is doing its job fairly well.
Sure, athletes still use, but they can’t use as much anymore, and they certainly can’t use as openly. At the very least, they have to cycle off for international competitions, which impacts performance; yet performances keep improving. Training has likely improved, but most of the progress is attributable to larger athlete pools.
In other words, assuming that the pre-steroid era bodybuilders of the ’40s and early ’50s represented the absolute peak of drug-free muscular development is extremely naive. Bodybuilding’s athlete pool was certainly more limited than that of Olympic sports. Calling bodybuilding an underground sport in the ’40s and ’50s would be an understatement. The modern gym with weights didn’t really take off until the ’60s. It’s impossible to get an exact count of aspiring bodybuilders in that era, but the number was certainly tiny – certainly tinier than the athlete pools in the other sports producing (comparatively) amateurish performances during that era.
Modern bodybuilding has way more visibility, larger incentives, and a dramatically larger athlete pool than it had in the ’40s and ’50s. Comparing the top pros of the ’40s and early ’50s to the top pros of today certainly tells you something about the effects of steroids, but the comparison is hopelessly confounded by the effects of a dramatically larger talent pool. If you added steroids to the NFL in 1946, you still wouldn’t get talent comparable to the NFL in 2016 (although obviously the NFL has way more visibility and way larger incentives than modern bodybuilding).
The second problem with comparing bodybuilders of the ’40s and early ’50s to today’s pros is that such a comparison only gives you hints about what is maximally possible with huge amounts of drugs. The average steroid user isn’t on the same drug stack as IFBB pros.
There’s a clear dose-response relationship with steroids. The more you do, the more muscle they help you gain. If you’re not planning on using the same drugs in the same dosages that pro bodybuilders use, seeing how much of a boost they get from their stack doesn’t give you realistic expectations for what to expect from a more moderate approach.
Before we dig into the data, let’s just briefly discuss hypertrophy in a general sense.
When you first start lifting, you gain muscle pretty quickly. Over time, the gains taper off. You may gain a little faster when you’re in a calorie surplus, lose a bit of muscle in an aggressive deficit or if you took a break from the gym, or gain muscle fairly quickly for a period of time after your newbie gains if you found a program that really clicked with you; but on the whole, if you graphed your hypertrophy progress, it would look like a curve that initially rose rapidly, tapering off until it started approaching a horizontal asymptote that corresponded with your genetic potential.
When you add drugs into the mix, you initially gain muscle very rapidly. It’s sort of like another period of newbie gains, and perhaps even more extreme.
For example, in this study, reasonably well-trained men (90-110kg/200-240lb bench and 100-125kg/220-275lb squat on average) went on 600mg of testosterone per week for 10 weeks. The people who used test while also lifting gained about 6.1kg (about 13.5lbs) of lean mass, on average. That’s a ton of muscle! That’s more than the drug-free high responders (the people above the 85th percentile or above for mass gain) in this study on untrained men.
However, those easy gains obviously don’t carry on forever. It’s very similar to drug-free training – rapid gains initially, tapering off over time.
With more drugs, unsurprisingly, you gain more muscle. As previously stated, there’s a very clear dose-response relationship. If people could just use 500mg of testosterone per week and keep gaining muscle indefinitely, there would be no reason for people to take more and more compounds at higher and higher doses.
The effect is basically the same – a quick spurt, followed by leveling off. The second (third, fourth, fifth, etc.) growth spurt generally isn’t as big as the first one, assuming someone is increasing their dosages gradually, but the general effect is the same.
Full Article: How Much More Muscle Can You Build With Steroids? • Strengtheory
There is no way to know for sure how much muscle it’s possible to build drug-free. It’s naive to assume that pre-steroid era bodybuilders reached the absolute limits of drug-free muscularity, but now that Pandora’s box is open, we can never be totally sure about modern lifters who claim to be drug-free. We’ll never know for sure where the limit lies.
Instead, we can estimate the likelihood that someone is drug-free or not based on their degree of muscularity. How? Math, of course. Don’t worry, we made some calculators that do all the heavy lifting for you.
Over the course of a training career, it seems like steroids allow you to build about twice as much muscle as you’d be able to build drug-free.
This article seeks to shed some light on a common question: It’s obvious that steroids help people gain more muscle than they’d have been able to gain drug free … but how much more?
I want to make it clear from the outset that I’m not going to attempt to answer this question in the common (and quite frankly, lazy) manner people attempt to answer it.
The most common approach is simply to compare bodybuilders before the steroid era to bodybuilders today.
On its face, this seems like a pretty reasonable approach. However, upon closer examination, there are two fatal flaws with this approach:
In nearly every other sport in existence, results of the very best improve over time as the sport gains more exposure and as incentives increase.
This approach only tells you about the difference between drug-free muscle growth and muscle growth with every drug under the sun. Most people who use gear are never going to run a drug cycle comparable to today’s top bodybuilders, and this type of comparison doesn’t tell you what would be reasonable to expect from a more restrained approach to PED usage.
The first critique is very straightforward. When the talent pool in a sport grows, freakier freaks come out of the woodwork. The top performers get results several standard deviations better than the average person. The further you move from the mean, the lower your odds of finding someone with that level of talent in a given talent pool. The more athletes you have in a sport, the higher your odds of finding someone a bit further from the mean.
This is easy to see if you compare pro athletes in the 1940s and 1950s to pro athletes today. Here’s the best running back in the NFL in the 1940s vs. the best of this generation – Steve van Buren vs. Adrian Peterson.
Has Peterson had better training than van Buren? Almost certainly. Is there the possibility that Peterson used pharmaceutical enhancements than didn’t exist in van Buren’s day? It’s certainly possible. But I don’t think anybody would seriously contend that van Buren could compete in today’s NFL (even if he had all the advantages afforded to modern players), or that Peterson wouldn’t have made the NFL of the 1940s his stomping ground.
This trend is clear across the board in the NFL. This site has a neat illustration showing the average size of NFL players over time.
This trend is also true in essentially every sport. Very few pro athletes in the ’40s and early ’50s would even beat the top high school athletes today. This is subjective in team sports, but you can compare the high school track records to the world record progressions in the same races; most world records “passed” the current high school records in the mid-’50s to mid-’60s. Heck, Doug Hepburn became the first 400lb bencher in the early ’50s, and there are plenty of high schoolers who can bench press over 400lbs now.
As sports grow in popularity and as incentives increase, more people compete, so the best of the best keep getting better and better.
Before you cry that all of that progress is due to drugs, let’s step back for a moment. Drug testing in the Olympics didn’t start until 1968, and the World Anti-Doping Agency wasn’t created to combat the ongoing problem of drugs in the Olympics until 1999. Drugs can certainly explain some of the progress since the advent of steroids (first used widely in competitive sports by the Soviets in the 1952 Olympics), but if they were the key factor, you’d expect the records from before 1968 to be untouchable, and you certainly wouldn’t expect people to keep setting records after 1999.
In fact, likely because steroids would be expected to give women a bigger boost, the female shot-put record set in 1987 is almost a full meter farther than any throw since 1999, and 22 of the top 25 throws of all-time occurred before 1999. WADA certainly doesn’t catch everyone, but that’s solid evidence that it is doing its job fairly well.
Sure, athletes still use, but they can’t use as much anymore, and they certainly can’t use as openly. At the very least, they have to cycle off for international competitions, which impacts performance; yet performances keep improving. Training has likely improved, but most of the progress is attributable to larger athlete pools.
In other words, assuming that the pre-steroid era bodybuilders of the ’40s and early ’50s represented the absolute peak of drug-free muscular development is extremely naive. Bodybuilding’s athlete pool was certainly more limited than that of Olympic sports. Calling bodybuilding an underground sport in the ’40s and ’50s would be an understatement. The modern gym with weights didn’t really take off until the ’60s. It’s impossible to get an exact count of aspiring bodybuilders in that era, but the number was certainly tiny – certainly tinier than the athlete pools in the other sports producing (comparatively) amateurish performances during that era.
Modern bodybuilding has way more visibility, larger incentives, and a dramatically larger athlete pool than it had in the ’40s and ’50s. Comparing the top pros of the ’40s and early ’50s to the top pros of today certainly tells you something about the effects of steroids, but the comparison is hopelessly confounded by the effects of a dramatically larger talent pool. If you added steroids to the NFL in 1946, you still wouldn’t get talent comparable to the NFL in 2016 (although obviously the NFL has way more visibility and way larger incentives than modern bodybuilding).
The second problem with comparing bodybuilders of the ’40s and early ’50s to today’s pros is that such a comparison only gives you hints about what is maximally possible with huge amounts of drugs. The average steroid user isn’t on the same drug stack as IFBB pros.
There’s a clear dose-response relationship with steroids. The more you do, the more muscle they help you gain. If you’re not planning on using the same drugs in the same dosages that pro bodybuilders use, seeing how much of a boost they get from their stack doesn’t give you realistic expectations for what to expect from a more moderate approach.
Before we dig into the data, let’s just briefly discuss hypertrophy in a general sense.
When you first start lifting, you gain muscle pretty quickly. Over time, the gains taper off. You may gain a little faster when you’re in a calorie surplus, lose a bit of muscle in an aggressive deficit or if you took a break from the gym, or gain muscle fairly quickly for a period of time after your newbie gains if you found a program that really clicked with you; but on the whole, if you graphed your hypertrophy progress, it would look like a curve that initially rose rapidly, tapering off until it started approaching a horizontal asymptote that corresponded with your genetic potential.
When you add drugs into the mix, you initially gain muscle very rapidly. It’s sort of like another period of newbie gains, and perhaps even more extreme.
For example, in this study, reasonably well-trained men (90-110kg/200-240lb bench and 100-125kg/220-275lb squat on average) went on 600mg of testosterone per week for 10 weeks. The people who used test while also lifting gained about 6.1kg (about 13.5lbs) of lean mass, on average. That’s a ton of muscle! That’s more than the drug-free high responders (the people above the 85th percentile or above for mass gain) in this study on untrained men.
However, those easy gains obviously don’t carry on forever. It’s very similar to drug-free training – rapid gains initially, tapering off over time.
With more drugs, unsurprisingly, you gain more muscle. As previously stated, there’s a very clear dose-response relationship. If people could just use 500mg of testosterone per week and keep gaining muscle indefinitely, there would be no reason for people to take more and more compounds at higher and higher doses.
The effect is basically the same – a quick spurt, followed by leveling off. The second (third, fourth, fifth, etc.) growth spurt generally isn’t as big as the first one, assuming someone is increasing their dosages gradually, but the general effect is the same.
Full Article: How Much More Muscle Can You Build With Steroids? • Strengtheory
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