Steroids in Sports: Questions Answered

This article answers some common questions about steroids. One of the good things the article says is that in reality we don't know the long term side effects of performance enhancing drugs.

Through many years in the fitness and martial arts worlds I have come to two big realizations as far as steroid use:

1- Steroids are much more commonly used than the average person thinks. In some sports you are actually more likely to find an athlete who is taking some sort of performance enhancing compound than one who is not.

2- There are a lot of exaggeration out there about the effects of those drugs. And although I am not in favor of using them, I don't believe we should lye to try to scare people from using them. If someone tries it and sees that most of the bad things they have heard about steroids are not true, they will be more likely to use it even more.

A lot of people think that the minute an athlete starts using steroids he will loose a lot of hair, develop breasts and become an extreme violent person. This are all possible side effects but they are the exception rather than the rule. So what happens is a young athlete tries it out and does not see any of those side effects. In fact the only thing he sees is that his performance improves quite a bit. From then on, this athlete is likely to always try to use something whenever he thinks he can get away with it.

So my position is that athletes should not use steroids because we don't know the long term side effects of it. But we should be straight forward as far as what we know.

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