March 19, 2026
The (Not So Obvious) Case for Staying Natty | Ep 25
Is staying natural the smarter path to building muscle, improving fitness, and protecting long-term health?
In this episode of Unconditional with Norbie Schickel, we break down the rising trend of steroids, SARMs, peptides, and performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs)—and make a powerful, evidence-based case for staying natty.
From TikTok fitness influencers to everyday gym-goers, PED use is becoming mainstream—especially among young men chasing faster gains and aesthetic physiques. But what are the real tradeoffs?
This episode explores the hidden risks of steroids and PEDs, including:
- The link between PED use and body dysmorphia
- How drugs may break the connection between fitness and health
- Why natural lifters are more likely to achieve sustainable, aesthetic physiques
- The unknown long-term health risks of modern performance-enhancing compounds
- The influence of social media, looksmaxxing culture, and pharmaceutical incentives
We also compare classic physiques like Steve Reeves to modern bodybuilding icons, highlighting how training, expectations, and drug use have reshaped the definition of fitness.
If you’re considering steroids, TRT, or other enhancements—or simply want to build muscle naturally, safely, and sustainably—this episode is a must-listen.
Key Topics:
natural bodybuilding, steroids side effects, SARMs risks, TRT, fitness vs health, muscle building, body image, gym culture, longevity, aesthetics, performance enhancement
🎧 Tune in and discover why staying natural might be your best move—for your body, your mindset, and your future.
#StayNatty #NaturalBodybuilding #FitnessTruth #SteroidFree #PEDsAwareness
WEBVTT
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Go ahead and pop onto TikTok, Instagram, or whatever your favorite social media site is.
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And if you're into health and fitness as I am, it is hard not to notice a disturbing trend.
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And that is what would appear to be an explosion in the use of steroids and performance enhancing drugs.
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And I'm not talking about among professional bodybuilders or powerlifters or wrestlers either.
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And I'm talking about among normal people.
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People who are just looking to get in shape, to add some muscle, maybe look a little bit better at the beach.
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And perhaps most alarming, I'm talking about young people, guys in their early twenties, even teenagers, openly discussing and in some cases advocating for drugs, which only recently would have been considered by competitive bodybuilders and maybe some professional athletes.
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Exogenous testosterone, Tren, Dianabol, SARMS, Peptides, Ozempic, Retitrutide.
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The list goes on and on.
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All with a common aim.
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A single promise, if you will.
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More gains, faster.
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And here's the thing.
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They work shockingly well.
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Just for giggles, when you get a second, pull up a picture of Steve Reeves, okay, widely considered to have one of the most aesthetic bodybuilding physiques of all time, and winner of the 1947 Mr.
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America, the most elite bodybuilding competition at the time.
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This is before the Olympia.
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Now at 6'1 and over 200 pounds, the guy is muscular.
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The guy is proportionate, and he's aesthetic.
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Then after you do that, pull up a picture of Samson Dowda, the winner of the 2024 Olympia.
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At 5'11, he's about two inches shorter than Steve Reeves.
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But he competes at a stage weight around 300 pounds and completely shredded.
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Okay, not an ounce of fat on this guy.
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We're talking about a hundred pounds or more of lean muscle on a similar frame.
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Okay, it's just unbelievable.
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If you haven't seen this guy, just take a look.
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It's incredible.
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We're talking about not even in the same league of muscle mass, of leanness in definition.
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Okay, if you were an alien and you were looking at these two guys, you might be tempted to think that these are two different species of humans.
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Now, what changed in the last 80 years that led to such a stark difference between the two men?
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Both, I remind you, competing at the top of their game in the same sport at the time.
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Is it better training?
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Maybe.
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Better nutrition?
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Sure.
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But I think we all know the big one.
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PEDs, performance enhancing drugs.
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Now, of course, there's a trade-off, right?
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These are drugs that are not without side effects.
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But let's be honest here, most people are not going for, nor could they achieve Samson Dowdo's level of mass and leanness, right?
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Just not possible.
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So maybe, just maybe, it's worth considering just a little bit more risk, you know, for a little bit more or faster rewards.
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And it would seem, tragically, that more and more young men are beginning to conclude, sure, it's worth it.
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And I believe that this is a mistake.
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Health effects aside, there are some not so obvious reasons why, for the vast majority of people, staying natural is absolutely the way to go.
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With that, I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Unconditional with Norby Shickle.
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This week, my friends, it is time to preach.
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Okay, and preach I will.
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If you've been with me before, you know that this podcast, this channel, is centered on the idea that human beings are not built broken.
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Okay, we are not designed for, nor are we destined for, a life of slow and painful decline.
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That something or some things in our modern world are robbing us of the health and vitality that I believe is our birthright.
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Now, we've talked about nutrition, we talked about whole foods, we've even talked about the power of mindset in driving and delivering health outcomes.
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But fitness is certainly one of the most powerful lovers that you can pull from the perspective of health.
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In fact, in some ways, we think about health and fitness as almost synonymous.
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It's hard to imagine a person getting healthier without also getting fitter.
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One tends to reinforce and drive the other.
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But I can't help but notice that we may be at a pivotal moment in history in which that long marriage, the union of health and fitness, it may be coming to an end.
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I don't think it's a stretch to say that we may be entering a time in which the world of fitness is rapidly moving away from the concept of health.
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And that's for a very specific reason.
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Because of the rise and the use of performance-enhancing drugs, PEDs, steroids, SARMs, peptides, and synthetic hormones, including TRT.
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These are all terms and concepts that would have been completely foreign to most people just a few years ago, reserved for bodybuilders, professional athletes, and maybe some of the most hardcore gym bros.
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Certainly not teenagers and average guys just looking to get in shape.
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But in a shockingly short amount of time, that has changed in a dramatic way.
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And you get why, of course, there's absolutely no denying that performance-enhancing drugs do just that.
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They enhance performance, at least in one domain.
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And when you start combining drugs, say testosterone or steroids for mass and modern weight loss drugs like red or chutide or fat loss, the effects, especially from an aesthetic perspective, can be dramatic.
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I did an entire episode on the rise of looks maxing.
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Okay, definitely check that out if you haven't done so.
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But a key aspect of looks maxing, in many cases, involves the much more aggressive use of pharmaceuticals, often by very young guys, in an attempt to optimize and improve their looks.
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Now, what does this have to do with fitness?
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Yeah, I think that maybe there's a case to be made that PEDs will help improve fitness, right, depending on how you're looking at it.
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But health?
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I don't know that anybody is making that case that PEDs are going to improve your health outcomes.
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You know, and it's dawned on me that if this trend continues, we may be at the very start of this split, the split between health and fitness.
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Because certainly if we use the sport of professional bodybuilding as sort of a leading indicator, which historically it has been, as an athlete within competitive bodybuilding ascends, as they become more successful, and they are at their fittest within the context of the sport.
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In general, their health may be at their lowest, right?
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Their health is taking a serious toll.
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And before you think, yeah, but that's bodybuilding, you know, those guys are known for pushing the limits with training, pushing the limits with nutrition, pharmaceuticals.
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So yeah, a lot of these guys, you know, they push past reasonable limits.
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Let's just remember that it was only a few short years ago that so, so much of what's being openly discussed by teenagers on social media and online forums as part of getting in shape would have been considered pushing the limits.
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Okay, and I don't hear anybody else talking about it in this context, in this way, that we might be witnessing the end of health and fitness as we know it.
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That we might be entering an era where certainly for many, the price of fitness is health.
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And to me, that's not a good thing.
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And we should be talking about it.
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So I've got to chime in.
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I get it, this may not be popular, but it needs to be said.
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I am going to make the case for staying natural.
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Okay, I'm going to argue that despite what you see on TikTok, despite the latest and greatest compound, your favorite fitness influencer is hawking on social media.
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For the vast, vast majority of people, staying natural is far and away their best bet, both from a health perspective, which should be obvious, but also from a fitness perspective.
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And I mean that both when considered individually and in combination.
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I have outlined four not so obvious reasons why staying natural is the right move for most people.
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So before you reach for that injection, before you follow that link, give me a few minutes.
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Okay, in the future, you will thank me for this.
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So let's get into it.
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Point number one, PEDs are the on-ramp to body dysmorphia.
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This is how it works for most people.
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You start going to the gym to get in shape, you want to look better, you want to feel better too.
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But what if in a cruel twist of fate, you actually started to feel worse on the inside as you started to look better on the outside?
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In short, that's body dysmorphia.
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It's real and it's a terrible irony.
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I'm not the first person to point this out.
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That your odds of experiencing it, and I'm not the first person to point out that your odds of experiencing it go up dramatically with use of PEDs.
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So, what exactly is body dysmorphia?
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Technically, it's defined as a mental health condition in which a person becomes preoccupied with one or more perceived flaws in their appearance.
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Importantly, flaws that are either minor or not observable to other people.
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Okay, the key aspect here being that this is a perception issue.
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That one experiencing body dysmorphia has a fundamentally distorted view, which is clouding their view of the reality of their own body.
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Now we're talking in the context of fitness, maybe aesthetics, but this might relate to any physical attribute, the perception and preoccupation with one's weight, as an example, or height, or a specific feature of their body.
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And again, there's this sort of terrible irony at play here, whereby the person attempts to remedy the perceived flaw, but rather than those efforts resolving or reducing those negative feelings, it actually accelerates and exacerbates them.
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Even when objectively things are moving in the other direction, say with weight in the case of anorexia or an eating disorder.
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Now, how does this happen in the context of fitness and performance-enhancing drugs?
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Many people get into going to the gym, into lifting weights, getting in shape in order to put on some muscle, maybe lose fat, maybe look better, feel a little bit better.
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Nothing wrong with that.
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Okay, all valid reasons from where I'm sitting.
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But as you improve in these areas, two things tend to happen.
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First, your standards tend to change.
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What was once the standard of success is now the new minimum.
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15% body fat is awesome.
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But how great would I look at 10%?
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Right?
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This is human nature.
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We see this at work all over the place.
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It's something that I like to call moving the gratitude goalposts.
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Okay, we all do it.
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I certainly do it.
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We think that the next thing, the next thing that's on our list, the next accomplishment, the next measure of success, once we get that thing, we're going to be forever grateful.
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We're going to be permanently happier than we were before.
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But, you know, with a little bit of time, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, you know, we just start to reconsider.
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Maybe a little bit more would feel a little bit better.
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You know, maybe it would actually do the trick.
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And we convince ourselves that the next accomplishment, that next goal, then that will really be it.
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And then we'll finally be happy this time.
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And the cycle continues.
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The second thing that happens is that our frame of reference changes, in part because our peers change.
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Spending more time in the gym will put us around other people who prioritize things like muscle mass, maybe leanness, you know, or whatever their thing is.
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In comparison, it's inevitable.
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You add social media to the mix, the problem becomes even worse.
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With a never-ending number of people who look bigger, in better shape, with better symmetry, right?
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Whatever our thing is, social media will serve it to us for as long as we're willing to pay attention.
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It is a hole with no bottom.
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Now you might be thinking, okay, sure, but isn't this a possibility with natural athletes as well?
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I mean, what we're talking about here, evolving standards, changing frames of reference, these are fundamentally human tendencies.
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Why would body dysmorphia be uniquely bad with PEDs?
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And I think that the answer here lies in the fact that the nature of training and making gains in the gym shifts in a subtle but important way.
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When you were training as a natural, there are very, well, natural physiological limits, right?
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Guardrails in a way to certain things that we might want.
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And those things might be impossible or they might just be very difficult, especially delivered over a short amount of time.
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I'll give you an example.
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Building muscle and burning fat at the same time.
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Ask anybody who's been in the fitness world for a while, very difficult.
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Okay, very difficult to do at the same time.
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Especially once you get beyond a basic level of fitness when you are natural.
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And with some humility, I think it's fair to suggest that this might be for a good reason, right?
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Even if we don't necessarily know what that reason is, because the body has all sorts of natural balancing mechanisms.
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And again, some of these are understood and some of these are not.
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But given how difficult this is, I think one has to assume there's probably a good reason for it.
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And that simply overriding these mechanisms to achieve a look with the use of pharmaceuticals, that might not be wise.
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But with PEDs, that rule, it becomes a bit more flexible, doesn't it?
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Much easier to push things a bit further, especially when you consider, or you're willing to consider, multiple drugs.
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The same could be said of natural limits to muscle mass, the development of tendon and ligament strength relative to the pace of muscle strength.
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Every one of these natural systems exists, I think it's fair to suggest, with some built-in guardrails.
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And each one of these systems can be overridden to a degree with the use of pharmaceuticals, which provides an ever-present temptation to push the envelope a little bit further.
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When you're natural, the biggest difference makers in your performance and your looks are going to come from how you eat, how you train, and how you recover.
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Not taking anything away from the hard work of, say, an elite bodybuilder.
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But when you add PEDs to the mix, that equation very quickly and very dramatically changes to how far you are willing to push PEDs.
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It immediately comes to the top of the list.
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I don't think there's any argument with that.
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And the proof of that statement is how rapidly guys will just sort of shrink down to a shadow of their former selves when they stop using PEDs.
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Okay, now that's me saying it.
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Other people have said it.
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But do we have any evidence that this is the case?
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You know, has anyone studied whether body dysmorphia is more likely with PED use?
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Actually, yes.
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Quite a bit, in fact.
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And multiple studies over many years, including randomized controlled studies, have found a strong association between PED use and body dysmorphia.
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Now, in the interest of time, I'm not going to go through them all, but I will link to them in the show notes.
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And look, I get the temptation.
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You know, I'm 42, and in many ways, I am incredibly fortunate because these things weren't around in the same way when I was in my 20s.
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I mean, certainly not when I was a teenager.
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But as I said earlier, there is this sort of special, I don't know, cruel irony that is involved here.
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That by doing what you believe will make you look better, feel better, more confident, more secure, there's a good chance that it's going to do the opposite.
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Why open that door?
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And of course, bodybuilding and fitness is not the only area where we see this dynamic at play.
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Where introducing some artificial element to what was a natural system leads to a permanent and fundamental distortion of the perception of oneself.
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We have plastic surgery and other cosmetic procedures where we see this dynamic at play.
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You know, how often does someone stop at just one procedure?
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Almost never, right?
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And we've all seen examples of celebrities, maybe even people that we know, where maybe they look a little bit better after the first procedure, but as it continues, they eventually begin to look sort of distorted.
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Okay, and that's not a judgment here.
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I don't mean that in a mean or nasty way, but we have seen it, and it does happen.
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And the mechanism that enables that is body dysmorphia.
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Okay, so that's body dysmorphia, real risk, real evidence.
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Okay, we get the mechanism.
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The second thing is that by staying natural, by saying no to performance-enhancing drugs, we get to keep the important link between health and fitness.
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Okay, we've touched on this already a little bit, but as I've said before, we are truly living in what I believe is an unprecedented time here.
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Okay, as far as I can tell, this is the first time in all of human history that we are breaking the link, this fundamental union between health and fitness.
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Just a few years ago, in the vast majority of cases, if you had said someone got fit, if you'd said someone had gotten in shape, it meant almost by definition that they were healthier.
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When you enter PEDs and modern pharmaceuticals into the mix, including injectable weight loss drugs, the picture is less clear.
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We can clearly see examples in which additional muscle mass or loss of body fat is not necessarily a reflection of improved health.
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But in many cases, it's the exact opposite, right?
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It's a reflection of pushing the envelope too far.
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You'll see the string of very high profile and unfortunate deaths of young bodybuilders as evidence here at the pinnacle of their career, from guys like Rich Piana to Dallas McCarver, right?
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It's a long, unfortunate list.
00:20:20.079 --> 00:20:40.880
You know, one thing to think about is can you think of any other professional sport, maybe other than boxing, but I think even if you include boxing, in which we expect multiple athletes will die in a given year, while they are apparently at the peak level of fitness for their sport.
00:20:41.839 --> 00:20:43.920
I mean, I can't think of any other ones.
00:20:44.160 --> 00:20:46.160
And this is more than anecdotal.
00:20:46.400 --> 00:20:49.359
Again, there have been a few studies that have looked at this.
00:20:50.240 --> 00:20:54.799
It turns out one of the best studies was actually published last year in 2025.
00:20:54.880 --> 00:20:57.599
I'll link to the study again in the show notes here.
00:20:58.240 --> 00:21:10.160
But they tracked over 20,000 male bodybuilders and found that professional bodybuilders were five times more likely to suffer sudden cardiac death than amateur bodybuilders.
00:21:10.400 --> 00:21:14.240
In the median age, around 45 years old.
00:21:15.119 --> 00:21:19.759
Now, do we know for certain this is 100% due to PED use?
00:21:20.480 --> 00:21:23.039
No, I don't think we can say that for sure.
00:21:23.359 --> 00:21:32.240
But what we can say is that young people in the general population have an incredibly low risk of sudden cardiac death.
00:21:32.960 --> 00:21:39.839
And steroids have a long and known history of creating heart issues in their users.
00:21:40.559 --> 00:21:54.240
And given that the risk of sudden cardiac death among professionals was five times that of the amateurs, and I don't think it's controversial to suggest that PED use is certainly higher among pros than amateurs.
00:21:55.519 --> 00:21:59.599
I mean, you can draw your own conclusions, but I think the answer is fairly obvious.
00:22:01.039 --> 00:22:05.039
Now, what does that number mean, say, in the context of the general population?
00:22:05.200 --> 00:22:09.680
You know, how should we think about this number as non-bodybuilders, let's just say?
00:22:10.480 --> 00:22:21.440
Well, the risk among the pros was so high, in fact, that their risk profile essentially matched the risk profile of very old people, right?
00:22:21.599 --> 00:22:25.759
The demographic, which is actually at risk for sudden cardiac death.
00:22:27.200 --> 00:22:28.480
But these are young guys.
00:22:28.559 --> 00:22:31.200
Okay, these are not guys that are in their 70s and 80s.
00:22:31.359 --> 00:22:34.880
We're talking about guys in their 20s, 30s, and 40s.
00:22:35.759 --> 00:22:44.079
Now, again, the point is not to provide a bibliography on the side effects and potential risks of each performance-enhancing drug currently on the market.
00:22:44.160 --> 00:22:46.000
Okay, that is not the point here.
00:22:46.559 --> 00:22:57.039
The point is that it's becoming increasingly obvious to me that PEDs are a fundamental break in this connection that we have assumed for so long, right?
00:22:57.279 --> 00:23:06.720
The connection between health and fitness that has existed probably since the first caveman dropped on the floor and banged out a set of push-ups.
00:23:06.880 --> 00:23:20.319
To me, the importance of this change cannot be overstated, especially because, as we discussed in the past, so much of what passes for quote fitness and the gym today comes from the world of competitive bodybuilding.
00:23:20.480 --> 00:23:24.240
As I've said before, it's a leading indicator, so to speak.
00:23:24.960 --> 00:23:31.039
And I think the question that we should continually ask ourselves, is this really the right model?
00:23:31.920 --> 00:23:33.680
Now, this is my own bias here.
00:23:33.759 --> 00:23:35.680
I've spoken about this in the past.
00:23:36.000 --> 00:23:50.079
As much as I appreciate the sport of bodybuilding, and I do like it, the obvious question is, is this really the right model to be following to meet your objectives for fitness and health?
00:23:50.400 --> 00:23:54.160
As much as I like the sport, I'm not so sure.
00:23:54.960 --> 00:23:57.759
And I'll tell you also something that I find fascinating.
00:23:58.000 --> 00:24:03.519
You know, as I was preparing for this episode, I got curious about the word fitness.
00:24:03.680 --> 00:24:05.599
You're like, where does this come from?
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