Without steroids, sports like powerlifting, bodybuilding and Olympic weightlifting won’t be what they are today. If the muscle elixirs are cut from the equation, the records will drop to incredibly low levels.
I don’t care what they say about genetics, it’s the truth. If the so-called natural bodybuilders today were really natural, they could easily start using and shock the world by dwarfing Ronnie Coleman. Oh, wait they are already pinning.
Yet those mighty magic pills and pins are not reserved just for the strength athletes.
The sports that are the least affected by steroids are skill based. For example, you can become a professional skateboarder without injecting steroids. You simply don’t need them because the sport is not strength based and requires an incredible amount of skill training which can be achieved naturally.
When it comes to gymnastics, the game is 50/50. You need both – incredible strength and skills. Male gymnasts are known for their developed upper bodies because all strength elements on the rings require super strong arms, back, chest, forearms, mid-section and joints.
Many people have been using gymnasts’ bodies to brainwash people into believing that secret bodyweight training can result in extraterrestrial muscular development. I am sorry, but that’s just propaganda.
Let’s go in the past and see how gymnasts actually looked during the last century.
The guys in the photo don’t look nearly as massive as some of the modern gymnastic monsters. What do you think changed? And if you are going to talk about the “advancement of nutrition” and similar nonsense, please save your speech for somebody else. I don’t think you understand what’s actually going on.
I personally used to believe that all gymnasts are clean, but now I see clearly that this is not the case. The evidence is everywhere.
But honestly, what did we expect? Modern drugs exercise influence on almost every sport there is.
It’s also worth noting that the same holds true for the so-called bar-barian movement. Funny. There are guys with 18-inch lean arms who play on the monkey bars and claim 100% natural.
“Just push-ups and dips, bro. How bad do you want it?”
Sorry guys, but some of your listeners are not 3rd graders and know who’s who and what’s what. Of course, there are many guys in the bodyweight movement who are completely natural, which is great, but the vast majority of the bar stars who look really impressive are not and take anabolic steroids. End of discussion.
Do you really think that push-ups, dips and muscle-ups can make you 195lbs @ 6′ @ 8% body fat? That has to be a joke, right? If there is a person who can get that massive and lean this way, his origin would have to be the Mars or Jupiter. I am not buying it.
I spent the last couple of hours looking for information on drug use in gymnastics. On various forums, there were guys claiming that gymnasts are using not only steroids but also IGF-1 and growth hormone just like everybody else. Therefore, I am even more inclined to believe that many gymnasts serving as poster boys for the effectiveness of the methods are actually not natural.
I know most PEDs are used to enchance recovery. How could that not affect gymnastics like any other sport such as say Olympic lifting or T&F?
“As you can see in the photos (a picture of gymnasts from the last century) those guys don’t really look nearly as massive as some of the modern gymnastic monsters. What do you think changed?”
This assumes that the physical requirements of the sport of gymnastics have remained completely unchanged in the last century… it has not. The basic skill shave been greatly expanded upon, requiring *far* more strength and skill to accomplish, new training methods, etc. It’s only logical this evolution would result in much stronger athletes over time instead of remaining exactly the same.
Dreams are free.
Apparently so…
The “modern gymnastics monsters” description was also worth a chuckle… what passes for impressive these days! Of course these guys look fit and developed when compared to average people for sure (and logically, compared to gymnasts of the last century)… but have any of them stand unflexed and totally unpumped next to a novice bodybuilder and they will be DWARFED in the muscles dept. I’ve seen some of these guys in person and when they aren’t actually training, they look fit but nothing to stare twice at as far as muscle size… they’re just very lean and pumped while doing the routines on TV and that makes them appear larger and more impressive than they really are.
Same goes for those Bar-Barian and similar bar groups and street personalities on youtube… some of them are obviously regular weight trainers and bodybuilders and only use calisthenics as a supplement to their normal training (they even say so up front). Cali muscle is about the only guy I know for sure uses steroids, I don’t know the rest personally but I will say this: If most of those other street workout guys are using, then PEDs are seriously overrated….
Your pic shows teens. Teens dont have years or training and people didn’t knew much exercises or optimal training. Gymnasts arent around 195 pounds. They want to me as light as possible and steroids wouldnt help because of the excess mass and water.
“Icario” movie/documentary. There the guy said everyone in Olympic games is using some sort of steroids or PED. Is that they never get couth (sponsors,etc) of course the difficulty is different from 30 years ago but if you train 8 houres a day you kind of need to recover faster. How much a body can take? There are periods of time when they have competition after competition. How they recover in between? All the landings on hard surface. And this is just scratching the surface.
Steroids are of no use to gymnasts due to creating beach muscle and water retention making it harder to hold static stenth positions. Gymnasts do strength training with arms locked leading to superhuman strength and tendon strength not beach muscle.
I am extremely skeptical of PEDs (got crap for calling out Lance Armstrong, well before it was a known issue). And I believe there is huge cheating in Olympics and pro sports in general. All that said, I have been involved in gym at reasonably competitive levels (guys on team with me who went to NCAA nationals and were at least in the discussion of going to a Trials). And I never saw any roids or anything linking to it (e.g. shady doctors).
Personally I think steroids ought to benefit gymnasts. In addition, that there does seem to be an increase in the frequency of certain strength moves on rings that were at one time rare. These are factors to make you suspicious.
All that said, from personal experience on a team and in the military with competitive gymnasts: none of them used steroids. In fact none of them conscientiously did weight training. Many of them didn’t even do conscientious gymnastics strength training! However, just doing routines, “turns”, and skill development tended to blast their arms. It becomes very normal to have an extreme V-shape physique.
The lats in particular get overdeveloped (can even cause shoulders to roll forward). Deltoids get very developed for natural reasons, same with triceps: look at all the planche position and handstands. Biceps are strange that they get developed as there is almost no curling motions…that said, it is normal to have prominent biceps (even overdeveloped versus frame). Pecs get decent development but not always as much as a football players…also the shoulder roll tends to make them look less prominent. Blasted abs are just very normal and come from decent core along with not being fat. (really nothing extreme needed to get abs, just another side effect of training).
In particular biceps is strange because very few gym movements use any kind of curling motion. Much more straight arm (and thus tricep and deltoid development). I have heard the theory that it is the cross position in rings that tends to blast the biceps. It is some sort of strange thing because really the position wouldn’t seem to involve the biceps. However, it’s just so damned hard to do, that you end up trying to involve every muscle. For example, check out the shoulders…it is normal to see a roll forward…this allows the lats (big muscles, much bigger than shoulders) to get involved and help achieve the position. My belief is that the bicep is also engaged even though it is probably in a disadvantaged position.
I don’t completely understand the mechanics, but from having tried doing crosses, you are definitely straining and trying to involve every arm, back and core muscle. If you look at a gymnast doing a cross, his arms don’t look that thick and the bicep isn’t noticeable at all (arm is fully extended). But when you see them standing and even just with a natural couple inches of arm flexion at rest, you notice the biceps being huge.
Gymnasts have and continue to take steroids. I’m no expert on who does what when, but this is an obvious fact. I competed at Nationals in Tulsa, OK a long time ago, a long, long, time ago, and even there I heard discussion of steroids. Did they use right in front of me? No. Why not? Because they weren’t stupid. You think steroid users are just freely injecting in every locker room, in every gym, like they do in the movies or something? God. Ya’ll really need to get out more (Why am I even bothering?)
I didn’t use, but I also barely qualified and I wasn’t very good. One could only speculate as to who was natural and who was not. No, I wasn’t drug tested either. Nor was anyone else, for that matter. On another occasion, a girl I talked to back in college said her coach made their team use steroids when she was in high school. It happened then, and it happens now.
All your little analytical comments about which muscles are good for what, or what their sizes are as gymnasts as compared to bodybuilders, or that last poster going on and on about bicep flexion and routines “blasting” your arms, are hilariously naïve. By that logic, Lance Armstrong should’ve been “clean as a whistle.” As if steroids only gave the user “size” and nothing else. As if there’s only one kind of PED. As if the women who used steroids all became too massive for their britches. C’mon now.
Stop overanalyzing. You guys just don’t get it. They’re on drugs. Teens can be slender and on drugs. You can be slender and on drugs. Why do I even bother trying to explain? Performance enhancing drugs don’t automatically make you huge. Remember: they’re performance enhancing. The first word being performance. But go learn that on your own. Just open your mind up to the fact that reality isn’t what it’s marketed to be. But believe what you want. You’re the reason they keep doing what they’re doing. The audience will believe anything, and suckers like ya’ll are great for business.
I compared old school gymnasts less likely to use PEDs with modern gymnasts and the modern guys are about 5kg heavier on average. I think it’s pretty clear why.