Actors, Athletes, and Influencers on Steroids Part 1

Actors, Athletes, and Influencers on Steroids

How to Tell Who’s Lying and Who Isn’t
C’mon, Rock. C’mon, Thor. C’mon, Wolverine. You’re all using, or have used, steroids to get in shape. Here’s how we can tell.

Influencers on Steroids: Shocking? Nope.
A lot of us rolled our eyes whenever the Liver King used to insist that his extreme muscularity was the result of his caveman diet and not drugs.

It reminded me of the time when my dad came home and found his expensive Warhol print defaced by crayons, the kitchen flooded because of a Play-Doh clogged drain, and an empty blackberry pie tin floating on the currents.

Much like the Liver King, I claimed innocence to all of it, even though I was sitting in several inches of water wearing a floatie, had a crayon sticking out of each of my ears, and had blackberries smeared all over my face.

Similarly, most of us were/are also hugely skeptical of the superhero physiques in all the Marvel and DC movies. Are we really supposed to believe that Hollywood actors got that way because they can afford suck-up personal trainers and nutrition coaches who feed them protein shakes every few hours?

How about Hugh Jackman? One film he’s Wolverine, and the next his lithe self is prancing around the set in some musical, only to beef up again in an amazingly short time for the next Marvel movie. Either the guy puts on muscle with the ease most of us slip on a pair of boxer shorts, or there’s something steroidal in the air.

And then there’s The Rock, already “outed” by Joe Rogan, bragging about how he, unlike other actors in their superhero roles, didn’t have to wear a padded suit to play Black Adam.

Granted, Mr. Rock, sir, you were probably beefier than those other celluloid superheroes before you started your career(s), but the steroid chain you carry is a ponderous one; you have labored on it mightily!

Who Cares? I Do
The question you might be asking at this point is, why should any of us care? Steroid use isn’t really something actors need to hide. It’s just something they did to prepare for a role, like Charlize Theron gaining 30 pounds of fat for her role in “Monster” or Christian Bale losing 60 pounds for “The Machinist.”

And even among regular Joes, steroid use is so prevalent that it shouldn’t be any more scandalous than using Just for Men to cover up some graying temples.

However, Hollywood types inflict some damage when they keep their drug use a secret. It creates unrealistic expectations among the great unwashed. They believe that all it took to look like Thor or Wolverine was a few months of specialized training and some protein shakes.

These expectations are nothing, however, compared to those created by unconfessed steroid-using “fitness influencers,” like the thousands of male and female Instagrammers who have cashed in on their surreptitious steroid use.

They use their chemically altered bodies to beef up their bona fides as trainers. The unspoken message is, “See what my knowledge of training and diet did for me? I can do the same for you.”

The crimes of the Liver King, however, are more egregious than most. He deked a significant portion of his 1.7 million Instagram users into not only buying his supplements, but also eating the testicles of an awful lot of barnyard animals. There’s got to be a special circle of hell for guys who make you eat horse and pig testicles.

In general, following the advice of steroid-assisted “athletes” is like getting chess lessons from a guy who has a strategy-relaying buzzer up his ass at a chess tournament.

Then there’s the issue of steroid use in sports. That’s an entirely different matter. With so much money involved and the difference between an average player and a superstar often coming down to several thousand milligrams of anabolic steroids, it’s easy to understand the allure.

Still, it’d be nice to know who’s a legitimate superstar and who’s riding on the coattails of pharmaceuticals. Their peers and competitors deserve to know, too, as do the people who pay them colossal salaries.

It’s very easy, though, to pre-judge an actor, fitness influencer, athlete, or regular Joe and brand them with a scarlet S for steroid user. There are other possibilities. They might even be legit.

So how do we tell? Let’s look at the different possible categories of suspect buffitude and see if we can come up with some conclusions.

The Genetic Freak
I’ve known a lot of pro bodybuilders, but there’s only one that I’m fairly convinced was natural, at least early on in his competitive career. His name is Jean-Paul Guillaume and he competed in the 90s. He never fared better than 10th place at the Olympia, but that’s pretty damn good for an alleged natty.

He trained at the same gym as I did in San Diego, and he certainly didn’t have any special training secrets, and he didn’t train any harder than a lot of us. Still, he had admirably round muscle bellies, some supernatural hamstrings, and a tiny waist you could imagine slipping your hands around if he was your square-dancing partner. Maybe not so much the dancing, but you get the idea.

Jean Paul Guillaume1240×698 268 KB
I was friends with his girlfriend, too, and she steadfastly backed up his steroid-free assertions. I believed him, as did most of the bodybuilding world. He simply didn’t have any of the telltale signs, which I’ll get to later. Quite simply, he was a genetic freak.

It’s difficult to say how many genetic freaks like Jean Paul there are in the world, but a sane guess would be one in a million. Of course, most of them probably never end up picking up a weight. They just quietly assume their lives, their larger-than-normal muscles concealed by flannel shirts or suitcoats as they tend to their everyday business.

There’s another type of genetic freak too, but it’s far rarer than the type represented by Jean-Paul Guillaume. You’re no doubt familiar with the Belgian Blue cattle, at least by appearance, if not by name.

These cattle have “myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy.” Myostatin is a protein secreted in muscle tissue that negatively regulates muscle growth. The Belgian Blue, however, have a mutation that knocks out the myostatin gene, leading to a phenomenon known as “double-muscling.”

This phenomenon is also seen in the occasional human. In 2005, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the existence of an unidentified child with the same mutation as Belgian Blues, which became apparent the moment he was born:

“He appeared extraordinarily muscular, with protruding muscles in his thighs and upper arms. With the exception of increased tendon reflexes, the physical examination was normal. Hypoglycemia and increased levels of testosterone and insulin-like growth factor I were excluded. Muscular hypertrophy was verified by ultrasonography when the infant was six days of age.”

In 2008, another such boy surfaced. Three-year-old Liam Hoekstra became known as the “World’s Strongest Boy” as he had approximately 40% more muscle mass than other children his age. He was able to do chin-ups at the age of one. By 18 months, he was picking up and moving furniture.

He could climb ropes and wield 5-pound weights as if they were pom-poms. He was faster than a speeding Nerf bullet, more powerful than a Scoot About, able to leap tall bean bag chairs with a single bound. He also had the metabolism of a hummingbird on meth and had almost no body fat.

Today, Liam is a relatively normal-looking young man (at least with his shirt or jersey on) who aspires to play football for the University of Michigan. Who knows what he could have looked like if he’d decided to be a bodybuilder?

It’s impossible to say how many people, let alone fitness influencers or athletes, are walking around with this “defective” gene. It’s remotely possible that some bodybuilders, fitness influencers, or pro athletes who look the way they do, or partly the way they do, because of a defect in their myostatin gene, but it’s likely they would be missing many of the telltale signs of steroid use.

The Steroid User
The first time I became aware of steroid use outside of bodybuilding and beefy Russian female shot-putters from the 1960s was when sprinter Ben Johnson tested positive and was stripped of his Olympic gold medal.

Johnson, however, could plausibly have passed as a non-steroid user. He just wasn’t that inflated. He had some nice rounded delts and some impressive quads and hamstrings, but they weren’t all that out of place for sprinters. Most likely, he was, as his coach Charlie Francis attested, using amounts that were almost inconsequentially small, a duck snort of stanozolol.

However, the first time I was able to visually detect that some athletes outside of bodybuilding were using steroids was in 1993, the year the Philadelphia Phillies lost to the Blue Jays in the World Series.

I’d noticed early in the season that a few of the players, most notably outfielder Lenny Dykstra, looked completely different than they had the year before. Having been relatively slight of build the year before, Lenny now had Popeye forearms, a chest struggling to stay confined in his jersey, a huge, bullish, veiny neck, and a reddish face that looked like it was going to explode from the slightest provocation.

Lenny, in my opinion, was sort of like the Rosa Parks of steroid use in baseball, only instead of taking a seat in a bus, he ripped out a whole row of seats and tossed them out the emergency exit onto the freeway.

Soon after, baseball players embraced steroid tech wholeheartedly and monsters began to roam the outfield, but they were easy to detect, as long as you took off the rose-colored glasses that came in your Cracker Jack box. Most people, though, kept the glasses on, not wanting to believe their heroes were chemically enhanced.

We’re less innocent now, but we still, as a society, seem to give a lot of steroid users, particularly Hollywood types and fitness influencers, a pass. We shouldn’t. We need to apply some Sherlock Holmesian logic and some steroid detection science to help us determine exactly who’s a charlatan and who isn’t, so the innocents are protected.