The techniques that Australian female bodybuilders are using to get competition-ready could be worse than originally thought, with accusations that women are also using peptides, cocaine and a drug legally prescribed for horses.
A three-month investigation by The Sunday Times found a growing number of bodybuilding and body sculpting competitors are using steroids, oestrogen blockers, hard liquor, “waterloading” and last-minute junk food gorgefests to get the “perfect body’’.
Now a Gold Coast woman who has competed in events run by the two most popular bodybuilding leagues — Australasian Natural Bodybuilding and the International Natural Bodybuilding Association — has revealed the extent of the drug abuse involved.
“I know competitors who drink wine to help them dry out and they use cocaine and peptides and Clenbuterol, which helps to get rid of body fat quite quickly,” Amanda Fisher, 30, told news.com.au.
Peptides help to boost lean muscle and cocaine suppresses appetite while boosting energy levels.
“I’ve seen people so exhausted [after a competition] that they can’t speak or string a sentence together,” Ms Fisher said.
“You get so tired in the lead up and you just have to keep training. You get dehydrated when you train, and to be exercising while using a drug that also dehydrates you creates a really bad effect.”
Clenbuterol is legally prescribed in Australia as an airway dilator for horses. It’s banned by the International Olympic Committee and World Anti-Doping Agency.
“Clenbuterol is like a relative of salbutamol, which is what’s in ventolin puffers,” Professor Lisa Nissen, head of the School of Clinical Sciences at Queensland University of Technology, told The Conversation. Clenbuterol helps to build muscle and churn through calories.
“So not only will you be ripped — you’ll get that muscle definition — but you’ll also speed up your metabolism,” said Professor Nissen.
“It’s like putting a V8 engine in your heart, it’s not really built to be sped up at that rate. The consequence, in its extreme, can be a heart attack.”
Ms Fisher, who runs the Bangin Bods gym on the Gold Coast, says she wasn’t surprised by The Times’ investigation.
“No one really talks about it, but everyone sort of knows that it goes on,” she said.
“They’re getting smarter with it as well, because there’s a lot of people who can enter natural competitions but still use peptides, but they only use up to a certain level of it, so they don’t get into trouble.”
Drug testing at “natural” competitions is sporadic, according to Ms Fisher, who says she has never been drug tested or taken any performance-enhancing drugs.
“About the worst thing I did was drink nine litres of water in one day and I took herbal diuretics, but that’s not too bad in the scheme of things,” she said.
So why would you put your body through this amount of strain?
“If you really enjoy weights you want to take things to the next level and give yourself a challenge. It gives you something to work towards and you push your body to see it change,” Ms Fisher said.
The difficulty comes when women try to get too lean, too soon.
“If you’ve been doing this for 30 years, that’s three decades where your body has built up that muscle. But some girls who are new to this want to be able to achieve that same physicality, but in six to twelve months.”
For most women putting on muscle is extremely difficult.
“That’s why steroids and peptides are so popular, because getting that muscly naturally is really hard. You’re fighting your genetic makeup, which is why they have things like oestrogen blockers and testosterone boosters.
“You go on Instagram and see these girls getting frustrated because they say, ‘I’m doing everything that this woman says she’s doing, how come I can’t reach this point too?’ These girls are keeping a lot of the darker side of things behind closed doors,” Ms Fisher said.
News.com.au was contacted by numerous trainers and bodybuilding “experts” for whom the word “natural” was a strong part of their branding.
It seems getting competition-ready without steroids and peptides is seen as the ultimate feat.
“People are really owning the fact that they’ve achieved results without enhancements,” Ms Fisher said.
The director of Australia’s only “all female, all natural” bodybuilding federation says the methods Ms Fisher describes are “old school” techniques used by a small number of competitors.
“The good prep coaches encourage clean eating and health methods. The old school ways have gone,” Australian Women’s Natural Body Sculpting (AWNBS) director Toby Gartner told news.com.au.
“90 per cent of bodybuilders or bodysculpters do this through diet and exercise alone. We promote no drugs. We have dietitians and psychologists to educate people about the healthy way of doing things.”
But Australian Medical Association WA spokesman David Mountain, head of emergency at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, says bodybuilding is becoming an unhealthy “glorification of extremes”.
“These are all basically (methods of) pushing bodies to extremes to look a particular way. It’s never really a good thing to be aiming for,” Dr Mountain told The Sunday Times.
“It drives more dysfunctional behaviour, more problems with body image and I think it’s problematic that we have a whole branch of pseudo-sport that is completely about image and distorted body shape.”
“There are people who end up with serious problems — kidney problems, liver disease, and it’s not good for fertility. There are a whole bunch of long-term side effects. Just because it’s on social media doesn’t make it normal. It might be normalised, but that’s the problem.”
Courtesy of: Newscom.au