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- Steroids help you get bigger and stronger, faster.
- Both observational evidence (comparing records in powerlifters and weightlifters) and experimental evidence suggest that the advantage you get from steroids is quite large in terms of absolute measures (total muscle and strength gained), but that they only confer a ~10% advantage in terms of how competitive you’ll be in strength sports. As you gain more muscle mass, you’re expected to lift more to be equally competitive in your sport. When taking into account both gains in strength and muscle mass, the performance edge they give you is about 10%.
- Higher doses for longer periods of time don’t seem to provide an increasingly larger advantage. The relative performance improvement in Bashin’s 20-week study was identical to the performance improvement in his 10-week study. Additionally, in his 20-week study, the group using 300mg of Test per week actually improved their Wilks Score more than the group using 600mg of Test per week. Furthermore, in Yu’s study comparing drug-free lifters to lifters who had been using much higher doses for 5+ years, the advantage of steroid use for improving relative performance disappeared entirely, though there were some important drawbacks to that study.
- The advantage steroids give you is likely larger for tests of upper body strength, such as the bench press. Though Bashin’s 1996 study actually found a larger advantage in the squat than the bench press, the world records in powerlifting, Yu’s study, and insights into the muscle groups most affected by steroid use all seem to suggest that the bench is the lift that benefits the most from steroid use.
10% is pretty massive though. When the margins become thin, razor thin, at the highest levels of competition.
Also just as a tangent, are we counting bodybuilding as a "strength sport"? If so, I would disagree with this notion and say that steroids/PEDs clearly play far more than a ~10% role in increasing "performance" or in this case...aesthetics/size.
The difference between a natural bodybuilder and a juiced/insulin/HGH'd to the gills bodybuilder is stark.