Muscle Memory From Steroids

Brief Exposure to Anabolic Steroids May Have Life Long Lasting Performance Enhancing Effects

Recent discovery research shows that athletes who take steroids for brief periods of time, will likely benefit from their muscular effects decades later.

Anabolic Steroids Do Not Only Induce Temporary Gains

Scientists from the University of Oslo were able to show that with just with 2 days use of anabolic steroids not only induce temporary gains but it allow for exceptional gain within a few of days of training to rodent years later.

Previous thoughts were that once the athlete came off steroids, the rate at which they bulked up during training, returned to normal. However now proven differently, as Professor Kristian Gundersen learned that mice that were briefly exposed to steroids, resulted in increased muscle mass and a fair amount of cell nuclei in the muscle fibers. Three months after drug withdrawal, (nearly 15% of a mouse’s life span) muscle growth increased by 30% over 6 days following load exercise. The non steroid mice grew insignificantly.

The largest cell in the human body is a muscle cell (fiber). To support their large volume of more than a thousand times that of most cells in the body; muscle cells are of few that have several nuclei. Exercise science teaches ACSM Personal Trainers that muscle mass increases with strength training enhancing the quality of each fiber by adding extra nuclei instead of increasing the overall number of fibers. The researchers learned that steroid use during training posed a long term advantage on the body’s acquisition of additional muscle cell nuclei. This leads to positive implications when strength training young benefit later since the ability to generate new myonuclei is impaired in the elderly may combat the effects of sarcopenia.

Benefits Lasting an Entire Professional Athletes Aareer

These findings have yet to be tested on humans but the equivalent would show benefits lasting an entire professional athletes career. This may lead to consequences for the exclusion time of professional athlete doping offenders as brief exposure to anabolic steroids may have life long lasting performance enhancing effects.

Ref: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/jphysiol.2013.264457/abstract