Munzer

[redback]

Munzer

[curtus e flush]

that dude was always shredded.....he died right

[redback]

ya sure did, cut him open and his guts were full of blood

[bigscott]

Part 1
Dying to be Arnie

Andreas Munzer dreamed of emulating his hero, fellow Austrian and bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger. In this special report, Jon Hotten traces two careers - one of riches and fame that may yet lead to the White House, and another that ended in drugs and disaster


Sunday October 31, 2004
The Observer

He went to the stage as hard as a bag full of nails. He looked like the eighth wonder of the world up there: 17 stone of muscle and bone and not much else. He was huge and dense and cut. He had 21-inch arms, a 58-inch chest and enough junk in his bloodstream to kill a horse. It was certainly killing him. He lived in agony. If he had still had the will to turn his head to the left, he would have seen other men like him, Godzillas of the iron game. To his right, the same. They looked barely human.
They looked like a sub-strain, a spin-off, a genetic joke.

He was so dry that his lips kept sticking together. His body was arid. The last of his sweat rolled slowly down him, streamed by his deep striations. It left light streaks in his tinned tan. Andi fixed his feet harder into the floor and squeezed his unsteady muscle one more time.

The other guys still had some zap and heft and zing left in them. Kevin Levrone, 'The Maryland Muscle Machine', was ripped and zipped; Kenny 'Flex' Wheeler was as austere and beautiful as a Greek statue; Paul Dillett had a chest by Jackson Pollock, splattered with fat chunks of vein; Vince Taylor brought out his galactic shoulders; Shawn Ray ran as thick as a bull, front to back. It was a war of the strangest kind. Huge men in spangly thongs shoved each other aside so they could hit muscleman poses. There were 4,000 people watching them do it and they were going off while they did. The Veterans' Memorial Arena was a mushroom farm of jumping muscle. Most of the crowd were bodybuilders of a sort themselves - there were women who could have beaten the living crap out of you.

Andi already knew that the game was up. This was the final round of competition, the posedown - a concocted crowd-pleaser. It existed mainly to allow the judges time to verify the scores. Levrone, Ray and Dillett jumped from the stage and walked into the stalls so the fans could see them close up. They posed for photos. They gripped and grinned. Andi held on at the edge of the platform. There, perhaps one more judge might catch the final nuances of his development. Perhaps one more judge might move him up by one more place. Perhaps Arnold Schwarzenegger himself would look up from his seat in row two and understand that Andi's head had blazed with his name for 20 years. Perhaps then he would finally get his due and perhaps it would tip the balance of his life. His name was Andreas Munzer. For a decade, he had been the greatest bodybuilder in the German-speaking world.

Head judge Wayne DeMilia called the last six competitors into line. Schwarzenegger now stood in the wings ready to present the prizes. He had not been a bodybuilder for a long time; it had been 16 years since he was Mr Olympia 1980. But he remained the talisman of muscle. The Arnold Classic contest was named after him, promoted by him and dedicated to his glory.

In professional bodybuilding events, results were announced in reverse order. Andi would die soon, but he wouldn't die wondering. DeMilia said: 'Sixth place ... winning five thousand dollars ... from Austria ... Andreas Munzer...'

Andi picked up a slim cheque and a joke trophy. The applause was thin and slow. The crowd already had Munzer sixth. This was how things often were at the top shows. The consensus of years informed results. The judges had muscle memory, too.

There was a truism in bodybuilding: be born black or German. These were the favoured genetic lines. Through them, muscle thrummed down generations. Andi's people were farmers, 'simple with weather-tanned faces' as the press would later describe them. They lived a mile or so from the Modriacher Stausee reservoir near a village called Pack in the rural Austrian region of Styria. They ran a dairy business that just about kept them afloat. Andi absorbed their ethic of stoic self-improvement. He was a quiet boy and a hard worker. Andi paid his dues in the fields. He liked to play the trumpet in a local band, a Musikkapelle. During the summer, he played football. During winter, he skied.

Andi was hired as a toolmaker in Flach, a town 10 kilometres from the farm. He didn't have a car so he took the bus. Between finishing work and catching the bus home, Andi had a two-hour wait. 'To loaf about and drink beer was not his thing,' his father Killian said. Andi joined a gym instead. Passing time waiting for a bus home, he connected with his strange fate. Andi got big quick. The weight hooked up with those juiced-up Germanic genes. Ethics of work and sacrifice ran deep in Andi, too. His muscles began to haul him out of obscurity.

Andi's God was Schwarzenegger. Arnold was Austrian. Moreover, Arnold was Styrian. Arnold came from Thal, Andi from Pack. Arnold took up bodybuilding after seeing a muscleman working out by a mountain reservoir. Andi grew up by one. Arnold became the greatest bodybuilder in the German-speaking world. Andi was striving towards that end. Arnold was a seven-time Mr Olympia. Now he was a movie star, perhaps the planet's most driven man.

In the gyms, everyone was juicing. To succeed in professional bodybuilding, you had to. But you had to do many other things too. If winning pro shows was as easy as taking steroids, every loser iron-junkie, every tragic muscle rat, would be Mr Olympia.

Somehow, somewhere, at some point, Andi joined in. He had no choice. In chess, there is a position called zugzwang, where you must make a move, even though that move will cause you to lose. Drugs were Andi's zugzwang. Drugs were bodybuilding's zugzwang.

As he became more successful, Andi moved to Munich, where he was known as one of the nicest men in a sport mostly populated by meatheads, narcissists, egoists, attention-seekers, overcompensators and the terminally aggrieved. It was a sport that demanded extremity, so it attracted extremists. Andi was no such thing.

But he had made the deal. The Munich Andi would play the zugzwang. He hit some heavy cycles: he injected two ampoules of testosterone a day; he took the oral steroids Halotestin and Anabol; he combined them with Masteron and Parabolan; he used between four and 24 units of the growth hormone STH. Steroids aided muscle repair and general recovery; they allowed him to train with greater intensity. He combined different steroid types to maximum effect. He found that STH, the synthetic growth hormone, mimicked human growth hormone; it made everything grow - muscles, bones, organs, tissues. He ate 6-8,000 calories a day to nourish his muscles. He used insulin to stimulate his metabolism and churn the calories more quickly; he used at least five aspirin tablets each morning to thin his blood and help with the pain of training; he used ephedrine and Captagon to increase his intensity on the weights.

Fifteen weeks or so from competition, he would begin a rigorous diet designed to reduce his body fat. He would come down to 2,000 calories a day. In the days and hours before a show he used Aldactone and Lasix, both diuretics, to rid himself of the last of his water. Most pros would get close to competition shape once or twice a year. Anything else demanded too much; Andi maintained a reputation for always being in shape, or close to it.

The stomach pains had begun some months before Andi went to Columbus, Ohio, for the 1996 Arnold Classic. At first it was just more pain, and pain was the currency of muscle. Andi paid it little heed. It dug in and nestled down with all the other pain: the agonies of training, the banal deprivations of dieting down, the pulls, nicks, strains, jags and twists of the gym. But it kept coming back and its payload was different. A connoisseur of pain like Andi would soon have been able to tell. He would have been able to recognise it and rank it as something special in the pain game, something more exotic than the stuff he usually bore. He began to mention it to friends at the gym. He tried some health cures that would strengthen his stomach lining. Perhaps if Andi had quit training then, if he had turned away from the withering deprivations of another round of competition and stopped juicing he might have survived. Instead, the boy from Pack made himself ready to compete in front of the boy from Thal, in front of his hero.

After his sixth place at the Arnold Classic on 2 March 1996, Andi's mood remained low. 'Man, why don't you laugh?' a German official had said. 'You're the best white guy behind five Negroes.' Andi was never going to laugh at that. Best white guy. Best German speaker. All of the pain and deprivation, all of the gym seminars and pain-filled nights for those worthless epithets.

On the morning of 13 March, Andi's stomach pains became intense. His gut was swollen and hard. His bill had come in. He was fairly sure that this time he couldn't meet it. The debt was too big. The agony grew.

He was taken to hospital. Doctors there diagnosed the bleed, but could not prevent it continuing. He was transferred to the University Clinic. At 7pm, surgeons decided to operate to stop the bleeding inside Andi's stomach. Andi came through the operation, but his problems had multiplied catastrophically. His blood was viscous and slow-moving. His potassium levels were excessively high. He had been dehydrated by the diuretics he used in the days before his last competitions. His liver was melting. A post-mortem would find that it had dissolved almost completely. Andi's body went into shock. After his liver failed, his kidneys did too. He was offered a blood transfusion, but it was too late. Andi's heart held out for a while - he had always had a big heart - but by morning Munzer had joined the ranks of the bodybuilding dead.

Arnold Schwarzenegger sent a wreath from Hollywood to Andi's grave in Styria. The message was simple. It read: 'A last greeting to a friend.'

[Bouncer]

good post scott

[curtus e flush]

Shits not worth it....at all

[liftsiron]

This is the drug that resulted in the death of Andreas, not steroids or diuretics.


Anabolic Steroids Profile
<-- Return to Main Profiles Page
Cytadren
Aminoglutethimide

Cytadren (Aminoglutethimide) is one of the more interesting compounds found in the bodybuilder´s arsenal of Ancillaries. It´s really not too popular today, but a decade or two ago, it was considered state of the art, and was prized by bodybuilders for many of it´s properties.

Lets first consider it´s primary use, which is that of an Anti-Estrogenic compound. is able to produce highly significant (almost total) estrogen suppression (1), and this is of course of interest to athletes who are using steroids which convert to estrogen. Unfortunately, this suppression of estrogen is not followed by an increase in any of the other hormones (testosterone, LH, FSH, etc... ) that many other anti-estrogenic compounds will cause. Thus, Cytadren is probably not going to be anyone´s first choice for use in Post-Cycle-Therapy.

The thing which, in my mind, sets it apart from other ancillary compounds currently in use today is its unique ability to inhibit the production of cortisol. Cortisol, as you recall, is a catabolic hormone, and breaks down muscle. Cytadren inhibits the conversion of cholesterol to pregnenolone (2) as well as having an aromatase inhibiting effect. Thus, Cytadren is quite unique in having both of these abilities, and certainly none of the AI´s I´ve seen thus far has anything resembling such an effect on cortisol.

Cytadren is used, medically, to fight breast cancer and/or hyperadrenocorticism, and it is the only drug currently available (to my knowledge) that can be used successfully for both purposes (1)(3). It may even have anti-depressive properties (4)(5). During a cycle, it may be used to both lower cortisol levels from intense training, and to lower estrogen levels. Sounds almost perfect, right? It´s use would allow us to consider the use of Arimidex, Nolvadex, or a similar compound for strictly post cycle use, when an increase in test, LH, and FSH would be more necessary...

Well, it´s not quite perfect, as you´ll soon see. The first problem is that it (possibly) could reduce androgen levels. The best we could hope for is that it doesn´t have much of an effect on circulating androgen levels (1).

The next problem is that eventually your body, smart cookie that it is, will start to figure out ways to compensate for the reduction in cortisol, by either producing more, or inhibiting the Cytadren´s effects. Great... And while the cortisol isn´t present in your body, your joints will be aching. Yeah, I´ve actually used this stuff (the things I do in the name of science!), and it worked& made me look a bit "dryer" and more cut; but as I recall, it also made me sleepy. This could be due to its effects on the adrenal cortex, I don´t really know, but that´s a pretty good guess.

If you are thinking about using Cytadren for this purpose, I´d have to tell you to forget it. Three grams of Vitamin C lowers your Cortisol around as much as 1,000mgs of Cytadren, from the literature I´ve seen on both, and the Vitamin C doesn´t do it at the expense of your adrenal responsiveness (7). A gram of Vitamin C lowered cortisol by 1/3rd in UltraMarathon Competitors (8) (these are the people who apparently don´t have cars, so they feel compelled to run 90 kilometers at a time). I just can´t justify taking Cytadren for an extended period of time to reduce cortisol, when Vitamin can do the same thing, more cheaply, and has other added benefits.

Next, we have to deal with Cytadren´s liver toxicity (3). This stuff is pretty stressful on your liver. I guess we can use some milk thistle and such, but do we really want to risk it, when it´s effects on cortisol are short lived and it may reduce circulating androgen levels?

Maybe...

See you can use this stuff for (maybe) the last week or so while you are dieting for a bodybuilding contest, when your circulating androgens are being totally replaced by synthetic androgens, and you aren´t giving your adrenal-cortex much chance to shut down and make you lethargic, then I think it may be useful. Taking 500mgs/day for your last week of contest prep may help you to dry out that last little bit, and edge out that ever increasing specter of cortisol over production for long enough to do dial in for your contest. For athletes considering this compound in their cycles, I think this is not a viable option when you consider all of the other available options.

References:



1. Preservation of androgen secretion during estrogen suppression with aminoglutethimide in the treatment of metastatic breast carcinoma. J Clin Invest. 1980 March; 65(3): 602 612.
2. Adrenocortical steroidogenesis and aminoglutethimide I. Biomedical studies. Biomedicine. 1973 May;18(3):185-91.
3. Use of aminoglutethimide in the treatment of pituitary-dependent hyperadrenocorticism in the dog. J Small Anim Pract. 2002 Mar;43(3):104-8.
4. Treatment of depression with antiglucocorticoid drugs.Psychosom Med. 1999 Sep-Oct;61(5):698-711.
5. Neuroendocrine responses to inhibitors of steroid biosynthesis in patients with major depression resistant to antidepressant therapy.Can J Psychiatry. 1998 Apr;43(3):279-86.
6. Treatment of metastatic breast cancer with aminoglutethimide.Cancer. 1981 Apr 15;47(8):1954-8.
7. A randomized controlled trial of high dose ascorbic acid for reduction of blood pressure, cortisol, and subjective responses to psychological stress. Psychopharmacology (Berl). 2002 Jan;159(3):319-24. Epub 2001 Nov 20.
8. Attenuation of increase in circulating cortisol and enhancement of the acute phase protein response in vitamin C-supplemented ultramarathoners.Int J

[redback]

good posts

[Mr I]

'a last greeting to a friend' and a few thousand dollars for that, now way

His legs look ridiculous i that picture abobe, I have to say that if I had the genetics of these guys or I had a son that did and loved bodybuilding, I'd rather be a WWE wrestler than a bodybuilder competitive

[Bouncer]

I'd rather be a WWE wrestler than a bodybuilder competitive

great, you go from bodybuilding to just about the only worse thing you could pick. lol. guess you want you or your son to be dead by 40 and addicted to pain killers by 25... :hang:

[Mr I]

great, you go from bodybuilding to just about the only worse thing you could pick. lol. guess you want you or your son to be dead by 40 and addicted to pain killers by 25... :hang:

Really? or just the odd one, Batista, John Cena, Stone Cold all those guys seem pretty rich and well to me, even the old guy looks well

[Bouncer]

Really? or just the odd one, Batista, John Cena, Stone Cold all those guys seem pretty rich and well to me, even the old guy looks well

the guys you listed are the odd ones. most of these guys have so many fucken issues its scary. i am sure someone that knows the history of wrestling can post about 1000 names of guys who have died before the age of 40 in wrestling.

[curtus e flush]

Really? or just the odd one, Batista, John Cena, Stone Cold all those guys seem pretty rich and well to me, even the old guy looks well

Bouncers right,google dead wrestlers its crazy how many of them are dead....watch the movie ...The wrestler its the closest thing to what life is like 4 some of these guys