[jonnyone]

>It mostly boils down to people pumping themselves full of steroids up until a week or so before the competition so they test clean.

The most common "base" of a steroid cycle is testosterone. If you stopped injecting testosterone a week before a competition, you would still show unusually high levels of testosterone in your blood (even if you were using a shorter ester). But as others have pointed out, they don't test for steroids in most BB competitions.

My personal suspicion is that pro BBers who use steroids but deny it do so to protect product endorsements they have.

[bluecalm]

There is also no ester test. You have to inject it daily (or more likely several times a day) but it's detectable for like 4-5 hours. This plus first two no-shows not counting as failed test makes it possible to juice in professional sports which do out of competition testing. Granted I don't think it's popular in BB circles because yeah no testing and injecting as much as frequently would be painful.