When I was a young boy, muscles were the coolest thing to happen to a guys body. Seeing a bulge here and there was really exciting. If a vein popped out a little that was even more awesome. There were no fitness centers or gyms to amount to anything back then (sounds like the Stone Age, I know). Comic books had ads for Charles Atlas paraphernalia to help turn the cards on the guy who kicked sand in your face on the beach last summer. But when I was young, getting strong had to do more with labor like working on the farm and carrying blocks for construction. Muscles from work seemed more legitimate and less vain than artificial muscles from exercise. So I did lots of farm work and construction, but leaving nothing to chance I also cheated by building my own weight set with a pipe that I would insert into the holes of cement blocks.

My dad was of the school that I had better be careful or I could get all muscle bound if I exercised too much. I guess he must have worried as he saw me in the backyard hoisting my pipe with blocks dangling from each end. But I loved the sense of strength that exercise brought and reveled in the pumped feeling and look.

Sorry to sound so narcissistic. But its the way all of us guys thought. We would even compare bumps on the school bus every morning and banter about who could do the most push-ups. This is not to say muscles and fitness are still not important to me. Other than a brief hiatus while in college and shortly after, I have exercised continuously. I cant imagine not. And yes, new bumps can still emerge although I focus primarily on exercise that will help me to stay in shape for the competitive sports I play.

I bring this up not to brag or appall you, but as a backdrop for the current situation in the sport and bodybuilding world. Now that we are off the farm, exercise is a perfectly legitimate way to replace the physical activity lost with modern living. The use of hormones, however, is a perversion of what should be clean and healthy personal development. Anabolic hormones totally miss the point of it all. The freaky bodies that are created are unnatural aberrations yet magazines are filled with photo spreads as if they are icons we should emulate and aspire to. Particularly dangerous is the influence on the young. It is the brave new technological and synthetic world gone amuck. It is one thing to create a new fitness machine to facilitate a workout, it is quite another to tinker with what we know so little about, the infinitely complex human body machine.

Aside from the fact that natural bodies and developed talents should compete in sports, not drug regimens, here is the real tragedy. And there is a lesson here for anyone taking hormones for any purpose. Of all the drugs I used in practice, it was the hormones that scared me the most. They could create dramatic immediate results (and that is their allure), but hormone treatment continued for any length of time came back to harm the patient and haunt me.

An example in humans is the use of testosterone patches in women used to increase libido. Take them very long and although your passion may be triggered, your voice will deepen and a beard start to grow not so good for the libido of the husband. Corticosteroids for allergies can result in extremely serious adrenal gland diseases, immune suppression and vulnerability to infection. In veterinary medicine the same things can happen. One situation I am reminded of that occurred many years ago was related to hormones given to dogs for birth control. Years after discontinuing the drugs, treated dogs would present to veterinarians with life threatening illness, extreme thirst and white blood counts off the charts. Their abdomens were enlarged and when surgically explored would reveal a gigantic uterus filled with pus (pyometra), quarts of it! All just because a little ole hormone was given years ago without a hint of an immediate ill effect.

You see the body is extremely wise. It is not fooled, enamored of fad or forever forgiving. For example, if you break your arm and put it in a sling, the muscles dont grow bigger, they atrophy. Why? Because the body is also efficient in that it will not do what is not needed. Why grow muscles or even maintain them if they are not needed. If you take the sling off you will find that the arm has lost most of its strength. The body shuttled its resources into building bigger muscles in the arm that had to do double duty. Its a very pragmatic thing. The body doesnt pay attention to your agenda, it just does what it must to stay alive, make do and meet stress.

The same thing would happen to both arms to your whole body if you had servants do everything for you as you reclined in an easy chair. If then all of a sudden you had to get out of the chair and run a mile or lift 200 pounds to survive, you wouldnt make it. Your wasted and weak body could not rise to the challenge.

Hormones are a metabolic sling. They replace the hormones that your body normally produces. When this happens there is a negative feedback mechanism. The more hormones from the outside that are introduced into the body, the less your body does what it no longer needs to, synthesize its own hormones. So the metabolic muscles that create hormones atrophy. If all of a sudden the outside source of hormones is withdrawn, your organs that are now withered from the easy chair life do not have the strength to produce their own. Since about every function in the body is hormone influenced, and every hormone interacts with every other hormone in some way, catastrophe results.

Since, as I said, hormones react with and are interdependent on other hormones and metabolic processes, what would be expected with massive doses of hormones at a level your body would never produce on its own? In the case of anabolics and the massive bodies they can produce, what happens to the digestive system that is not growing digestive muscle paralleling the pecs, but is being forced to digest and assimilate massive amounts of food daily?

Is it any wonder that modern anabolic bodybuilders are racked with heart disease, cancer, immune weakness, digestive failure and metabolic disorders in their early later years?

A huge number of high school kids are now trying to get big with steroids. What an incredibly dangerous proposition for them. Parents, be aware that this is not innocuous. If the argument is that taking them is the only way to excel in a sport, then change sports. Insist.

For you adults who are toying with the idea of taking hormones for one reason or another, think long and hard. Read the contraindications and cautions on the drug insert sheets. Take heed. Find other ways to stimulate your bodys own natural ability to enhance or improve itself through exercise, lifestyle and nutrition. Dont put your organs in slings and then expect long-term benefit. The piper will always be paid.