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Originally Posted by cdubb
Majority of ppl who have ACL surgery use their own hamstrings tendon. And fixing your ACL doesn't make you suddenly an All-Star, it allows you to run without blowing out your knee and getting premature arthritis.
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No but Tommy John surgery has been shown to have pitchers throwing harder than ever before afterwards and regardless I'm not talking about taking stuff that turns Joe Shmo into an All-Star, I'm talking about elite athletes who are already better than most, and training harder and longer than most, making up small gaps they may have in their own god given bodies between them and other athletes. Some elite athletes have bone structure that makes them more likely to blow out a knee or an elbow, other elite athletes produce less testosterone than others. They are both deficiencies.
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Originally Posted by cdubb
There is an inherent difference in training in altitude, and removing your own blood and re-infusing it. Heck, hospitals don't even allow it anymore for blood transfusions prior to surgery.
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I'm really interested, could you please elaborate on this?
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Originally Posted by cdubb
this may be true about proper education and safety. i am frightened if there are cops/soldiers using horse steroids and going on ragers.
the things is these people use steroids that are different than the corticosteroids a person takes for asthma or rheumatoid arthritis.
PEDS means whoever has the most money will have advantage - maybe true in reality anyways with Yankees, Lakers, etc.
The thing is people can get hurts in sports (hockey, football, boxing) with concussions, fractures, etc. It's not like its unknown steroids cause roid rage, and players may do a cheapshot they normally wouldn't do.
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I kept the rest of this together because I'm not just talking about steroids, I'm talking about all different types of performance enhancement. I know there are ways to go about using steroids and other types of performance enhancement without seeing negative side effects. I think proper education would mitigate a lot of that.
You make an excellent point about PEDs giving advantages to the people with money. I'd argue that if we made this stuff more mainstream that the costs would be lessened to the point where money would be less of a factor. I'd also suggest that since I am talking about steroid use of elite athletes that these guys would already have to get to a certain point and be making a certain amount of money that they could afford high costs of PEDs anyhow.
But that gets me thinking about a real strong negative to PED use and that's in youth sports. As a youth coach I have players asking me all the time about simply helping them with training to become better and what sorts of weightlifting and such they can do to help improve. I have enough issues with simple weightlifting for kids the age that I coach 14/15 that I don't really know how much information to give them. In general, I always say that because their bodies are still growing that they shouldn't be messing around in the weightroom too much.
Now to think about these same kids using PEDs, well that frightens me. They already have their hormones going all over the place. Even the smartest course of PED could likely screw up their physical development. This is an area where I think we really need to step up both research and education.
I'm fine with adults making adult decisions to push themselves as far as they need to go but I'm definitely not fine with kids trying to make those same decisions. Especially not when you consider how much bad advice kids can get from adults who pretend to have their best interests at heart.
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Originally Posted by cdubb
I personally am amazed at the difference in reaction about steroids in baseball and olympics versus in the NFL.
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I view NFL players as very similar to Olympic athletes. If you think about the sport in general and how it doesn't so much demand endurance as it does the ability to give it your all for but a few seconds then it's got more in common with sprinting than it does basketball. Also if you think about all the niche skills players can have such as linemen, receiver, etc. These are positions where you might really only need to work on your pure strength or explosiveness, which again gives them more in common with track athletes than basketball players.
Now obviously you need to have a different mentality in football than in track but you can train in very much a similar way, so it wouldn't shock me at all to find out that many professional football players use PEDs in much the same way that track athletes do.
