Steroids and strength gain

Here we are continuing debate I had with Oni on Commonwealth champs thread.

I have long argued that anabolic steroids (and other PEDs) gives you significant strength enhancement.

But Oni disagrees. 'It's my personal belief that steroids, outside of making you more muscular than you can do naturally, do not "give" you strength. Of course there are the idiots running more than a gram, multiple grams of androgens but they do not last. The best natural guys will be just as strong as the enhanced guys up until a certain weight class (110+ most likely)'.

Oni will post more on this.

I can only offer my own experience and comments made to me by various champs (although I will not name them).

As for myself, I only compare two lifts given my form for squats was all over the place and I never did many deadlifts when bb training.

My best bench presses (touch and go but strict) assisted and clean are 172.5kg (1994) and 147.5kg (1998), both at about 98-99kg bw. In case of latter lift, did a 137.5kg paused bench at time in front of a champion PA lifter.

My best power cleans 155kg at 98kg (1991) and 135kg (1995) at 93kg.

In both cases, about 15% difference.

As for bbs I knew, they got 15-23%. Two of them got 15-20% on their bench press very first cycle, including one who won a Mr Australia weight class first time on gear.

And two of Aust's greatest powerlifters told me they got around 15% from drugs. Another Aust champ, who won national champs both drugged and clean, got around 15% when we worked out difference from two totals.

Another powerlifting champ suggested 15% improvement was conservative.
Maybe other forum members can add.

Hopefully no sook comments by those who 'can't handle the truth' or don't want to discuss.

Obviously some people gain more or less, so my estimates cannot speak for all. I am merely speaking for myself and the many I have spoken to.

Of course they are going to give you increased strength and performance.

The sheer ability to recover faster and have increased work capacity alone is enough to warrant decent strength gains, even at the same BW. Although I do agree somewhat about the fact they are more muscle building than performance enhancing the fact is someone using androgens will be able to hold a lot more lean dense muscle at the same BW than someone who is not, which is going to increase performance dramatically.

Athletes wouldnt risk their entire careers on the chance of getting court if there was nothing to gain from using them.

I actually think the most gain is from the physiological effect of the body's messaging retaining more nitrogen and other important nutrients and so on.

To be honest, as a young person then, I never found that much difference on or off for training intensity and recovery, but others people and texts swear by the recovery.

The difference for recovery may be more profound when one gets older though.

Steroids will give you the ability to recover faster/better from more workload - will they directly give you a huge increase in strength - no I dont think so.

Alright, I'll probably be adding to this thread as I find stuff as I never took any notes on this so will have to dig it out.
This study is a good start to give us some background:
http://ajpendo.physiology.org/content/281/6/E1172.full.pdf+html

This blog post explains a lot of it:
Intermittent Thoughts on Building Muscle: Quantifying "The Big T" - Do Testosterone Increases Within the Physiological Range Really Matter? And How Much is too Much? - SuppVersity: Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

As you can see, strength gains correlate with the muscle gains. There is also another point made here, that the IGF/Test ratio is the most important factor here. The more you increase testosterone, the more you decrease your IGF-1/test ratio and the "less" you get out of the testosterone, despite the extra muscle mass.

Because of this, a natural guy will have a far bigger igf:test ratio. So unless the steroid user has surpassed his natural limit of muscle mass he is unlikely to out perform the natural user- unless of course he has good training when it's simply incidental. This is why you get people in the pre-steroid era that still to this day shit all over the "feats" that people put up today. Paul Anderson put up 540/285/370 completely raw, Sandow put up 371 lbs overhead with one fucking hand, Goerner could one handed deadlift 727.5lb and Saxon put up 448 lbs in the two hands anyhow, which is fucking insane. Men's Raw World Records | Powerlifting Watch take a look at the raw records here as well, I'm sure a lot of people will want to cast their doubts on people like Konstantinovs despite him passing every drug test thrown his way but whatever. Jesse Norris recently squatted 700lb, without wraps at 198 and put up a 1,850lb total. Karwoski also put up huge totals and squats in IPF.

More reading here to give yourself a good background, honestly read every link:
Intermittent Thoughts on Building Muscle: Zoning in on "The Big T" - Does Testosterone (Alone) Build Muscle? - SuppVersity: Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone
Intermittent Thoughts on Building Muscle: IGF-1, TNF-?, IL-15 & Co and the Emerging Role of an Auto-/Endocrine-Immune Axis in Skeletal Muscle Hypertrophy - SuppVersity: Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone
SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

I think if steroid users did more to increase their IGF, there would be potential indeed. But even then, it's hard to increase your IGF-1 levels long term without running into serious health issues. The best you can do is have them in the upper normal and you can do that naturally.

The actual empirical data suggests that the advantage is not just about recovery and there is a concretre strength advantage from unrestrained PED use.

If you look at a range of sports pre and post testing, you will find that the records from pre-testing days have stood for a long time or at least compare favourably, despite improvements in all other areas of athletic development (talent identification, training science, nutritional science, investment in recovery and professionalism).

Some of the best data for strength sports is to look at the old IPF records from before the weight class changes, particularly for deadlift. The deadlift is useful, as the technical advances in lifting equipment don't blur the numbers so much. The improvements in squat and deadlift largely reflected advances in equipment.

Most of the deadlift records were from 1985 or earlier and were never broken (some still haven't been in the new weight classes).

From what I recall, a similar trend exists for olympic weightlifting before it changes its weight classes, but I would need to check the data. The ones I do know is that 80s world records of Taranenko and Zakharevich from the Soviet Union are still unbroken. These were from 1988, the same year as the infamous Ben Johnson olympics.

Of course, we all know the introduction of testing did not eliminate drug use, but it did mean that the kinds of drugs being used and the time in which they can be taken has been seriously restrained. Simply put, the drugs in a tested environment are not nearly as good as the drugs one can take in an untested environment. This, again, is supported by the data.

In the early-mid 1990s, there was a big shift in powerlifting as the sport became much bigger in eastern Europe. The Russians in particular transferred what they knew and excelled at in olympic lifting and took over the US as the dominant powerlifting nation.

Firstly, one must assume many of the IPF champions were still using out of competition in the post-testing era - which we know that many Eastern European lifters are in the IPF (as out-of-comp testing in these countries is lax to non-existence and the number of recent in-comp positives from former Soviet nations).

Secondly, we can assume that the human genome has not regressed - generalised across the population, we are the same species so the potential for strength is unchanged.

Thirdly, there have been significant advancements in training methodology etc largely introduced by the eastern Europeans as well as increases in participation across the world beyond being more concentrated to the US population.

Yet despite all this, many of the early 80s IPF deadlift records remain unbroken. Removing all other factors, this points to unrestrained PED use being the difference.

You also then begin to understand one of the motivations for the weight class changes in the first place, which is precisely the same reason olympic weightlifting did it.

Rugby88 said:

Steroids will give you the ability to recover faster/better from more workload - will they directly give you a huge increase in strength - no I dont think so.

Click to expand...

That pretty much covers that.

I've never seen any data to support the hypothesis that steroids will increase workload more than you can get naturally

Huge amounts of anecdotal evidence is on my side as well, Vikings would row across an ocean, rape and pillage entire civilisations then row the fuck back again. Modern rowers can't even row the things, let alone across an ocean and then wiping out whole tribes

0ni said:

I've never seen any data to support the hypothesis that steroids will increase workload more than you can get naturally

Huge amounts of anecdotal evidence is on my side as well, Vikings would row across an ocean, rape and pillage entire civilisations then row the fuck back again. Modern rowers can't even row the things, let alone across an ocean and then wiping out whole tribes

Click to expand...

And a sail.

Maybe it was the horns in their helmets.

0ni said:

I've never seen any data to support the hypothesis that steroids will increase workload more than you can get naturally

Huge amounts of anecdotal evidence is on my side as well, Vikings would row across an ocean, rape and pillage entire civilisations then row the fuck back again. Modern rowers can't even row the things, let alone across an ocean and then wiping out whole tribes

Click to expand...

Hahaha. I hardly consider monasteries entire civilisations. How did the varangians fair against the Byzantines? Not the same as raiding bumpkins on the Volga. A few years ago they recreated a trireme and got modern athletes to row and found that they couldn't match what the historical records claim. Maybe a whip and imminent death would inspire a greater performance lol. But I get the gist of where you are coming from Oni, I just don't buy too heavily into the "manthropology" style detestation of modern man's capabilities (or supposed lack thereof).

Also, you'll find it hard to find the studies because they really haven't been performed. Ethics and whatnot.

Well it's a bit of an aside but the Vikings left their shit scattered all over Minnesota
I like interesting anecdotes

Dont linsten to 0ni.. How would he know if aas make you strong he has dick all expeience with them. Run some halo and tell me aas dont make you strong, tit

Genics said:

Dont linsten to 0ni. How would he know if aas make you strong he has dick all expeience with them. Run some halo and tell me aas dont make you strong, tit

Click to expand...

What are your best lifts?

Oni, those two studies you put in clearly demonstrate that drugs work for strength.

Also, tend to agree with my view that too much has diminished return. Say not that much difference between 300mg and 600mg of test per week in terms of strength and power achieved.

ok, I see what you say about igf 1 and test in 2nd article.

For both the leg press strength, as well as the total leg power, though, a different picture emerges: Contrary to the weight and size gains, the gains in strength and power in the 125mg were not statistically significant (p = 0.42 and p = 0.59). Moreover, the aforementioned effect of "diminishing returns" with doses of testosterone >300mg /week is way more pronounced for leg strength and power than it is for the gains in total muscle mass and leg muscle volume. And as if that was not already confusing enough, in contrast to the +7% increase in the 125mg group, the + 6% increase in leg press power in the "low testosterone" group (50 mg) did reach statistical significance (p = 0.02).

Testosterone, myostatin and IGF-1 - tying the knots together

In order to explain this "strength anomaly", we will have to resort to what we have learned in previous installments of this series about the differential effects of myostatin and IGF-1 on muscle size and composition. Assuming that you have read all the installments of the Intermittent Thoughts, you will be familar with the results from the Quaisar study, I discussed in "What is Hypertrophy". You will also remember that Quaisar et al.'s observations showed quite clearly that the "uncontrolled" muscular hypertrophy in the myostatin negative mice left them with huge, yet dysfunctional muscles. The over-expression of IGF-1 on the other hand, facilitated a profound restructuring process within the skeletal muscle in the course of which the recruitement of satellite cells and the subsequent addition of myonuclei allowed for "healthy" growth that would not burst the maximally allowed myonuclear domain sizes (cf. "Getting Big Means Growing Beyond Temporary Physiological Limits").

Against that background the testosterone to IGF-1 ratios on the right hand side of figure 2 in yesterday's installment of the Intermittent Thoughts (the graph on the right hand side of figure 4 is an identical copy in figure 4) should get a whole new meaning: If IGF-1 is required to keep rapidly growing muscles functional,the reason for the stalled power and reduced strength gains in the 600 mg testosterone enanthate group could well be a relative lack of IGF-1 (>3.5x elevated testosterone / IGF-1 ratio). The superior correlation (R²) between performance measures and IGF-1 values of the study participants (cf. figure 4, left) would does not only support this hypothesis it also underlines the vital importance adequate insulin-like growth factor levels (and its splice variants, which have unfortunately not been measured in this study) may have for "chemical athletes", in particular.

This is interesting. May explain much bigger size of bb in recent decades given GH use, which directly increases IGF-1 levels. But still, many of the great powerlifts done in earlier decades, perhaps before GH days.

Do you have any more similar studies?

I'd have to look around
Just remember, the main point I am making is not that steroids won't make you stronger
Just that a natural trainee can get just as strong (or stronger I guess) as long as they can have an equal amount of muscle mass. Trying to out total Stan Efferding, may as well give up as a natural guy. However you'll notice when you get into super heavy, it equals out again

I'm pretty sure lots of (untested) PL and Weightlifters take Test Susp right up until just before contest to give them the strength and aggression advantage.
What do naturals do, sniff nose tork? LOL

Oni, but even at your early stage of development, if you were to take a 8-12 week cycle, assuming enough dose and adequate diet/training, you would be a lot stronger.

This physiological advantage, pointed out by studies, would remain true throughout your career, regardless of what stage you chose to take them.

It is an advantage that can only occur from taking them, and is lost after a period of ceasing them.

shrek, as you allude to, the untested powerlifers and bb's could take whatever they want.

They would have so many choices, with test and its various esters working.

spartacus said:

Oni, but even at your early stage of development, if you were to take a 8-12 week cycle, assuming enough dose and adequate diet/training, you would be a lot stronger.

This physiological advantage, pointed out by studies, would remain true throughout your career, regardless of what stage you chose to take them.

It is an advantage that can only occur from taking them, and is lost after a period of ceasing them.

Click to expand...

I'd get stronger relative to the increase in muscle mass

yes, that is true.