Victor Conte once may have been Public Enemy No. 1 to regulators of combat sports. The founder of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative – more commonly known as BALCO – was the man who not only helped athletes such as baseball home run king Barry Bonds to use performance enhancing drugs, but also hide their usage.
These days, Conte is one of the world’s most outspoken opponents of PED usage and regularly points out the inadequacies of testing protocols.
Conte scoffs at the notion that there is a large percentage of mixed martial arts fighters and boxers who genuinely need testosterone replacement therapy, or TRT, for legitimate medical reasons. He believes they’ve simply discovered a way to increase their testosterone levels without failing a postfight drug screening.
Experts like BALCO's Victor Conte doubt there is a legitimate reason for an athlete to use testosterone replacement therapy.
“This is just another way to circumvent the rules,” Conte said of TRT usage in MMA and boxing, which entered the headlines last month when Ultimate Fighting Championship welterweight Nate Marquardt revealed he had fought three times while on testosterone replacement therapy. “That’s all it is.”
I'm interested to see this in retrospect - do we look back at Chael and Nate popping for TRT at being one of the big events in what affected steroid use in the sport? Does this turn out to be something that gets closer to the truth we all basically already assume: Most fighters are finding ways to circumvent the system?
CountChocula - 1st, low testosterone levels are a health problem.
2nd, testosterone replacement shouldn't be lumped into the "performance enhancing drugs (PED's)" category
Testosterone should not be stigmatized by the media, people like this, or regulatory agencies and athletic commissions.
Even if an athlete has subpar testosterone levels as a result of using PED's, that should not be a reason to disqualify him from treatment to regain normal hormone levels. There's no relationship, medically speaking, between the cause of low testosterone and the treatment. The cause and treatment are considered separately.
Medically sure, no doctor should refuse to treat a patient because of this reason (although interestingly doctors will refuse to give other drugs of abuse to patients who have grown to need a drug through abuse, but that's another topic) but there's no particular reason the athletic commissions have to see it that way. They are well within their rights to refuse to license a fighter who takes and needs TRT due to cheating the system for too long.
CountChocula - I can see that athletic commissions might suspect that an athlete on TRT will abuse his prescription, in order to elevate his levels; but, they have to follow recommendations from the doctors when it comes to fighter safety and medical use exemptions.
That's why I say that TRT should be destigmatized, and why the cause and treatment are mutually exclusive.
I've been dealing with low T issues due to my own use of PED's, and have been researching the issue, talking with doctors and others in the field, and on a course of different medications to fix the issue, and know what these fighters are going through by my own experience.
Wrestlers, especially, are well known to use PED's. Dan Henderson, Matt Hughes, and Chael are just a few that come to mind that are on TRT, I suspect as a result of using PED's in the past.
The truth is, low testosterone sucks, and can be dangerous.
. . . so years of taking steroids (cheating) to among other things, increase bulk muscle mass, and strength means later on you need TRT to not deflate and lose strength.
Answer this question: After years of cheating by steroid users, does TRT help them "lock in" the ill-gotten gains in strength and bulk muscle mass they got while juicing?
That's not exactly right. After years of steroid abuse your nuts can actually stop producing testosterone, because your system recognizes the overload and accordingly lowers production. Some people never recover. Thus they need the TRT to maintain even baseline levels of testosterone, otherwise they'd have even less than, all else being equal, a man who'd never used steroids.
Everyone with any sense knows this trt stuff is a crock of shit. Yes it is used for legitimate medical reasons but in mma it's used as a loophole to juice.
HexRei - That's not exactly right. After years of steroid abuse your nuts can actually stop producing testosterone, because your system recognizes the overload and accordingly lowers production. Some people never recover. Thus they need the TRT to maintain even baseline levels of testosterone, otherwise they'd have even less than, all else being equal, a man who'd never used steroids.
I completely get that part. What I'm saying is that it allows someone to keep a steroid-based gain that without juicing, would have been impossible. Not the test levels, the actual gains in bulk muscle mass and / or strength. Agree or disagree?
Not necessarily. The point of TRT isn't to give them superhuman test levels, but levels comparable to naturally occurring test in a prime man. If they are using it as directed by a doctor who isn't "playing the game" it shouldn't give them a significant advantage over athletes with normal natural test levels, and thus they shouldn't be bigger than their natural best. Plenty of doctors willing to look the other way though.
