I’m interested in how the COVID vaccines impacted this. Some of my acquaintances who were super fit marathoners etc. had cardiac problems after vaxing and some died.
I’m not trying to start a furore, just interested in any correlate. COVID 19 on the pie chart seems to indicate actual COVID related deaths.
Arnold Schwarzenegger seems to be going strong 
Steroids (I separate appropriate use of testosterone from this) + stimulant fat burners + pre workouts + ungodly amounts of exercise + party lifestyle + experimental drugs + dehydrating your body to get a certain physique before a bodybuilding competition.
Bodybuilding is a supremely unhealthy endeavour and gives a bad name to exercise, muscle building and drugs lol.
Below is the full article.
https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/advance-article/doi/10.1093/eurheartj/ehaf285/8131432?login=false
Below is the Supplemental Data.
Death and cause of death start on page 3. Most heart attack deaths occurred pre pandemic.
Arnold definitely did not do his heart any favors by using steroids.
Arnold never used anabolics and other drugs to the extend that people do now. Even at his peak, he was less muscular and had more body fat than modern day keen amateurs and Instagram bros. Those guys are using cocktails WAY beyond what Arnold used as a full-time pro. Plus, they use a bunch of other dangerous drugs like diuretics and insulin which can kill you on an acute basis.
It’s no secret that long-term supraphysiological doses of testosterone will enlarge your heart. The oral steroids are very stressful for the liver. Almost all of them ruin your lipid profile (my HDL-C fell to 7 mg/dl one time while using oral steroids). All of them raise your blood pressure. Most of them cause you to retain loads of tissue fluid. Most androgens also increase your RBC production, so you get a high HCT where the blood is super thick and sticky. All of that equals cardiac stress. The dieting cycles are also incredibly stressful, often using thyroid medications, stimulants like clenbuterol, and crazier stuff like DNP which is a ox-phos de-coupler. You can burn fat, but also die from it.
As for Covid vaccines, I will agree that probably they did impact this. But you know what else caused cardiac problems in young people? Getting Covid. Yes, there is some risk of myocarditis from the vaccines… but the risk of myocarditis is about 5x higher from actually getting Covid (not to mention other complications). (Clinical outcomes of myocarditis after SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination in four Nordic countries: population based cohort study | BMJ Medicine) And that’s in healthy young people. If you’re older, the virus is far more deadly.
At the end of the day, the vaccine is a non-proliferative piece of mRNA which induces a transient production of spike protein, mostly in the shoulder muscle, provoking an immune response. The other is a virus which invades cells, actively replicates itself, spreads across different organs, can get into the brain, testes, seems to acutely damage endothelial cells, inflames the heart, damages lung epithelium, and provokes an even larger immune response which also requires a massive cleanup operation to purge infected cells. I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to say that the virus is much worse than the vaccine.
Unless you live in one of those bubble boy sterile environments, you’re going to get infected by Covid. So you get to choose whether to raw-dog it against the real virus, or to try and build up some sort of immune response and memory first by vaccination. Neither is risk free, but you don’t really have the option to not participate.
I’m sorry to hear of your acquaintances. There was a real lottery when it came to how you responded to Covid. I know a (formerly) fit and athletic 38 year old who ended up on a ventilator for 6 weeks from Covid, but his obese, type-II diabetic, chain-smoking mother got nothing more than sniffles. My 98 year old great aunt also shrugged it off after 1-2 days of mild fever, but my friends brother died age 40. (This was early days, with no vaccine yet)
Absolutely ridiculous statement. Bodybuilding is muscle building (regardless of whether that’s your rationale for building muscle), and not every person bodybuilding is doing so competitively and/or blasting a gram of test per week.
In my mind there is a difference in approach to gaining muscle for health vs bodybuilding. Bodybuilding is inherently tarnished. I don’t mean to offend you when I make that distinction.
The average person looks at steroids in a vacuum but the topic is MUCH deeper. While there is no such thing as “healthy” steroid use, there is definitely a massive difference in steroid selection, dosage, time on, whether you take ancillary measures to mitigate the damage, etc.
For instance, someone taking 700mg of trenbolone every week for a year withough blood pressure meds, statins, etc. is going to do FAR greater damage to himself than a guy taking 700mg testosterone for 8 weeks, taking a break (TRT), then repeat, while having a healthy diet, taking BP meds or statins if necessary, etc.
So for the massive bodybuilders who are dying, they are usually taking far greater risks with their health than the majority of steroid users who use recreationally. It is possible to remain mostly healthy while using stuff but it’s the manner in which you do it (including genetics) that is truly going to determine the fate of your health.
Are they really dying from atherosclerosis though?
Sometimes. Many different kinds of steroids (the orals and tren especially) make ApoB/LDL skyrocket. Cardiovascular issues are the most common cause of death but it seems clear that hypertension is the primary culprit and they die from complications with that (including kidney issues) before the atherosclerosis can even get them, since those issues manifest a lot faster.
They use high doses of testosterone and somatomedins and somatotropins. These are also strong stimulants of the IGF-1 and mTOR pathway, which in turn accelerates aging at the tissue and organ level.
What dosages and compounds do you think Arnold was using vs today’s bodybuilders for AAS only?
I think what he/they’ve said is they ate Dianabol like candy, so to some extent even more toxic than today at least to the liver. If we compare to today’s fake natty bodybuilders.
That makes sense and what I was thinking as atherosclerosis takes decades to develop or at least two when it’s high if we see what happens to people with FH, at the same time an untreated suboptimal LDL-C doesn’t really help might even harm other organs (and be even worse with other suboptimal markers), in the short term.
They didn’t have HGH back in Arnold’s day and they would take a lot of time off from what I’ve heard so the cycles were shorter. There wasn’t trenbolone yet (used to be called parabolin) in those days either (that became popular in the 90s).
Dianabol definitely will raise ALT/AST liver enzymes to a high degree (dose dependant) but they come back down to normal within a week of stopping. The liver is very resilient so we don’t really see bodybuilders with too many liver isssues.
Maybe I mixed up the words extend vs extent. Total amounts vs total time on. It did sound like it could be both from what was written. I’ve heard that high dose orals were used back in the day as well. Anadrol was another oral that was popular.
All good points. On and off vs blast and cruise.
Hgh, and tren for sure. Perhaps might add in diabetes medications (insulin, metformin etc), and site enhancement oils (synthol etc) for the 90’s.
I am under the assumption that AAS dosages are quite similar to what Arnold would use.
Agreed. The autopsy reports pretty much always seem to mention enlarged hearts too.
The question is, could they have prevented the cardiac hypertrophy/remodeling with combined use of an ARB (telmisartan) and SGLT2i (empagliflozin or dapagliflozin) while still obtaining benefits of the performance-enhancing drugs? And also aggressively controlling BP and lipids, of course.
And just after I asked the above question, I came across the following new study. Anyone taking testosterone along with an SGLT2i should be regularly monitoring CBC, since the risk of elevated hematocrit is apparently much higher with the combo:
Tirzepatide seems to be a good candidate for this.