So it’s been about 4 years since I started dabbling with PEDs to see if they could help with one glaring, depressing issue: trying to progress as a climber at the age of 50-something is a totally different game, to doing so in your 20s. At my age, recovery is slow, progress is slower, injuries are common, and plateaus hit with depressing frequency. I wanted to see if a few pharmacological tweaks could help me leverage some of that youthful momentum I see in climbers around me.
The phrase “performance-enhancing drug” carries an implicit promise: take this pill, stick this needle, and watch your climbing improve. It’s seductive because it seems so straightforward, so immediate.
Climbing is fundamentally a skill-based sport, and improving skill demands frequent movement on rock (or plastic if it’s raining, which, let’s face it, it always is). Younger climbers can train longer, recover faster, and therefore practice more frequently. The more they climb, the better they become, creating a virtuous cycle of not only skill but also strength. At my age, that cycle breaks down because I simply can’t climb hard enough, or often enough to get the practice in at the rate or intensity I would like. I hoped that taking PEDs might level this playing field, giving me the capacity to climb more like a 20-year-old, and develop skills and strength at a comparable rate.
However, four years of careful experimentation have taught me a clear, sometimes frustrating lesson: steroids don’t make you climb harder. In fact, despite their reputation, steroids can be seen performance impairing drugs in a climbing context. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to examine three reasons why this is.
Problem 1 – weight gain:
Climbing strength isn’t absolute; it’s a ratio of strength to weight.
If a climber can crimp 35kg with each hand, are they strong? The question doesn’t make any sense unless you know how heavy they are, right? If the climber in question weighs 50kg, then 35kg with each hand gives them the finger strength of a V7 climber, at least. However if the climber weighs 80kg, they won’t even be able to hang their own body weight.
Google which is the best anabolic steroid. Go on… I’ll wait. You’re going to get a lot of opinions by a lot of people, but I guarantee that every single one of them will be a bodybuilder.
Bodybuilders care about one thing above all other things: weight gain. How do they know if they’re building muscle? The scale goes up.
We might not exactly want the scale to go down, you can be too light after all, but we certainly don’t want to gain weight, do we? It makes us functionally weaker unless our strength goes up at a greater rate than our weight.
Unfortunately steroids are very, very good at making you gain weight. Better, in fact, than they are at making you gain strength.
There are four ways steroids pile on the kilos, and not just steroids in fact; human growth hormone and its secretagogues, IGF-1, and SARMs all leverage one or more of these mechanisms too. Bodybuilders love all four of these mechanisms, because they all contribute to the “swole” look (if only temporarily in the case of the first two). However, we don’t want to be weak and pretty, we want to climb hard, and in that context, 3 or potentially all 4 of the following can be classed as unwanted side effects:
- Water Retention: this can be caused by shifts in electrolyte balance, increased estrogen levels, or enhanced capillary permeability. It can be stored both inter and intra muscularly as well as subcutaneous fluid. Regardless, it isn’t functional mass.
- Nutrient Storage: you’d think this could be useful. PEDs cause the muscle tissue to store glycogen, creatine, nitrogen, and a whole host of other bits and pieces.
Muscles swell with stored fuel, which is great for enhancing work capacity. However, this extra storage can remarkably increase the mass of muscle tissue in itself, and also cause yet more water retention. You end up using the extra strength to lift the extra weight, and if you’re lucky the result is a zero sum. - Non-Training Related Hypertrophy: studies have shown that you don’t need to train to grow muscle on steroids. Anabolics upregulate protein synthesis even without targeted resistance training, and muscles grow in size simply from being present, not from being useful. The higher dose, the more weight you put on, even if you never go to the gym.
- Amplified Hypertrophic Response to Training: when combined with exercise, PEDs massively upregulate muscle growth. You can train harder, for longer, and the muscles respond better.
From a climbing performance perspective this last mechanism is the only one which can be leveraged, if one is very careful, in a way where the extra kilos are worthwhile. Who wouldn’t want an extra kilo of forearm on each side? Sure you’ll be two kilos heavier but you’ll be able to pull like a beast. The problem is though, that climbing is a compound exercise – one of the compoundest of all compound exercises in fact. When you climb you engage a surprising number of muscles, and when you climb on steroids all of them respond to the stimulus by growing bigger and heavier in unison.
We’ll come back to this point later because understanding how this works, and exerting careful control over the process, is the key to making steroids work in a climbing context
Next week we’ll dive into Part 2: how steroids and related compounds supercharge the forearm pump and sap your grip endurance.
Doping For Climbers 