Steroids: the real story

Not a lecture, and definitely not a sales pitch. Just what anabolic steroids are, where they came from, why some of the biggest physiques in history were built with them, and why they aren't the shortcut the bloke by the hand dryer says they are.

What they are

Anabolic steroids are man-made versions of testosterone, the main male sex hormone, or drugs that act like it. They have genuine medical uses. Outside medicine, some people take them to build muscle faster than training alone would allow.¹

They're not the same as the steroids a doctor might prescribe for asthma, eczema or swollen joints. Those are corticosteroids, a completely different family of drugs.

A short history

• 1930s. Testosterone is isolated and made in a laboratory. The German chemist Adolf Butenandt later shared a Nobel Prize for his work on sex hormones.²
• 1954. At the world weightlifting championships in Vienna, the American team doctor, John Ziegler, hears that the Soviet team is using testosterone.^3,4
• 1958. Ziegler works with the drug company Ciba, and a new steroid sold as Dianabol goes on sale in the US. He gives it to American weightlifters. Years later he said he bitterly regretted it.^3,5
• 1960s and 1970s. Use spreads through strength sports and bodybuilding.⁴
• 1975. The International Olympic Committee bans anabolic steroids. The 1976 Montreal Games are the first to test for them.²
• 1970s and 1980s. East Germany runs a secret state doping programme, giving steroids to thousands of athletes, many of them teenagers who weren't told what they were being given.⁶
• 1988. Ben Johnson wins the Olympic 100 metres in Seoul in world record time, then tests positive for the steroid stanozolol and is stripped of his gold.²
• 1980s onwards. Use spreads well beyond elite sport, to ordinary people in ordinary gyms who never compete at all.⁴

The Mr Universe look is a different sport

Top-level professional bodybuilding, the kind with spray tans, posing trunks and men the size of a double wardrobe, is widely understood to involve performance-enhancing drugs. Drug-tested "natural" bodybuilding federations exist too, and their winners look noticeably different.

Comparing yourself with a professional bodybuilder is like comparing your Corsa with a Formula 1 car and deciding your Corsa is broken. It isn't broken. It's a Corsa. It'll get you to Tesco for years, it'll start in the cold, and it doesn't need eleven men to change its tyres. The Formula 1 car has never once been to Tesco. It wouldn't get over the speed bumps.

Two of the greatest bodybuilders of all time have been open about using steroids. Arnold Schwarzenegger said in 2005 that he used them during his competitive career, when they were legal, under a doctor's supervision, and that he had no regrets.⁷ In 2023 he had a blunter message for young lifters and influencers: "Don't go there."⁸

Dorian Yates, six times Mr Olympia, who trained in a famously no-frills basement gym in Birmingham, has also said he used them, explaining that he wanted to be on an even playing field with the people he was competing against.⁹

Not a Willy Wonka golden ticket

Here's the bit the bloke in the changing room leaves out, usually because he's mid-sentence about his mate. Both of those men trained brutally hard for years. They ate, slept and lived for it. And they had genetics most of us simply don't: the frame, the potential to build muscle, the luck of the draw. The drugs went on top of all that. They didn't replace any of it.

There's a famous study on exactly this. In 1996, researchers split healthy men into four groups for ten weeks: a dummy injection with no exercise, testosterone with no exercise, a dummy injection with training, and testosterone with training. Testosterone on its own did add muscle without any training at all, which tells you how powerful these drugs are. But the biggest gains by far came in the men who took it and also trained hard.¹⁰

So steroids aren't a golden ticket to the chocolate factory. At best, they're an expensive, risky way to make hard work go a bit further. And if you're a beginner, you haven't done the hard work yet. Taking steroids to learn to train is like buying a racing car to learn to drive. You'll go very fast, in a straight line, for a short while, past a lot of startled people. Then you'll meet a wall, and the wall will have had years of training.

The risks

The NHS lists serious risks from misusing anabolic steroids, including:¹

• Heart attack and stroke.
• Liver and kidney damage, high blood pressure, blood clots and high cholesterol.
• In men: shrunken testicles, a lower sperm count and infertility, breast development, hair loss and severe acne.
• In women: extra facial and body hair, a deeper voice, smaller breasts and changes to periods.
• Aggression, mood swings, paranoia and, in some people, hallucinations.

There's also a strong link between steroid use and muscle dysmorphia, where people feel small however big they get.¹¹ Chapter 2 of Basic Training, the mirror, covers it.

The law in the UK

Anabolic steroids are Class C drugs. Having them for your own use isn't an offence, but supplying them is, and that includes selling them or giving them to friends. Importing them by post or courier is illegal too.¹² If you compete in a drug-tested sport, using them can get you banned.

New to all this? Basic Training starts from zero, no shortcuts required.