The Harvard formula that spots steroid users
And how to find how much muscle you can build naturally.
Have you ever quietly looked at someone and wondered, are they on steroids? If yes, today’s post is for you.
Monday’s post covered steroids and testosterone. We ran an honest conversation with a successful 30-something who started taking steroids, and looked at the upsides and downsides of the testosterone replacement therapy boom.
Today, we’re investigating a study that gave us the closest thing science has to a “steroid detector.” We’ll use it to understand something more interesting: how muscular you can get naturally, and how to use that information to build muscle for life without wasting time, energy, or frustration.
It all started with a Harvard researcher named Harrison Pope. He’s one of the most cited researchers on anabolic steroids, substance abuse, and body image.
In the 1980s and 1990s, anabolic steroid use was exploding among all sorts of lifters—from professional bodybuilders to everyday guys who’d watched Pumping Iron one too many times and wanted to look like Arnold.
Pope was at the frontlines of the steroid boom and seeing the downsides: psychiatric issues, heart health problems, and a strange new perfectionism among men obsessed with muscle. But he kept hitting a roadblock:
Nobody admitted they were on steroids. Not to their doctors, not to researchers, and certainly not to their parents.
Pope wondered if he could Moneyball steroid use. He wanted to create a simple mathematical formula that doctors and researchers could use to flag likely steroid use.
The idea was that if you could just plug in some information about a person, you’d be able to gauge whether or not they were using steroids without having an awkward, probably lie-filled conversation.
The formula would also be good for science, because it would help researchers filter out likely steroid users when proof was hard to come by.
So he conducted a study.
Here’s today’s roadmap:
The steroid use study: How it was conducted and what it can tell us about who is and isn’t on steroids.
The steroid formula: A simple yet effective way to know if a person is on steroids.
The natural limit: Just how muscular you can get naturally.
Lessons for building muscle for life: How to use this number to set realistic muscle goals and use your time wisely.
Housekeeping:
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The steroid study
With his question in mind—can we develop a formula to determine likely steroid use?—Pope and his team recruited 157 male athletes from gyms in LA and Boston. He used men because steroid use was and still is an overwhelmingly male phenomenon. Some estimates suggest that men comprise 90% of anabolic steroid use.
All 157 men competed in weightlifting sports, like bodybuilding. To confirm whether they used steroids, Pope and his team conducted long interviews and also took urine tests.
83 of the participants were steroid users.
74 of them didn’t use steroids.
In addition to those men, Pope looked at 20 Mr. America bodybuilding competition winners from 1939 to 1959, which is the “pre-steroid era.”
Those people were likely genetically gifted and bodybuilding was their full-time job, so it gave Pope a sense of just how big and lean a person could get without steroids—a “natural limit.”
What he found was a mathematical line in the sand—a specific number that the non-steroid users simply didn’t seem to cross.
In the rest of this letter, you’ll get:
The steroid signal: The clear cutoff that suggests a person is likely on steroids.
The natural limit: How much muscle you can build without steroids.
Honest guidelines on how to build the most muscle in the time you have.