Planet Muscle EXTRA!
Number 1 in a Series
© Copyright 2005 Planet Muscle and Jeff Everson. All Rights Reserved.
40 YEARS OF EXERCISE LIES
By: Jeff Everson
If you read baseball journalists, you might believe that steroids were only invented about 5
years ago. Yet, in 1962-63, testosterone was modified chemically, to be orally and
commercially available. Yes indeed, anabolic steroids had come to the medical market.
However, in no time at all weightlifters and bodybuilders were using them.
Yes, testosterone and its varying extracts had been used long before this, but over the next
40 years, the world would go as anabolic as it had when man created organized flame to
roast yak, buffalo, briar rabbit, vermin and El' Polo Loco.
Like their long-standing cousins cortico-steroids, anabolic steroids were made for medicine,
used in cases where varying degrees of body wasting and atrophy had manifest, from
burns, hyperthyroidism, anorexia nervosa and other forms of metabolic and tissue
starvation. Doctors now had a pharmaceutical `helping hand' to arrest and reverse catabolic
degradation and resultantly, raise anabolic signals to augment tissue positively, through
enhanced protein synthesis from dietary nitrogen.
But, we all know the next story, don't we? Steroids spread rapidly from medicine into
weightlifting, bodybuilding and general training. That meant that exercise training was
never again the same. The application of the big 5 (progressive overload, intensity, volume,
frequency and duration) would change dramatically. But, there was a problem as no one
bothered to explain the changes, to reiterate differences in training load and recovery with
steroids versus without steroids.
Our exercise and bodybuilding world began to lie through its teeth, by its aversion to
admitting steroid use and the real effects steroids had on the training big 5!
Still, many "experts" are alleging things that steroids clearly do NOT do. For example, the
oft-used `roid rage' said to be a given subsequent to steroid use, has been scientifically
discredited. It never existed from a causal standpoint in the first place. (I suggested so in
the literature, as early as 1986).
Likewise, it is not axiomatic that using AS increases neurological athletic ability, the ability
to transmit nerve impulses from the CNS through motor units, to better activate skeletal
muscle. AS use does not guarantee any enhanced ability of said muscle(s) to shorten more
efficiently, to move any limb faster, or move it with more skill.
If an average pianist uses Russian Dianabol, his keyboard skills won't suddenly make him
Tchaikovsky. Steroids do cause increased activity on the ribosome. As such, they
disproportionately enhance myofibril structural protein deposition in relationship to any
specific recruitment of axonal-dendrite complexes.
What steroids likely did for Jose Canseco, therefore, besides making him more apt to win in
bar brawls, is to `allow' his neurological skills and eye-hand coordination, to move his limbs
faster, to swing a heavier bat faster and create more power. They also allowed him to
extract more `oomph' from his training and food, and to recover better, so he could grow
faster.
Study 