Saddest thing I ever saw in the gym was when I was lifting in this barebones 24-hour place (that actually closed at midnight, despite a giant banner out the front claiming they were open “24/7”).
Anyway, this gym had an agreement with one of the local colleges to allow students to use their facilities at off-peak times. Somewhat surprisingly, this wasn’t an issue at all. The lads (it was almost exclusively lads) were all well behaved – much better behaved than many of the adult members, I noticed. Moreover, there were never so many of them that the place felt crowded.
However.
Them boys didn’t half like their sauce.
I kid ye not, I overheard at least ten of them discussing their steroid cycles. The saddest instance being a kid who probably weighed no more than 55kg soaking wet who I overheard complaining to his friend about his terrible bacne and budding man-bewbies, both of which he admitted arose as a consequence of his drug abuse.
Bear in mind this was over ten years ago, and I know a whole lot more lads are abusing gear now thanks to the pernicious influence of social media and an increasing lackadaisical attitude towards drugs in general.
And it’s not just the young bucks wanting big muscles to impress the wimminfolk. If anything, they’re the minority these days. Far more common are men, generally middle-aged and divorced, jumping on TRT to cheat their way to a lean, muscular form because they are too weak to make meaningful changes to their lifestyle.
It’s sad when the kids do it, but when it’s grown men I have only contempt.
Yeah yeah, I know “their body, their choice”. But the impact these nuggets have on those who opt to Do the Right Thing by training naturally cannot be understated.
It’s utterly crushing to sweat bullets, year in, year out only to see some guy having a midlife crisis start popping needles into his backside and overtake you in a matter of months, often while bragging about how he still eats garbage and drinks like a fish.
There is no “fix” per se, because you cannot ever outperform a drug abuser.
But you can train smarter than them, so that when they are burnt out and broken with heart problems, tendon ruptures, acne, a pair of jugs that would make a pronstar proud, and maybe even paralysis from a stroke, you will be enjoying the fruit of many years of slow, patient training.
If a smarter approach to training is something you are interested in, you will find it in abundance inside “Phil Tyreman’s Big Book of Fitness”.
This is actually a collection of five books, the first of which is explicitly written for those who want to get strong and in shape without abusing steroids or other illicit substances. Inside, you will find a lot of informative and entertaining material about the “pre-steroid” era of bodybuilding, when people who trained looked healthy, natural, and real rather than like a cross between a mutated turtle and an anatomy chart.
The eBook is yours for £5 and you can learn all about it here:
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman