Bodybuilders can take a 7 week dose and increase their gains by more than 20%. This article looks into the history, the success and the possible consequences of steroid use. It contains the personal experience of the author and is an honest look at steroid use; its massive advantages as well as the disadvantages.
The History
Even prior to 1940, there was some spotty medical use of testosterone and its various extracts in medicine. In the mid 50′s, John Ziegler, M.D., who happened to be a consultant to the York Barbell weightlifters, began to suspect that the rapidly rising Russian lifters were ingesting more than borscht and Sholichnaya vodka.
Sure enough, after bellying up to the bar with the Soviet team physician, Ziegler (always the patriot), managed to finagle from the Russian team M.D. that his troops were washing down Methyltestosterone tablets with their vodka.
Dr. Ziegler (ever the chemist, too) went to work, and with some important chemical modifications to testosterone, the doctor, in collaboration with Ciba, developed Dianabol (methandrostenolone), an oral steroid with an unparalleled powerful effect. Complete rights were retained by Ciba pharmaceuticals (who long ago discontinued the drug’s manufacture).
It was rumored that weight lifters of the day, such as the great middle heavyweight, Bill March (military press, 390 lbs.) and even York head honcho, Bob Hoffman, (270-lbs bent press), experimented with Dianabol and made great gains on 5-15 mg/day. These gains were over and above those induced from the Hoffman Swing bell system, Energol, Ivaton and Protein from the Sea!
In the 1961 – 1965 years, certain west-coast bodybuilders started to stand tall, head and shoulders above the rest, and it had nothing to do with shoe lifts. Neither was it due to Rheo Blair’s (Irvin Johnson) Protein, York Functional Isometrics, or Joe Weider’s Super Pro 101. While these things helped, no doubt, Dianabol was rapidly becoming the undercover Breakfast of Champions amongst the big boys.
My Own Experiences With D-Bol
Why was Dianabol in particular, and steroids in general, so seductive? I started training in 1962, at age 11-12. No John Grimek, naturally, at the end of seventh grade I weighed all of 105 pounds. After some 15 years of regular training, I was able to get my lifts up to a 420- lb. bench press and 375-lb. clean and jerk — all naturally. Progress was slow, as it is biologically ordained to be.
To put this in perspective, it took me 4 years to go from a 300 lb. high school senior bench press at 195 lbs. bodyweight, to a 420-lb. college senior bench press, at 260 lbs. body weight, naturally. And then, because I didn’t gain any weight (in fact, I lost about 20 lbs. of water weight), from about age 21 to age 27, my bench press never moved beyond 425 lbs. (and that was with six years of painstakingly, regular hard work).
Then, after watching lifters I used to trounce start passing me by, I did a 6-week cycle of Dianabol. The first 3 weeks, I used 10 mg. a day. The second 3 weeks I used 15 mg. per day. My bench press moved to from 420 to 460 lbs. in that six-week period.
My body weight increased 5-10 lbs. I stayed off the drugs for 7 weeks and then I began a second cycle that lasted 7 weeks. The first 4 weeks, I used 15 mg. a day and the last 3 weeks I used 25 mg. a day. My bench press leapt from 460 to 500 pounds. My weight was up another 10 lbs. On two short cycles, I went from 420 to 500 lbs. I could identify no side effects except being in a much better mood, having more energy, transient liver enzyme changes, bigger armpit stretch marks, better recovery and growing out of my shirts.
Breaking it down, from a high school senior to a college senior, over a space of four years, training on protein, milk and filet, I gained some 60 lbs. in body weight and raised my bench press 100 lbs. Then, over a six-year period, without any weight gain, I moved my bench press up about 500 lbs (showing how an increase in strength after a while is most dependent upon body weight increases).
Comparably, on two short cycles of minimal Dianabol use, 15-25 mg./day, in effect, over 13 weeks, my bench press went up 80 pounds! So, 11 years of training natural moved me from a 300-lb. to a 420-lb. bench press and 13 weeks on Dianabol moved me from 420 lbs. to 500 lbs.
Look at it another way. I ultimately bench pressed 580 lbs. in the gym and 556 lbs. earlier in competition at 280 lbs. body weight. In my last workout preparing for a contest, 600-lbs. bench attempt, I unfortunately (or fortunately as the case may be) tore my right pectoral badly–thereby ending my bench press insanity. That was back in 1987.
I figure it this way, at the same body weight, if I had never used steroids, I would have probably bench pressed about 460 lbs. allowing myself that 20-lb. weight gain. So, steroids gave me 20% plus, over my active duration of use.
Just a 10% improvement in a skill activity makes a 64-foot shot-put sail to 70 feet. At 20%, a 2000-lb. natural power-lifting total becomes 2400-lbs. total, and an 18″ hard natural biceps becomes 21.6″! This is why steroids can be so damn seductive or even psychologically addictive.
Negative Side Effects And Dangers?
Oral steroids do not survive the first liver pass as do injected drugs. Medicine modified the basic testosterone compound into Dianabol so it could be absorbed orally. This means the oral drugs are concentrated more heavily in the biliary and hepatic systems.
Thus, their potential for liver and kidney damage is high. Despite stomach degradation, for most users, oral steroids on a mg. per mg. base, always seemed more effective than injections, too. Oral steroids are in and out of the system quickly. Thus, believe it or not, for women, controlling unwanted side effects is easier with oral steroids. Taking 20mg. of an oral daily, one could lower or discontinue the total dose, if for example, a voice change started appearing. However, if one has administered an injection (or injections), and this side effect begins to show, you are screwed because you can not discontinue the dose and injections do hang around for a lot longer time while exerting their effect. This is the reason, a reasonable, (considered safer) steroid, like nandrolone, can produce those receptor responsive muscles — deca-delts and a deca-voice in the case of women!
Orals are removed from your system so much quicker that it makes drug test detection harder. In experiments I conducted years ago with an IOC-accredited laboratory, I could take 25 mg. of Dianabol each day for four weeks and test negative at day seven (seven days off). A slightly less dose of Anavar actually cleared out of my system in 4-5 days.
However, the two, 100 mg. injections of Deca-Durabolin (nandrolone) I took were still testing positive at 11 months post use. You could verify that with Dr. Mauro Di Pasquale since he and I were communicating about the unique retrospection of one of the three metabolites of nandrolone, at the time.
In years past, the most common oral steroids were rated ambiguously (for good reason, hardly any legitimate M.D. ever studied this kind of stuff) for producing size and strength roughly as follows:
- Dianabol
- Anadrol-50 (oxymetholone)
- Halotestin (fluoxymesterone)
- Anavar (oxandrolone)
- Primobolan (methenolone acetate)
- Winstrol (stanozolol)
- Methyltestosterone
- Maxibolin
Anadrol-50 and Halotestin were considered the worst for bad side effects, with Methyltestosterone and Dianabol right behind. Winstrol and Maxibolin were used more by women (because of lower androgen potential) and, frankly, seemed to do little for strength for most men.
Because HIV/AIDS causes depressed immune function and a general gradual muscle loss at some point in the disease progression, many medical professionals are rediscovering the nitrogen retention characteristics of oral steroids, (Anavar by Oxandrin) nandrolone decanoate and testosterone. Legitimate, real Winstrol is still around, and supposedly Anadrol is also. Dianabol and others are still made in foreign countries, like Mexico, Thailand, Russia and Greece. Most steroids around today are probably counterfeits and, presumably, less than 100% effective.
The following list reviews the worst dangers of steroids’ side effects:
- Elevations in triglycerides and low-density lipoproteins, with a corresponding decrease in high-density fractions (HDL)
- Acne
- Testicle shrinkage
- Prostate irritability or hypertrophy
- Fat deposition in the breast of the male
- Clitoral growth and sensitivity increase in the female
- Male pattern baldness in both sexes
- Increased body hair in females
- Deepening of the voice in females
- Immediate libido increase followed by a gradual loss of libido in males
- Lower sperm counts and motility/viability in males
- Disturbed electrolytes
- Loss or gain in appetite
- Headaches and anxiety
- Increase in blood pressure and heightened aggression
- Jaundice
- Bloody liver cysts called peliosis hepatitis
- Elevations in enzyme makers for liver (SGPT,SGOT) and kidney stress (BUN and creatinine)
- Protein in the urine
- Possible promotion of existing pre-cancerous cells.
Rumors of serious side effects related to steroid use, and particularly oral steroid use, in otherwise healthy individuals, began in the early seventies. However, the bulk of actual data revolved around hospitalized patients.
In a landmark literature review in 1975, researchers reported 12 cases of cancer development associated with steroids. Again, the caveat was that these subjects were already hospital patients, compromised in some medical manner and subsequently treated with steroids.
For example researcher Johnson reported a case of Fanconi Anemia where a 20-year old male received 10 months of treatment with Anadrol 50 (oxymethylone). The patient developed liver cancer with bloody cysts and died. One patient who Dr. Johnson reviewed developed leukemia after being treated with 300 mg. per day of Anadrol (ouch!) for a nine-month period. A different patient with a case of non-descended testicles, treated with Methyltestosterone, developed primary cancer, which then spread.
Doctors have also noticed that liver tumors often shrink and disappear with cessation of steroid administration.
Here is Dr. Johnson’s original list of the oral anabolic steroids, doses and time length of use, associated with side effects of a serious nature in hospitalized patients:
In the mid-eighties, the athletic world was shocked by the development of heart ailments and stroke followed by a few cases of serious liver problems in healthy athletes, without any personal or family history of liver problems.
Bob Goldman, DO, first reported in FLEX magazine, and his own book, DEATH IN THE LOCKER ROOM, the case of Daniel Baroudi, a serious bodybuilder who had self-prescribed a series of different anabolic steroids over a 5-7 year period. Baroudi developed primary liver cancer and his doctors concluded that it was his heavy use of oral steroids that had induced his cancer. Sadly, Mr. Baroudi died in 1984.
In 1985, another serious recreational bodybuilder, William Loomis, was hospitalized with a cancerous tumor of his liver. Mr. Loomis had been using doctor-prescribed Anadrol, non-stop, for almost two years. It was not a high dose but Anadrol is a notorious liver-unfriendly, oral steroid. Mr. Loomis did have periodic blood exams, which often do not detect the presence of a tumor which was the case here.
When his tumor was discovered, it was operated upon immediately. It was encapsulated without metastasis. Two thirds of his liver was removed and his story also ran in FLEX magazine years ago. The last I heard, he was alive and recovering. I hope this is still the case.
