• Question: do steroids improve the way in which a sport person performs, if so how?

    Asked by dukesta to Helen on 11 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Helen O'Connor

      Helen O'Connor answered on 11 Jun 2011:

      Good question. Steroids are one type of performance enhancing drug, and basically bulk people up to be bigger and get larger muscles. Being loads bigger could help people in certan sports do better because different sports need different body shapes: but you wouldnt want to be a great big bulked up high-jumper!
      But steriods have dreadful side effects: they cause really bad acne and baldness, men taking steroids can develop boobs whilst also getting smaller other parts (you know the ones I mean). People taking steroids can also get “roid rage” and be really aggressive or depressed…
      So all in all I would say NO, steroids don’t improve the way in which a person performs.

Comments

  • Photo: Mark

    Mark commented on :

    Ah, this does depend on what you mean by “perform”! Steroids (usually a substance related in some way to the male hormone testosterone) certainly increase muscle size (a process known as hypertrophy; this is a reason why bodybuilding competitions in the US are divided into those for people who take steroids and those that don’t), and because muscle strength is related to muscle size they make you stronger.

    Whether they make you faster over 100 m, for example, is open to debate because being bigger means being heavier, and being heavier means it takes more force to move your bigger body around. And as you can’t be absolutely sure the steroids will increase the size of the muscles crucial to sprinting, on balance if they have any effect it is probably quite small. That said, there aren’t any studies done on the effect of steroids on elite athletes for obvious reasons!

  • Photo: Jenni

    Jenni commented on :

    Good question.

    One important thing to note is that steroids are taken for two reasons. As Helen and Mark have already discussed anabolic steroids are taken to boost muscle size and increase power. The second type is corticosteroids which are used to reduce inflamation and pain when people have an injury – it is common to prescribe local steroid injections into the joints of rheumatoid arthritis sufferers.

    This reduction in pain can be helpful for athletes who are trying to train with an injury – it is fairly common to give local corticosteroid injections for tendon and ligament injuries. This allows athletes to continue to train and so not lose fitness because of an injury. However, while one-off injections can help reduce pain, scientists think that taking these types of steroids long term may actually reduce the strength of the tendon, making it more likely to tear and so reducing performance!

    Part of my research is looking at how corticosteroid injections affect the structure and composition of tendon

  • Photo: dukesta

    dukesta commented on :

    is there any good reason what so ever in taking steriods??