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Articles Steroid & Drug Information IG Muscle > Steroids and Drugs > Swells on Steroids!
I Asked The Sergeant If The Marine Corps Test For Steroids? He Told Me That Testing Was Too Expensive And As Long As I Wasn't An Idiot With A Big Mouth I Could Get Away With It. Besides, The Marines Want Huge, Savage, Killing Machines."
Bodybuilding horror stories (Often Containing Too Many Capitals) aren't hard to find on the net. And with the news that "a Nationwide footballer" has tested positive for steroids, perhaps we ought to start taking them seriously. Nah, only kidding. But they are a good laugh.
"We Started Noticing That His Toes And Fingers, As Well As His Ears, Began Growing - And So Did His Head."
Bodybuilding is, of course, a sport. And its building blocks - resistance training, nutrition and supplements - have now become part of every other sport. Along, allegedly, with its drugs.
This article is the tale of four bodybuilding entrepreneurs, But first, let's have another cracking horror story.
"One gym owner called me a walking chemical reactor, but I didn't care. I thought I was the cat's ass. Then one day in 1987 I was lifting a 1,000-pound weight with my legs when there was a loud crack. My thigh muscle had simply ripped off the bone. 'My fucking thigh came off!' I shouted. Everyone just laughed."
First up is Joe Weider. Joe publishes the best selling Muscle & Fitness and is a bigwig in the world of professional competitive bodybuilding. Now it is commonly assumed that competitive bodybuilders take anabolic steroids. Which are illegal. And loads of other drugs. Which are also illegal and, in some cases, potentially lethal. And Joe is not only a massively enthusiastic advocate of health and fitness, he also campaigns vigorously for bodybuilding to become a respectable Olympic sport. Uh, yeah - anybody see a problem here?
Second up is Bill Phillips. Bill started the magazine Muscle Media as a no-bull, tell-it-as-it-is hardcore bodybuilding mag - complete with info and advice about steroids. Then - in what can only be described as an act of entrepreneurial genius - he went totally "softcore". MM became a totally steroid-free zone and the launch platform for his massively successful Body For Life competition. Which features before and after pics of moms and pops who look exactly like you. Except tons fitter, leaner and loads and loads more muscular after following Bill's patented 12-week, drug-free bodybuilding and fitness course.
Next comes Tim Patterson, Tim's magazine Testosterone reads uncannily like the old hard-core Muscle Media. Except more so. The current issue starts with an editorial extolling the virtues of both steroids and the concept of manliness. Which, apparently, is under threat from the combined forces of "radical feminists, prudes, political-correctness fanatics and those who don't have a nanogram of testosterone flowing through their nutsacks". Testosterone, does not, as you might have guessed, have a large female readership.
And last but not least comes Mick Hart - whose No Bull magazine makes Testosterone look like the Miss Kitty Quiche Cookbook. Mick is the only Brit in our quartet. And his magazine is to the slick American products what British pornography is to the infinitely more sophisticated Hollywood product - cruder, dafter, more vulgar... and much, much funnier.
No Bull is littered with spelling mistakes and spiced up with pics taken from porn mags. Complete with amusing captions. And the covers are to die for. The best has got to be the one for issue 27. Actually, thinking about it, it's probably the best cover of any magazine ever.
Standing in front of the UK and US flags is a furiously snarling man-bull throttling a middle eastern gent who vaguely resembles Osama Bin Laden. Whilst vigorously copulating with him. Underneath runs the warning "Not for sale to anybody under the age of 18 years or anybody who thinks that if they give it they have to take it BACK."
Kinda knocks G2's "Fuck Cilla Black" cover into a cocked hat or what?
Mick is a Good Bloke. And No Bull is "Bodybuilding's Last And Only TRUE Stand". In his most recent newsletter, entitled "Bodybuilding Persecution: A rant from me, Mick Hart", Mick develops this theme further.
The general public, says Mick, see bodybuilders as "dick-short, half brained drug users with an attitude problem". And they get this image from "total 100% wankers ... that have about as much a clue to taking gear as I have about West Bolivian Duck Sucking!!"
The bottom line to all this hoo-hah is, of course, that to get really, really big you're best off taking steroids. And that the really, really REALLY big top professional bodybuilding guys "might" also be ingesting testosterone, thyroid drugs, veterinary growth hormone, oestrogen blockers and diuretics.
Hence the horror stories ("I Started To Rot") and such media representations as the bodybuilding/crime novel Steroid Blues. In which a neo-nazi steroid dealer who cracks open frozen monkey skulls and drinks the brains is battered to death by a revenge-crazed rape-victim bodybuilding cop who takes so much testosterone that she turns into a man (I kid you the heck not).
Bodybuilding, in short, is seen by the non-muscular world as closet homo-erotic Wagnerian tragedy featuring deranged, raisin-testicled chemical kamikazes with bodies once thought possible only in superhero comics.
But that's only part of the story. The fun part. Because, as Mick, will tell you, the typical steroid user is a relatively sane and healthy individual who just happen to like possessing the physique of a mountain bull-gorilla. And is willing to take illegal drugs to do it.
Which brings us back to the "Nationwide footballer" who tested positive for anabolic steroids. Hard-core bodybuilders of my acquaintance greeted this news with a muscular wink and a hearty snigger. There is, they claim, a lot more of it going on than we no !
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