“Is it still cheating if everyone’s doing it?” is the tagline for Christopher Bell’s documentary on steroids, and he is asking both himself and the nation the same question. Chris’s personal dilemna is that as an amateur powerlifter, he sees other lifters on steroids, including his brother, making big lifts, and he wonders if he should partake. This dilemma leads him to question to America’s enhanced need to win. The movie reaches a little in that it tries to cover the personal story of Chris and his family, his relationship with icons like Hulk Hogan and Arnold, the supplement industry, powerlifting, professional and olympic sports, steroid legislation, and performance enhancement in general all in 2 hours. However, one is left with new perspective of who uses steroids and why they use them.
Bell’s own family’s experiences with steroids grounds the film in middle America, allowing the film to be more than a freakshow of bodybuilding and powerlifting fanatics. Bell’s personal struggle with whether to take steroids is spawns from his admiration of his childhood idols. As kids, Bell and his brothers raptly watched muscular icons such as Hulk Hogan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone. Hulk told kids to take their vitamins, eat their vegetables, workout, and say their prayers. Arnold Schwarzeneggger said that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can accomplish anything. However, both of these titans have admitted to using steroids to help them achieve their physiques. Sly was caught with HGH when filming Rambo. The brothers Bell all began working out to emulate their idols. Chris and his brother Mark (“Stinky”) got into powerlifting, while his other brother Mike (Mad Dog) tried to get into the pro wrestling circuit. Both Stinky and Mad Dog started taking steroids to advance their pursuits, and were still on them during the filming of the doc. Chris tried them once, but went off them due to an insurmountable sense of guilt that he might be cheating. Chris centers the film around the ultimately unanswered question of whether he should go back on steroids.
We are saturated with the negative effects of steroids, mostly due to their use in professional baseball. Bigger, Stronger, Faster* takes a more sympathetic approach. Bell points out that there are no studies on the long term effects of steroid use, and that many of the claims about the dangers are overblown. Through both anecdotal and scientific evidence Bell shows that: roid rage is extremely rare in steroid users, not everyone grows hair in odd places, claims of mind-altering psychosis and suicide resulting from steroids are suspect. Bell is also careful to point out that all of the effects of steroids are reversible when a man goes off the drugs, and most are reversible when a woman goes off the drugs. He also points out that legal drugs which have been studied for long-term effects, namely tobacco and alcohol, kill many times the number of people that steroids have ever killed.
Bigger Stronger Faster* points out that the great majority of steroid users are not professional athletes, but rather gym rats, usually from the amateur bodybuilding or powerlifting communities . Bell explores what pushes that minority of professional and scholastic athletes to use banned substances to enhance their performance: American culture’s unwavering commitment to winning. Under pressure to succeed, many steroid-using scholastic and professional athletes take the approach that it’s not cheating if you don’t get caught. Bell does well by exploring further than the professional baseball scandals of recent years. Most interestingly, he pits old sprinting rivals Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis against each, showing how both of their drug test records are suspect.
Bell goes on to discuss performance enhancements in general. Why are some things allowed while others are banned? The best example is the methods of how to get more oxygen-delivering red blood cells flowing in cyclists. Bell visited stripped Tour de France champion Floyd Landis to illustrate his point. There are 4 methods to achieve the same result. The first is taking blood from an athlete, spinning it in a centrifuge and replacing it into the body of the athlete just before a race. The second is taking a drug called EPO. The third is to take time training at altitude. The fourth is to sleep in an altitude chamber (Floyd’s method). The first two methods are illegal and the last two are legal, yet they all achieve the same result. Bell brushes over the fact that the spun and replaced blood and EPO can cause death as a result of the cardiovascular system’s inability to handle the newly thickened blood at rest, and I would contend that the safety concerns cause the banning of one method over another.
In the film, Bell explores how to legally get steroids. He goes to an anti-aging doctor and says he has a hormone deficiency. This doc takes a blood sample, makes the completely subjective decision that Bell does in fact have a hormonal deficiency, and prescribes him a cycle of steroids. The legal way to obtain steroids raises an interesting question: as our bodies age and decrease their production of testosterone and human growth hormone, is it acceptable to go on a carefully supervised regimen of anabolic steroids and human growth hormone to bring these hormones to their previous levels? The decrease of these hormones greatly contributes to aging in general, including loss of lean body mass, decreased eyesight, decreased bone density, and decreased immune function. These regimens are very expensive, so only a small part of the population can afford them, which will keep many of us from ever being able to seriously consider trying them. Should we use medical science to help us take back what we have lost? Is hormone replacement an artificial way to cheat aging, analogous to the way that a breathing machine is an artificial way to cheat death? Will proper nutrition and training allow us to naturally cheat aging, and continue to improve fitness even in our forties and fifties? When I see guys like Andy Petranek (42) and Jeff Tincher (40), I’m encouraged.
Everything in the body is run on hormones. You can influence your hormones positively or negatively, and your body will feel the effects. Eat like crap, release too much insulin, and get fat. Eat well, balance glucagon and insulin, and maintain a healthy weight. Don’t sleep and find your mood and digestion suffer due to hormonal imbalances, and vice versa. Train high intensity exercise and stimulate production of testosterone and human growth hormone, making you lean and fit. Don’t train, or train mainly in the aerobic pathway, and see your body get weak and wasted. Performance enhancing drugs like steroids and human growth hormone are either precursors for or extra doses of hormones that encourage muscle growth and repair, giving users the benefits of training faster and to a greater result. The problem is that these drugs overload the body with too much of these hormones too quickly, causing imbalances which result in side effects. These drugs may enhance parts of your life, but at what cost to the other parts? Naturally manipulate your hormones by: eating meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar, getting 8 hours of sleep per night, and training constantly varied, functional movements at high intensity.
Afterward:
Having spent about 6 months working at GNC in college, I had a special appreciation for the scene on supplements. Chris takes a shipment of expensive active ingredients and dilutes them into a dirt-cheap proprietary blend. Then he hires a few Hispanic day laborers to help him fill capsules with the powder and put the capsules into bottles that he could mark up and sell for $60 per unit. While exploring how to market his product, he shows how a photographer can use cameras, lighting, and software to change anyone from fat and ugly to fit and attractive in less than an hour.
The point of the exercise is to show that the unregulated supplement industry is mostly a smoke and mirrors advertising scheme. People can never look like the models in the ads by taking the advertised supplements. In the film, the fitness model on steroids all but says that people are fools for thinking that the supplements work in the way they are advertised.
Further reading: Drug Test in Outside Magazine (probably the best article I’ve ever read on banned substances)
