Arguments against steroid
Question: One of the arguments against steroid use is that all the gains I would make would disappear once I stopped using steroids. Is this true?
Yes, eventually, virtually all of the gains from steroid use would disappear. However, it would take years for that to happen. This is one of the reasons football players have not been getting smaller since drug testing began . Off-season, players don’t get tested, and they can accrue enough muscle mass to “coast” though the playing season.
The same logic applies with drug-tested bodybuilding shows. A bodybuilder could swear on a polygraph that he hadn’t used steroids for a year. Swell, except, during the year of being “clean,” a good amount of steroid-generated muscle will still be there. Steroids are still the anabolic bargain. In the studies of geriatrics using growth hormone, all of the beneficial effects induced from the growth hormone went away within a matter of weeks. I predict that the same fleeting anabolism will happen with IGF-1. Clenbuterol’s effects diminished even more rapidly. Many doctors don’t want to admit it, but limited steroid use of a yearly, eight-week cycle would have virtually no adverse side effects and would probably vastly improve the health of the individual through the rest of the year. It would be interesting to put a group of bodybuilders on a mild short cycle and then track the decreases of muscle mass over the months after the end of the cycle. These results wouldn’t surprise me, but I don’t think the anti-steroid crowd would like to hear that steroid gains do last for a long time.