In today’s society in athletics, muscle mass and strength seem more important than in years past. It is believed that many athletes use anabolic steroids to increase their muscle mass and also their strength. Anabolic steroids are a group of synthetic hormones that promote the storage of proteins and the growth of tissue, sometimes used by athletes to increase muscle size and strength. Before the mid 1970’s the use of anabolic androgenic steroids (AAS) was used mainly by highly trained athletes especially those involved in weight training. Since then other athletes including those involved in recreational sports and non-competitive sports have started using the steroids. Steroids are also being used by many school age children especially those involved in sports in the schools. Everyone wants to be bigger, stronger, and faster and will do almost anything to gain this. Scientists, researchers, and doctors have conducted many studies involving the use of anabolic steroids. These studies have been conducted on various athletes of different sexes and also involving many different sports. Comparison has also been made with athletes using anabolic steroids and those who do not use. A comparison has also been made using anabolic steroids compared to creatine. Several effects of steroid use have been identified. These include an increase in low density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol and a decrease in high density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol. These lipid changes if allowed to continue over long periods of time could result in coronary heart disease (6). Some other side effects of steroids in men include shrinking of the testicles; reduced sperm count, infertility, baldness, development of breasts, and increased risk of pro... ... middle of paper ... ...ble. With television and computer so common in today’s society, more and more people spend much time at home watching sport shows. Young children grow up with their heroes being famous athletes they see on TV everyday. These young children grow up wanting to be just like the people they have watched for years on television. Becoming a great athlete is a dream of many young people and also their parents. Because steroids have seemed to make it a lot easier for people to attain the goals they have set out to accomplish, many people have turned to the drugs to gain that goal. Without thinking about the physical side effects or the mental side effects that steroids can have on them, they are willing to risk all that to become bigger, stronger, or faster just to succeed in sports whether it be in junior high, high school, college or at the professional level.
Steroids have taken over the game of baseball and more players are starting to get involved with them. Steroids are a big part of the Major League today in 2014, yet they entered the game of baseball through trainer Curtis Wenzlaff in 1992. Players and the game’s images are ravaged when they become caught up in steroids. Some of the best players to ever play the game of baseball have been caught up in steroids, including Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, and Mark McGwire. Players with this level of skill are supposed to be role models for younger kids, yet younger kids see that they used steroids and are tempted to use them. When their young, impressionable minds witness steroids use, naturally kids attempt to imitate their idols. More importantly, steroid users damage their own well-being and the image of the sport. Baseball players who decide to use Anabolic steroids are affecting themselves just as much as the game of baseball itself.
Every year high school, college, and professional athletes try to get just ?a little bigger,??a little stronger,? and to increase the amount of weights they lift by, ?just a few pounds.? To achieve these goals athletes often turn to anabolic steroids to aid them in achieving their goals. Anabolic steroids are a quick, but dangerous way to increase muscle mass, and they can carry many risks including some life threatening side affects. Years after taking steroids athletes can live to have serious heart problems, sterility, or possibly not even live, all because of foolish decisions they made in the past. These potentially fatal drugs are not widely known by young athletes at all, because they don?t know about the risks that can go along with them. In school, every student is taught about marijuana, cocaine,heroin, sex, liquor, and all those other health risks, but they?re never taught about ?roids? or ?juice.? (slang words for steroids) That should be changed, because it is known that student athletes often use steroids, not knowing the risks. Many times they take the risk because they hear about professional athletes taking steroids. But, despite their widespread use in sports, steroids can have more negative than positive effects on athletes of all types. Steroids are chemical substances that can be made naturally by the body or produced synthetically. There are many different types of steroids that are used for different things other than just athletes enhancing muscles. For example, there are types of steroids that can be used by women as birth control pills, and other types that are used for menopause treatment. The abuse of steroids is almost always found to be in the case of athletes, and that is the focus of this paper. ?All anabolic steroids are synthetic compounds whose molecular structure is similar to that of the natural male sex hormone testosterone. Testosterone affects development of the male body in two important ways: it has an anabolic effect - increases growth, especially of muscular and skeletal tissue - And an androgenic effect - increased development of male sexual characteristics. Anabolic steroids are constructed stythetically in such a way that they maximize the anabolic effect of testosterone while minimizing the androgenic effect.? The way that steroids work can easily be interpreted by a foo...
In the world of sports today, anabolic/androgenic steroid use is a vast problem. Since its’ introduction into Russian weightlifting, it has been expanding with no signs of stopping. It has spread into every major sport, with usage by every age and race. The use continues to grow, even with a lengthy list of serious health, legal, and ethical concerns. Because of our society's adoration of muscle, athletes put their athletic goals higher on their priority list than their long-term health. From Hulk Hogan to Arnold Schwarzenegger, our heroes all fit the superhuman mold. The government has tried various laws and programs to cut down on usage, but these programs have had little or no effect. It has become one of the biggest problems in organized sports, yet it does not receive a proportional amount of attention. Steroid use has become an epidemic, and something must be done to stop it.
There are many types of steroids abused by athletes in order to increase their muscle mass and strength. Though steroids have a negative reputation, there are some that can be beneficial to athletes and certain patients. There are types of steroids called corticosteroids that have more medical uses to them and another type called anabolic-androgenic steroids that have a more limited medical use. The anabolic-androgenic are usually the steroids that are being abused by athletes (Bigelow, par.10). The use of steroids goes back to the end of World War II around the 1940’s. Doctors were giving the freed prisoners from the Nazi concentration camps that were at risk of death anabolic-androgenic steroids to help gain back their muscle mass and weight faster. From this knowledge, steroids began to be used by body builders and athletes to get more fit than they already were. It is believed that the abuse of the steroids started in the late 1940’s by weight lifters and bodybuilders, and by the 1950’s, it was spread to the Olympics (Bigelow, par.11). Any type of steroid should not be used if they are only going to be abused by being used in large doses with the intentions of increasing lean muscle mass and strength (Bigelow, par.11). After years of abuse of anabolic-androgenic steroids in the Olympics they were added to the list of banned substances and random testing of athletes were announced to start taking place (Bigelow, par.35).
You’ve all seen them, the enormously large muscle-heads at the gym, the participates of the World’s Strongest Man Competition, the amazing offensive tackles, and the lightning fast runners. They were all unnaturally strong, and looked like gods. You tend to obsess over how beautiful their bodies are, how strong they are, or how fast they can run. All you can think about is reaching that level of athletic excellence, and nothing will hold you back. At times like these some people tend to take the quick fit to get closer to their idols, in the form of steroids. But what individuals tend not see is the horrible side effects that accompany the use of these anabolic steroids. These powerful drugs have both positive and negative results from their use. Along with increased strength and size, users of steroids suffer from a wide range of sicknesses such as cancer, shrinkage of testicles, bad acne, hair loss, damage organs, intense mood swings, and impotence.
Steroid is a name given to drugs that are manufactured from testosterone, a reproductive hormone found in men. Some athletes normally use anabolic steroids because these drugs improve one’s capacity to compete and train, yielding high results. Steroids work by reducing exhaustion during training, and also reduce the length of time an athlete needs to recover from exhaustion. In addition, steroids enable the growth of tissues and muscles in an athlete’s body by instructing the body to produce extra proteins. During the 1936 Olympics held in Berlin, the first rumors of athletes using steroids emerged. The problem of athletes using steroids was again reported in 1954 during weight lifting championships. The Soviet athletes recorded a very impressive performance at all levels of weight lifting. Later on, the team’s physician admitted that the Soviet athletes were being injected with testosterone in order to increase their muscle mass and strength after being questioned about how they achieved their success. WHO (World Health Organization) in 1968 was the first party to complain about incidents of athletes using steroids, these sentiments were later backed by IOC (International Olympic Committee). This paper is going to give reasons why professional athletes should not be allowed to use steroids (Yesalis 25).
As time passes and education and science continue to evolve and change this world into something that many people never thought would be possible, there are many positives but there are also a lot of negatives that resulted (Helmenstine). As science continually comes out with new kinds of medication and performance enhancing drugs the sports world has to continue to expand with them. Every year hundreds of more drugs become part of our society and as they continue to become available, sports continue to struggle with keeping up. When steroids first became known to the world they really weren’t anything to worry about because the science was not what it is today. As a result, the performance enhancing drugs then did not provide athletes with the amount of strength they provide them with now. Steroids have been proven to be the m...
Anabolic steroids were first developed in 1930 when scientists attempted and successfully created a synthetic form of testosterone. This synthetic product was created for the intent that it will aide men who were unable to generate a sufficient amount of testosterone for a safe and balanced growth (Anabolic Steroids, 2013). Steroids simply function by converting proteins into muscle at an accelerated speed, which is the major influence for users. Over the past few years, there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of teenagers experimenting with steroids with little or no awareness of the side effects. According to “teenagers at risk for use of performance enhancers” journal article, 76% of the teens who responded to the survey could not identify any negative side effects of steroids (Schneider.M, 2004). Another study in the Sydney Morning Herald’s “Steroid Use Soars among young men” article, the 2013 needle syringe program survey, by the Kirby Institute at the University of NSW, found 74 per cent of people in NSW who started injecting illicit substances in the past three years had sought out performance- and image-enhancing drugs, compared with only 27 per cent in 2003. This increase of steroid use may ...
Athletes are often pressured from an early age to be better than the rest. In sports such as football, baseball, basketball, and soccer, the need to be “great” is becoming a dominant factor in the world of sports. Regardless of which sport is chosen, the stigma to be great is slowly surpassing the main goal of sportsmanship among team players. With the notion that being great is the key; many athletes, both amateur and professional, are relying on steroids to help bring them to the top of their game. Steroid use can cause damaging effects to the body and preventing this may save the lives and careers of current and future students. This essay is written to explain the problems of steroids in sports and the solutions in which to help deter or stop this problem.
Anabolic steroids are drugs containing, or hormone-like substances, that are used to increase strength and promote muscle growth. They were first developed in the 1930s in Europe to treat undernourished patients and to promote healing after surgery. Competitive weightlifters began using steroids in the 1950s as a way to increase their athletic performance. Use gradually spread throughout the world among athletes in other has been estimated that at least one in 15 male high school seniors in the United States--more than a half-million boys--has used steroids. Some are athletes attempting to increase their strength and size; others are simply youths attempting to speed up their growth to keep pace with their peers. In some countries, anabolic steroids are available over the counter. In the United States, a doctor's prescription is necessary.
“[Thirty percent] of college and professional athletes have used or currently use steroids, as do 10-20% of high school athletes” (“Anabolic Steroids”). These numbers are alarming, but there are two main reasons why this is occuring: people tend to belief steroids will improve their appearances, and athletes believe their athletic abilities will increase. However, most are not aware of the effects steroid use has on the body. Steroid use has dramatic effects on the user’s body and mind in many different ways.
My issue over the concern of athletes have been struggling with the usage of steroids has widely spread among athletes and others; not only do steroids give an athlete a hard times but it’s also an unfair advantage to the other athletes and what they’ve accomplish. “Besides making muscles bigger, anabolic steroids may help athletes recover from a hard workout more quickly by reducing the amount of muscle damage during the session” (“Steroids in Sports”,2005). Now a days steroids are everywhere as an athlete. Many males and female young athletes preferably take it because they want to look and feel good when it comes to impressing someone and trying to become someone they look forward too. Young teens and adults try to cheat themselves in the career of their dreams. When it comes to a sport, teen athletes are not aware of what type of consequences may happen to them at the time. It may come to the time where it’s too late to take care of. In other cases, some athletes may like feeling the aggressive they get when they take drugs such as steroids. Athletes shouldn’t take steroids as the harmful health effects of the anabolic steroid in population wise. Many people have had their lives ruined by the use of illegal steroids and yet the desired effects are overwhelming that people tend to forget about the results and consequences that may effect. Athletes on steroids believe taking steroids will enhance their performance, strength, and size without having to put necessary work. These benefits, however, are associated with much short-term and long term risk.
The intent of this essay is to show that steroids have many negative effects and that steroids, and other natural supplements, should be closely studied by the FDA. This essay will also support the claim that the professional sports industry needs to eliminate steroid use and set a good example for younger athletes.
Steroids became an option to athletes in the Olympics and other major sporting events during the 1950’s. But this use of steroids among athletes only became widely apparent when Canadian sprint runner Ben Johnson tested positive for steroid use after winning the gold medal for the one hundred-meter dash during the 1988 Olympics (Francis, 45). Now a skinny fifteen-year-old can just walk down to the local gym and find people who either sell or know how to get in contact with those who sell the drug that will make him envious of his friends. Steroids are an attractive drug. While steroids seem harmless to the unaware user, they can have a risky effect. Most of the time whether the users are new or experienced, they do not know the dangerous consequences steroids can have on their bodies and their minds. Though steroids cause a relatively insignificant number of deaths in our society, the banning of steroids is justified because steroids have a lot of side effects not known to the uninformed user.
Some benefits for athletes include, increase in strength, enhance athletic performance and quicker recovery from injuries (Sports and Drug Use). Some athletes are lazy and want to get in shape faster by taking drugs. In Anabolic Steroids, it states that people use steroids to gain strength and lose body fat. In an article, it says, “Anabolic steroids may help athletes recover from a hard workout more quickly by reducing the muscle damage that occurs during the session. This enables athletes to work out harder and more frequently without overtraining” (Performance- enhancing drugs: know the risks). People can recover from hard workouts quicker by using steroids. “When inflammation threatens to damage critical body organs, steroids can be organ saving and, in many instances, life-saving. For example, they may help prevent the progression of kidney inflammation, which can lead to kidney failure in people who have lupus or vasculitis. For these people, steroid therapy may eliminate the need for kidney dialysis or transplant” (Steroids to Treat Arthritis). Steroids can help people have the need to not get a transplant or dialysis. “When taken in these very high doses, anabolic-androgenic steroids can produce dramatic increases in muscle mass and strength, making it possible for users to far exceed the upper limits of muscularity attainable under natural conditions, without these drugs.