AIKHAL: Anabolics I have Known and Loved, by Adam Lehrer
In this exhaustive essay originally published by Numéro Berlin, Adam tells you everything you need to know about juicing but never thought to ask
I’ve been physically active most of my life, and was an elite track and field athlete during my youth. During my running career, my physique was a bit different. At 5 ft 9, I was a hard and vascular 155 to 165 pounds – slender but compact. As I got older, however, maintaining such a low body weight without eroding my strength and endurance became a chore. This was, believe it or not, how I got addicted to hard drugs. It started with Adderall, which I would sometimes take up to 60 MG of on both training and racing days. Amphetamines decimated my appetite, however, and continued use of them resulted in the early atrophy of my musculature. OxyContin, however, felt like a small miracle. Utterly devoid of pain but still able to consume carbs and protein, my body on them became a machine. The problem was that the machine would not run without the opioids. Pills turned into heroin, and by my mid-’20s, I was bottomed out junkie long past my athletic career. I kicked the drugs when I was 26, after a long decade of failure, arrested development, lies, and emotional paralysis.
Training without opioids was horrendous, and I quickly lost track of my fitness and my diet. My body fat spiked from under 10 percent to around 20 percent, and my body weight jumped from 165 to 185 or 190. I never got fat, but I felt ill at ease with a softer body. I mourned the physical feats that I used to be able to perform with ease. Jogging regularly did little to improve my body composition, and by the time that the pandemic rolled around I was already feeling the decline consistent with the loss of testosterone that transpires in men in their 30s.
About two years ago, I started regularly training with intensity once more. With my knees entirely shot, I had to learn new techniques. I could not run like I used to, of course, and with a higher body weight I could not reach my anabolic threshold with the calisthenics regimen that used to keep me in tip top. Therefore, I absorbed a program learned through bodybuilding magazines and Youtube pages; bodybuildings coaches like Hany Rambod and pros like Chris Bumstead and Nick Walker taught me how to train like they do. Leg day, chest day, shoulder day, and so forth. 18 to 22 sets per week for every area of the body. Two hours of intense conditioning on the stairmaster or other cardio machines with lower stress on the knees.. While I saw marked improvements in my physique — my love handles tightened and leaned out, my shoulders rounded — the amount of pain that I was experiencing felt extreme and intolerable given the relatively little aesthetic changes to my body. It was around this time that I decided to indulge in the dark arts. I started researching anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing drugs.
When one decides to take the plunge into the world of performance enhancing drugs, he is essentially forced to treat his body like a rigorously monitored science project. And that, my likely shocked but undeniably curious reader, is exactly what I did. My first cycle began in November of 2022 – the Arnold Schwarzenegger Golden Era of Bodybuilding preferred classic combination of testosterone and Deca-Durabolin (chemical name “nandrolone)”. I kept my doses low for that first cycle.
The changes were subtle at first, and then not so subtle at all. First, the pain and soreness I was experiencing after my training were dulled and eventually hardly noticeable. Then came the strength boosts: soon I was comfortably dead lifting 405 pounds, comfortably squatting 405 pounds, and comfortably chess pressing 100 pound dumbbells. After six weeks, I went off the anabolics by taking Clomid (chemical name “clomiphene), an anti-estrogen medication that was originally designed to treat infertility in women, but has been found to suppress estrogen production in men, which allows us to prevent crashing after a steroid cycle, losing our gains in strength, and possibly developing gyno (or, milky titty disorder). In February, I stepped it up some. I did another two month cycle: 400 MG of testosterone a week, 300 MG of Masteron a week, and 50 MG of Anavar a day. The Masteron and Anavar are both compounds adept at sculpting and carving out the muscles, as well as boosting overall athletic performance. The lifts I previously mentioned grew easier, and soon I was getting eight to 10 reps on weight that I previously couldn’t lift at all. After a month, the aesthetic of my body was responding at a rate quicker than it did when I was a 24-year-old man. My shoulders broadened and rounded, my back carved out with detail, my waist shrank, and my legs grew to absurd, near professional level proportions. How could this be bad? I found myself wondering. Again, I cycled off with Clomid. After this cycle, I got my blood work done to make sure my heart was still tip top and that my body was still naturally producing testosterone. According to the doctor, everything was in fine shape. Most shockingly, my body was operating at a higher level of health than it had two years prior, before I’d ever put any of these drugs in my body. It seems that polluting my body with ice cream and red wine was doing more damage to my heath markets than enhancing my body with steroids.
My fascination with performance enhancing drugs has become nothing short of both aesthetic and philosophical. Perhaps it has something to do with my past life as a heroin addict and the intimate knowledge I have about the potency of the mind-body connection. From that perspective, it only makes sense that a man who once felt enslaved to his own body by the addictive need it had for hard opioid drugs would find himself feeling freed by the use of drugs that aided in his quest to develop mastery over his own body. The fixations that I’ve developed in the attuning of my athleticism and strength has reaffirmed my will to power but is also undercut by an almost postmodern critical disposition towards my desire to achieve a peak physical form. The two sports that I remain a passionate viewer of, professional bodybuilding and mixed martial artists, are both body centric to the point of an obsessiveness that borders on the manic and artistic. The sculpting of the body in bodybuilding and the weaponization of the body in mixed martial artists. I have little need to pursue martial arts at this point in my life, so I’ve opted for the training, nutritional, and pharmaceutical regime of a bodybuilder. But even writing this, I realize: “What need do I have to pursue an elite bodybuilder physique at this stage in my life?”
Is my anabolic use and extreme training program merely a pipe copium smoked in response to a youth that has passed me by?
Am I nothing but a narcissistic maniac driven by a futile desire to look like one of genetic freaks of professional bodybuilding I’ve long been a fan of?
The answer to all these internal angst-driven questions is, at least partly, “yes”. There is indeed little point to me being the most preposterously jacked writer and performance artist in New York. That said, however, taking bodybuilding seriously to the point that I’m experimenting with performance enhancing drugs has clarified my mind and given me a goal outside my immediate career that has left me with a renewed energy and vigor for life. I hardly drink. I don’t take drugs. I derive most of my thrills from what Arnold referred to as “the pump”. A friend of mine who hadn’t seen me for a while was, predictably, shocked by the 20 pounds of lean tissue that I added to my frame and remarked: “This is great, it’s like bodybuilding for you is what boxing was to Ernest Hemingway or chess was to Duchamp.” I like this, because it reaffirms that one needn’t to make use of massive muscles in their career to enjoy the elite physical strength and conditioning that a serious approach to bodybuilding engenders. There is something truly liberating about having goals outside your immediate career.
“The groups of muscles that have become virtually unnecessary in modern life, though still a vital element of a man’s body, are obviously pointless from a practical point of view,” wrote Japanese avant-garde writer Yukio Mishima in his ode to bodybuilding Sun and Steel. “To revive the dead language, the discipline of the steel was required; to change the silence of death into the eloquence of life, the aid of steel was essential.”
Bodybuilding, Mishima means, is an escape from the weakening of the body and mind that has become endemic to men since modernity. It reminds us that we are alive, that we can endure, and that we can transgress our own physical limitations. Anabolic drugs — testosterone, growth hormone, Deca, Trenbolone, and otherwise — are merely tools at our disposal in our battles against the havoc of the aging process, bad HMO produced foods, drugs, and too much internet consumption. To sculpt the body is to take control over the body and, to an extent, your environment.
Now, I know what you’re going to be thinking: “But what about the side effects? Isn’t this shit unhealthy?” Leave aside the fact that you are likely an inhabitant of the Berlin or London or New York art world subsisting on a steady flow of vodka, cocaine, ketamine, and various forms of uppers and downers in no position to tell anyone what is healthy and what is not, the answer to your question is: of course. Or, at least they can be.
As in most things — athletic achievement, bodybuilding, sexual prowess — how your body responds to hormonal enhancement is largely determined by genetics. Because of this, I’d like to say loud and clear: this article is not making any kind of pro-steroids argument. My success with these drugs is mostly determined by my genetics first, and my responsibility in using them and having my health regularly monitored second. The sad reality is that the vast majority of people can take all the anabolic steroids in the world and snever come close to achieving an elite body composition. According to most studies, over 16 percent of American men use or have used anabolic steroids throughout their physically active lives. That’s at least 25 million men on the juice. Despite this, there are less than 100 elite bodybuilders in all three divisions — that’s open bodybuilding for the heavyweight freaks, the classic physique competition that stresses symmetry and shape over sheer size, and the men’s physique class that presents elite beach bodies, or something — of the IFPB that ever make it to the elite Mr. Olympia stage.
Steroids aren’t magic serums. They don’t instantly turn your body into something that resembles that of 4X classic physique Mr. Olmypia champion Chris Bumstead or 7X open bodybuilding Mr. Olympia champion Phil Heath. They will, however, enhance your athletic performance, your body’s response to training, and your body’s recovery from that training. Alex Rodriguez was on a steroid cycle every bit as intense as a professional bodybuilder’s —high doses of testosterone, Primobolan, growth hormone, cardarine, and ostarine — and yet walked around with a pancake gut and very little muscular definition. The drugs did, however, give him the extra push to crank home runs more often than he ever did before. You see? Steroids enhance your genetic gifts absolutely, but they can only push past your genetic limitations ever so much.
The misunderstandings and false assumptions around performance enhancing and anabolic drugs are so vast that it would be boring to spend this essay answering and correcting them. So, let me just address a few. First, building on the previous point: anabolic steroids don’t immediately make you jacked. They are instead highly fluid compounds that can benefit athletic performance in whatever your chosen sport or training is. So, bodybuilders don’t look like that solely because of the drugs they are on. They look like that because of the drugs they are on combined with elite genetics for muscle growth, perfect and bountiful nutrition, and training to specifically target the growth and hardening of the muscle. Lance Armstrong, however, was using as much testosterone and Anadrol (a drug developed to treat anemia that accelerates athletic conditioning by increasing the production of red blood cells) as a bodybuilder, but never cracked 140 lbs. on a scale. He wasn’t training for growth, or eating for growth. He was training for elite cardiovascular endurance, and steroids sbenefited him in that goal. Hell, testosterone was developed by Russia in the 1950s to juice their competitors in the Olympics, and American scientist John Ziegler responded by creating Dianabol (“D-bol”) to level the playing field in the Olympics for Americans. Bodybuilders might adhere to a certain stereotype of steroid usage due to their shocking musculatures and near superhumanly low body fat percentages, but most athletes on the exact same drugs will never look anything like that without those bodybuilders’ genetics and training regimens. But these drugs improve athletic performance in any sport you can think of: from powerlifting to professional basketball to god damn tennis.
While bodybuilding and powerlifting are the sports that are most associated with anabolic use — neither sports are drug tested at the professional level —performance enhancing drugs are rampantly used in ALL sports at the professional level. We know the stories of Major League Baseball and Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, and Marc McGuire. We know that Lance Armstrong was juiced to the gills when he won seven consecutive Tour de France races. We know all of this. And still, many fans of these sports refuse to reconcile with the fact that their favorite professional athletes use drugs to perform at a high level, recover from their training, and to get stronger, faster and leaner. Sports fans with these old fashioned mind sets insist that athletes using these drugs — test, growth hormone, EPO, and whatever else — is a form of cheating simply because these drugs were not always available in those sports. This argument has always been preposterous to me, because it simply overlooks the technological and scientific advancements that have moved humanity forward. I’m sure that when Henry Ford created the mass production line and made automobiles accessible to consumers that there were surely older, hardened men from the late 19th Century who fancied it cheating to travel by car after they had spent their lives getting from point A to B on the back of a horse, but this is hardly a rational disposition.
In athletics, training has evolved, nutrition has evolved, and, yes – the drugs have gotten better. The reason athletes look so much more, well, athletic now than they did just 30 years ago is because of these three factors. The reason they are evolving the sport forward is because the drugs are allowing them to push themselves beyond physical limits previously unavailable to them. Do you really believe that Lebron James, age 38, is still performing at that level without an enhanced ability to heal, melt body fat, and hold muscle? If you believe this, you’re a mark. However, just because Lebron uses drugs — former UFC fighter Chael Sonnen has alleged that he procured EPO and growth hormone from the same doctor that Lebron still gets them from — doesn’t mean that Lebron is cheating. He’s a perfect athletic specimen and the greatest basketball player that ever lived. The drugs, however, allow him to maintain those god given gifts longer than he would be able to without them.
The better argument against anabolic steroids and other performance enhancing drugs is the considerable health risks that come with them. Using steroids, for men, almost completely shuts down natural hormonal production during the time that they are cycled and for a length of time after the cycle ends. This could mean that it restricts sperm count, causes hair loss, causes acne, and fluctuating moods. Steroids also are tough on the heart and internal organs, and the stronger and more potent the drug is typically the harder it will be on those organs. At minimum, you will almost certainly experience water retention and swelling at the joints. Some unlucky users might develop gynecomastia, or an enlargement of breast tissue around the nipples, that can result from the synthetically elevated testosterone “aromatizing” (or, converting) into estrogen once processed in the body; this is the source of those amusing photos where a bodybuilder or a mixed martial artists with rock hard pecs and abs might have protruding and feminine looking nipples. Anabolic drugs have to metabolize through the liver, and as such can be damaging on that vital organ. Anabolics that have to be taken orally, like D-bol or Halotestin, are even harder on the internal organs, and indeed many elite bodybuilding pros, from the 1990s Austrian pro Andreas Münzer, known for maintaining a five percent body fat year round, and 1990s German pro Nasser El Sonbaty, who finished second behind Dorian Yates at the 1995 Mr. Olympia, have died from organ complications that arose from their abuses of various forms of juice. For women, anabolic steroids are even more dangerous. Given that most of these drugs function by enhancing the production of male hormones like testosterone, female bodybuilders are in effect taking cross sex hormones and experiencing all sorts of unwanted side effects, such as the utterly marked masculinizing of their facial features that makes female bodybuilding a bizarre repudiation of the gender binary.
But again, side effect profiles are varied and essentially come down to genetics. Personally, I have experienced only some of them of them – some of the most common drugs like Testosterone have left me with barely noticeable side effects, while harder ones like Trenbalone left with utterly noticeable side effects (back full of acne and the need to jack off four times a day, like being thrusted back into puberty.)
Otherwise, I have a beautiful head of hair that is holding up. My acne hasn’t increased, and I haven’t become a rage case (I believe the stereotype of “roid rage” is likely more common with steroid users with high strung dispositions, I’m a mellow guy.) However, when I come off cycle I have noticed waves of intense melancholy that I’m sure have something to do with my altered hormonal levels. Furthermore, some drugs — particularly Masteron — cause bloat at my ankles, wrists, and — most depressingly — my midsection that makes me look like I have something akin to a hardened beer gut. But some of the side effects — such as unbelievable energy and sexual prowess and libido of a man 15 years younger than me — aren’t exactly bad ones. Insomnia is the worst side effect, and again was brought upon by Tren. The sleeplessness got to the point that I self-medicated with benzos. So, I should recommend: don’t take Tren unless you’re a competitive bodybuilder. It simply isn’t worth it.
Given all of this, I don’t believe that even the health cases made against performance enhancing drugs are particularly potent. Most sports at the professional level do obscene amounts of damage on the body through the sheer overworking of it, and when considering this it’s clear that steroids are either just one more hardship on the body alongside the others OR can be argued as means of aiding in the body’s recovery and healing process to combat the brutal damage on the body of an athlete’s over-training. To emphasize this point, I’ll use the UFC — the only professional sport besides bodybuilding that I loyally follow — as my example. A UFC fighter’s training regimen is so intense that most human beings can simply not understand the amount of pain that these fighters suffer. When a fighter has to make weight for an upcoming fight, they have to cut their calories to near starvation level, use saunas and other body temperature raising processes to rid themselves of water, and do all of this while still maintaining a superhuman regimen of conditioning, strength training and fight training. It should surprise no one that this process utterly decimates a body’s natural testosterone production, and that fighters often suffer from hypogonadism – or, the inability to naturally produce hormones.
Many mixed martial artists have attempted to justify the use of synthetic testosterone by pointing towards the fact that they are, indeed, hypogonadal. When he tested positive for testosterone in 2010, fighter Chael Sonnen brought his doctor to a press conference so his doctor could explain the need for him to use this substance. Nevertheless, he was still suspended. In the lead-up to a fight between Conor McGregor and Nate Diaz in 2016, two of Diaz’s teammates were popped and suspended for using anabolics. In a press conference, Nate brushed the criticism aside and said: “Everyone is on steroids,” to which Conor replied, “Not me, man.” Nate looked at Conor and said: “You’re on steroids.” Conor was still a young fighter at that point, however. After Conor had his leg broken in a fight with Dustin Poirier, fans and commentators noticed the substantial amount of lean mass that Conor accrued over his healing process, and whispers of PED usage surround the superstar in perpetuity. Conor left the USADA (United States Anti-Doping Agency) testing pool and has gone on the record justifying the use of PEDs for fighters recovering from severe injuries. To be frank, I totally agree with him. But that didn’t stop Conor from lashing out at Joe Rogan after the podcaster suggested that Conor’s urine would “melt a USADA cup.”
So, the point is: PED and anabolic usage in sports like MMA (and basketball, and football, and golf, and freaking cricket) are rampant and, to an extent, medically justified. But that doesn’t stop drug testing agencies from implementing extremely rigid, narrow, and boomer-minded rules to the professional sports leagues that they oversee. Their mantra is : “steroids are cheating, no exceptions (Which is ironic given how weak and ineffective and behind the curve the testing protocols actually are.)”
When an athlete is in a testing pool, he or she simply can’t take anything beyond the nutritional supplements (protein, creatine, and otherwise) that are available at GNC, and sometimes not even those. A culture of paranoia and hypocrisy has saturated this world. Steroids are utterly stigmatized – even actors that use them for movies like the Rock or Hugh Jackman perpetually face plant attempting to hide the fact that their physiques have been pharmacologically enhanced. And we also know that athletes in all sports use these drugs and have entire teams to mask the fact that they do. What’s even more clear is that the athletes who achieve at the highest levels of these sports — Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds, Jon “Bones” Jones — are the ones who are singled out and, in Barry and Lance’s cases, destroyed. This notion that “all steroids are bad” hasn’t just made it impossible for scientists and medical professionals to adequately test these drugs, but has also prevented what could have been the chemical refinement of them, – it’s not impossible that if chemists were still allowed to tinker with Test or Tren that these drugs might be refined to the point that their side effect profile dissipated.
Moreover, the anabolic paranoia has inflated our skepticism and disbelief of human achievement. Nothing triggers modern humans quite as much as witnessing human greatness. And by blaming every feat of athletic greatness on steroids, people get to cope with their own inadequacy and comfortable belief that no one can really ever achieve at that level absent these drugs. We project the Jonah Complex, or the fear of our own greatness, onto the greatness of those achieving at the highest level.
But steroids don’t make Lance Armstrong or Conor McGregor great; their genetic gifts and extreme work ethics do. PEDs simply help them maintain that greatness and recover from the injuries that might otherwise take them down. The outright banning of PEDs in sports is the outright cancellation of the future of sports. They simply won’t evolve if we don’t allow athletes to use all the tools at their disposal to evolve the sports forward.
Given that I’m not a professional athlete and instead just a maniac who likes to push past the limitations of my own body, these drugs have no real practical effect in my life. Intriguingly, however, they have become something of an aesthetic and artistic obsession of mine. Bodybuilding is a sport of aesthetics, after all – as much an art form as it is a sport, like ballet or skateboarding. Golden era 1970s bodybuilder Serge Nubret even argued that bodybuilding is more a form of art than it is a sport, since it applies technique and movement in the sculpting and perfecting of a form that still always has its own abstract specificities in each athlete. In 1975, Arnold himself posed before a roaring audience at the Whitney Museum. Still don’t believe me? Watch any video of 2010s bodybuilding legend Kai Green doing a pose down and witness the immense grace of his movements, the combination of posing and elegant dancing, and the extreme eccentricity he brings to the stage. Bodybuilders are not your typical athletes. They are weird dudes, doing something that most find alienating but some believe to be the pinnacle of form and aesthetic. Training, nutrition, and, yes, anabolics are but paint brushes at the disposal of the bodybuilding artist.
Performance enhancing drugs have replaced psychoactive drugs as the conceptual basis for much of my art and my writing. Where I was once interested in the degradation of my body in the quest for psychological bliss, I am now fascinated in the strengthening and conditioning of my body in the quest for my best ever physical form. I finished my recent upcoming novel whilst on PEDs – the mental clarity that they provided and the discipline they engendered in my routine gave me the mental fortitude to bang out the final 100 pages. Furthermore, the band that I started with Alex Bienstock, Botched Chadification, is largely a conceptual deconstruction of the bodybuilding and anabolic using mentality. A mentality that largely sees you perpetually unhappy with your body even as it reaches new levels of aesthetic beauty and physical strength. Your own body dysmorphia made into a Dadaist performative statement.
I even plan to set my next novel, a work of horror fiction, in the world of professional bodybuilding and a particular anabolic drug will be the primary plot device used by the novel. The only other artist that I’m proximate towards who has used these drugs is the Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard, who admitted in an interview with artist Slava Mogutin that he regularly used steroids for seven years. Bjarne too developed an aesthetic fascination with the drugs, and created a figure that he called the “anabolic warrior” to allude to what he saw as the “hardcore sexuality” that developed in bodybuilding, steroid using circles. “These drugs make you feel like you own the whole world,” he proclaimed. “Botched Chadification”. “Anabolic Warrior”. It’s clear that these drugs are rich with content and subversive philosophical implications. So, why does the same art world that cheers and lavishes trans women who take estrogen to become women also raises its eyebrow and judges men who use hormones to become stronger men? Hypocrisies abound, indeed!
I am utterly sick of an art world contained by itself – that can only reference itself. I desire an art that uses sub-cultures outside of art to fuel an art that can address previously unseen areas of our culture. For me, this is what bodybuilding and the usage of anabolic steroids have allotted me: a world previously unknown and unavailable to me. A world evert bit as idiosyncratic and outright fucking weird as any art scene that I’ve ever been a part of.
I’ve found a sweet spot in my steroid cycle. I am currently using 400 MG of testosterone a week, 30 IU of human growth hormone a week, and 450 MG of Primobolan a week. I find this regimen superior to previous ones I have tried, like Deca and Masteron, which have caused me bloating in my face and mid-section as well as joint and lower back pain, and Trenbalone, which despite the unbelievable density and hardness it gives to your muscles tends to make you feel completely fucking insane, insomniac, and dangerously horny after the third week of usage. On this cycle, my weight seems to stay between 190 and 200 lbs. My shoulders are massive, my arms and legs are veiny, hard and vascular, and my mid-section — historically a problem area for me after suffering two hernias during my track and field career — is flattening and showing definition in the abs. My strength is simply getting preposterous: I’m chest pressing 110 lb dumbbells, deadlifting 495 lbs, and squatting 405 lbs with relative ease and for multiple repetitions. My cardiovascular ability is heightened, and I manage to keep my heart rate up between 150 and 170 BPM for a solid 30 minutes while conditioning. I’m energetic and productive. My erection is firm as an elephant tusk, and my wife says that the sex has never been quite this good. Is this unhealthy? Am I harming myself? Maybe. Probably. But that’s the risk I’m willing to take. I’m no longer interested in deadening my consciousness with hard drugs. I want to use performance enhancing drugs to develop a more powerful body for an uncertain future.
The original version of this essay was published by Numéro Berlin in 2023