‘Natty or not?’: how steroids got big
Once upon a time, it was only hardcore bodybuilders who pumped themselves up with testosterone. Today it is no longer niche. But how dangerous is it?
D ave is an ordinary office worker in the north of England. He is about average height for a British man – 5ft 10in – and to catch a glimpse of him between 9am and 5pm, the only hint that his leisure time is spent shattering the natural limits of human growth might be his slightly ill-fitting XXL shirt, or the fact that he sometimes wears women’s trousers, to better accommodate the steep slope between his trim waist and bulging thighs.
But in the videos and photos Dave posts online, to approving comments from other weightlifters (“huge progress 💪💪💪 ”), he is a total beast. His chest looks herculean, and the skin on his legs is pulled so tight that it has ceased to conceal the striated landscape of muscles underneath. Looking at him brings to mind the peeled-back diagrams of an undergraduate anatomy textbook. You can imagine attentive medical students poring over him, admiring the clarity – there the brachioradialis, there the palmaris longus. He looks impossibly strong, and he is. His record deadlift is 250kg, about the weight of three average men.
To get this body, Dave needed two things. First, the discipline to eat well, sleep well and work out intensely four to six times a week. And second, to take steroids. Like most users, he does so in cycles – periods of 8-20 weeks, up to two or three times a year. During his last cycle, in January of this year, he was taking 600mg of testosterone enanthate a week, injected – or pinned, in weightlifting jargon – into his buttock or thigh with a needle, and 40mg of oxandrolone a day, as an oral tablet. He is so far thrilled with the results, and not shy about discussing it. “I wouldn’t say it’s a taboo subject,” he told me. Someone at work recently asked him how he got so big and strong. “I replied simply: ‘steroids’,” he said.
