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by chris_7 3517 days ago
> To make it as a bodybuilder, you have to use steroids.

Does this not disqualify you? Or is everyone just cheating like in cycling?

3 comments

There are divisions that are tested--monthly polygraphs and urine/blood. You've never heard of them. When people think about bodybuilding, they imagine freaks, which is not a natural state.

In software, we say: good, fast, cheap; pick two. In bodybuilding: big, lean, natural; pick two.

You can have a lot of mass and if you carry extra fat, or you can be shredded to the bone and carry a lot less lean mass. Naturally, the lower fat reserves run, the higher the chance that catabolic hormones break down lean mass. If you want to be big, lean, and win shows, you need to take the growth and steroid hormones to flip some bits on the config files in your muscular/adipose tissue to allow it.

Your DNA is the software for your body. Hormones bind to receptors on cells, get transported into the cell, bind to internal receptors, and then this complete structure moves into the nucleus where it transcribes certain DNA sequences into RNA chains that will be fed through ribosomes to produce proteins (your hardware).

Steroids/hormones (everything from vitamin D to testosterone) is the body's mechanism of editing /etc/* and calling kill -HUP on select daemons. Steroids evolved as the process for doing this because it's biologically impractical to grow a nerve ending to every single cell in the body.

Unless you have a homozygous myostatin deficiency, you can't compete without using them. Very similar to cycling.
You might be thinking of weightlifting, which is not the same as bodybuilding.