If you follow the news, both in the sports world and national news, you will have read many articles dealing with the drug use by athletes. The exposes of drug use by athletes range over many different sports but especially in baseball, football and cycling.
However, as more articles are written about drug use by athletes, they leave the impression that athletes, if they wish to be successful, must use drugs, especially steroids. The drugs or more specifically, performance-enhancing drugs (PED’s), are needed in order to become bigger, stronger and faster. This is a terrible message that we are sending to our youth.
There now even appear to be many articles dealing with the positive as well as negative sides of steroids. But as has been well documented, knowledge of the downside of drug use is not a strong deterrent for most athletes. Studies show that athletes are willing to use the drugs in order to win, even though they know it may kill them within a few years.
Thus, trying scare tactics is not the answer to preventing athletes from using drugs. Massive testing, of course, can be done, but it is very expensive and must be done on a regular basis in order to be effective. Athletes being tested once a year, or being told that they will be tested in the near future, as they do in some professional leagues, is far from sufficient to deter their use.
Perhaps even more importantly is that the media is not looking at what can be done in training. The media refuses to present the other side of the equation, namely that you can become a better athlete without the use of steroids.
There is no questioning the fact that steroids do make you bigger and stronger, and this, in turn, will improve your performance in some sports or sports skills, but at what cost? Note that for sports that require a high level of execution of skills, steroid use will interfere with the established motor patterns, and you will not be able to execute the skill as well.
This is quite obvious in many sports and especially in baseball batting. Players who have been found to use drugs or been alleged to use drugs, literally muscle their way through the swing rather than having effective technique in which they use their entire body to produce the force. They usually have a different swing than players who do not use drugs.
Drug or steroid users rely more on upper body and arm strength rather than total body involvement to create the power as was once done by the great hitters. The reason for this is that the steroid use and limited strength training programs, overdevelop certain muscles. The player then relies on these muscles for execution of the skill rather than using the total body for maximum effectiveness.
With an effective training program not only would technique of the skill be improved greatly but also the physical qualities that relate specifically to the technique be developed fully. This is something that PED’s cannot do.
But it is the basis of the training system that I have developed. By improving technique and the physical qualities related specifically to the technique, it is possible to greatly improve skill performance. This in turn improves game performance resulting in greater team success.
By using steroids over a period of time the dosages will be quite high to continually enable the players to become bigger, stronger and faster. As a result, they become more prone to injury. Understand that with steroid use the muscles become stronger, but the tendons that attach the muscles to the bones become comparatively weaker.
Because of this, a great imbalance develops between the muscles and the tendons so that in time, the tendons tear or actually rip off the bone because of the excessive muscle strength. This is one reason why we see so many injuries to the tendons in ball players. However, in their natural state, the tendons are quite elastic and can take great stresses. When weakened by the steroids, they lead to an increased number of injuries. This will never happen on a successful specialized strength training program.
Thus, if a ball player wants to have a successful, long career, he should avoid steroids. Steroids or performance-enhancing drugs may be of benefit for a very short period of time, but the negatives far outweigh the short-lived positives. The shame in all of this is that the media refuses to print such information that can help many athletes. Instead, they rely on sensationalizing the drug use, implying that without the drug use you can never be successful.
Why is it that newspapers, magazines and sports commentators refuse to address this topic, especially what a well-balanced scientifically-based training program can do for the athlete? If they are truly interested in helping develop the athletic youth of this nation and to create a stronger athletic base in this country, they should be talking about this and writing about this more than who is using and who isn’t using steroids.
They should bring out the negatives on how drug use shortens the athlete’s career, and if he continues playing longer, he will have little to contribute. If a ball club is truly interested in economizing and developing the best team, they would invest in the youth and truly develop them so that they can be even better than the present day athletes. This can only be done through a sound training program.
This is the key to success for each athlete and for the team when all the athletes are performing to their potential. There is no need for the continual emphasis on getting bigger and stronger. Emphasis must be switched to becoming a better athlete and improving the athlete’s ability to execute the skills of his sport or more specifically, his position.
For more information on this topic read Build a Better Athlete and Sports: Is It All BS?