Should I consider steroids to make me build muscle faster?

This is a question I get asked by many new male customers to Personal training studios so I thought I would address it here instead of brushing it under the carpet like many trainers do.

Everyone wants fast results but do you want fast results at the risk of causing permanent damage to your body, health and possibly even death.  At the moment there has been a lot of coverage around steroid use by the media where Matthew Dear a 17 year old man (pictured below) has died from steroid use after suffering an allergic reaction something I personally know about.

When I originally began bodybuilding and I was training with heavy weights regularly I went down the steroid root but not for long, as I suffered some kind of allergic reaction leaving me in hospital with an extremely high resting heart rate and having me gasping for breath.  After that day my view of steroids in bodybuilding and fitness changed. I hadn’t overdosed and had certainly spent months studying the risks of steroids and learning all about them from books providing an insight into steroid taking, but I still suffered.

It is only after this nasty steroid experience I started seeing the bad side of steroids where as before I had seen them as a miracle supplement.  In my early days of weight lifting I suffered two bad health problems one being this incident and the other a bad case of gastritis from over eating when I was not hungry to ensure I got in the calories and protein amounts the bodybuilding magazines recommended for competitive bodybuilders which was way beyond what I needed but certainly provided them with what they wanted, the cash from me buying their supplements to keep up with their exaggerated protein tables on what amount of protein you should be eating per pound of your body weight.  Had I not experienced these health problems at this time I would have probably not cut back from my extreme diet, as we all need to know our limits I suppose, but at the expense of our own health, No!

After these negative effects of extreme bodybuilding I went completely natural and dropped my protein consumption right down, I still gained a huge amount of muscle but safely this time.  Personal training was my full time job around this time and I was training ex bodybuilders and people trying to gain muscle for the first time.  When I spoke to a lot of the ex bodybuilders and told them my story I noticed they to had had bad stories around steroid use.  One of my clients at the time has been in a similar situation but far worse than mine.  He was a competitive bodybuilder, and had been a regular steroid user for some time, and it had certainly harmed his body, leaving him a few years before I began training him close to his death bed, yet his problems were caused not by regular consumption like I had followed but by taking way over the recommended amount so this could have been expected but not ignored.  Steroids are highly addictive, like with exercise when we see results in the change of our body we want more and more so train harder and harder, steroids work the same way but overdosing on steroids is far worse than overdosing on exercise.

Still today many bodybuilders, fitness magazines and steroid info books make out that steroid use is completely safe as long as it is taken following the daily amounts printed by the books.  I can honestly say this is not true, everyone told me around this time I had nothing to worry about, steroids were becoming more easy to purchase with Internet sites selling them and now today you can have them delivered on your door within 24 hours most likely from a warehouse based in Bulgaria.  You don’t know what you are getting, these aren’t UK tested drugs passed by the drugs testing standards in the UK.  Some people reading this article will say, he’s a one off its unlikely or he must have taken too much but just ask any steroid user if he has suffered any side effects or if he has been checked out by a doctor recently and been told he is ok, unless you are a competitive bodybuilder and this is your life long path then steroids are something you don’t need to really be considering.  Don’t get me wrong there are plenty of healthy people out there taking steroids I know a lot of people training today with no problems but there are also a lot suffering problems.  I only considered it as I wanted to go the whole way in bodybuilding competition, for most people impatience for fast results is why they take steroids and they are what makes up the steroid market and these are often the people who are the most vulnerable as they don’t have the knowledge most pro bodybuilders do on the steroid subject.

If you train hard there is no need to do steroids, naturally you can still build a body that looks incredible.  Bodybuilders who consider steroids get the best results from being a bodybuilder for many years prior to taking steroids.  Newbie’s to weightlifting should forget it completely it is a serious risk.  Steroids have become very popular in the gay scene and that is where I have seen it go badly wrong.  Young gay men have had personal training at the studio and told me they had started steroids on and off because a friend told them it was the best way to build muscle.  Can you imagine how dangerous that is, steroids are not like recreational drugs you can’t just take them now and again you have to keep to a strict course taking the correct anti estrogen’s and liver support, when you take steroid shots here and there you are dancing with the devil.