i was just reading an article regarding drug use in rugby players and this excerpt triggered something which has been at the back of my mind:
Of course there is a medical cost. “There are cardiovascular effects of taking steroids because of the increase in lean muscle mass,” Professor Julien Baker, who is director of the institute of clinical exercise and health science research at the University of West Scotland, says. “It puts extra strain and stress on the heart when players are exercising. Particularly with the forwards and the bigger guys, but it is bad enough with the smaller ones.” “The capacity of your heart is really only related to the natural size of your body, so when you increase the mass, you increase the pressure on your heart.”
So my question is basically whether or not you guys you agree with this and whether you feel there are potentially negative impacts on health and longevity from increasing muscle mass?
I’d be curious as to how you figure out the “natural size” of a person’s body. Maybe it is a thing in medicine that I am not aware of, but it sure does ring my BS bell a bit.
Even if we granted this as 100% true it has nothing to do with those of us who don’t take steroids.
Everybody knows there are health risks associated with abusing drugs including those that come from enlarged organs. Even if all of the effects are from the muscle size and none directly from the drugs none of us will ever get that big naturally.
Sorry, Austin, I shouldn’t have quoted the article as it is simply what brought the thought to my mind. And it seemed a perfect question for somebody who is both a medical and strength professional.
Is the question in general one you can answer/give your view on? It sort of feels intuitive that if I increase my weight from 190lbs to 220lbs (as I recently have) then my heart would have to work harder even if, and perhaps particularly if, that weight is mostly muscle. But presumably the heart can adapt too…and perhaps the degree of conditioning/cardio that goes alongside the training has an impact here.
As an aside, appreciate the content you and Jordan et al put out here and across other forums and especially the way you conduct yourselves in doing so.
Half of me thought that and the other half of me thought I do have a sense of where I would be weight wise if I kept fit (so body fat wasn’t high) but didn’t lift so rightly or wrongly the concept seems quite intuitive.
Good points and, as I said in my reply to Austin, quoting the article was a mistake as I am solely interested in the general question of whether increased muscle mass may have negative health/longevity outcomes. I don’t know the answer (obviously!) so also don’t know whether it’s a case of the ‘unnatural’ amount/rate of muscle growth that steroids produces would be the only danger versus packing on as much as possible naturally.
Not only does your heart adapt, but the new muscle mass is extensively capillarized.
No one has ever put themselves into heart failure directly due to increased muscle mass when achieved naturally.
Doing it using exogenous anabolic steroids, however, can come with consequences. Or developing sleep apnea in the process of gaining weight can, over the long term, cause a number of cardiac complications. Just to name a few examples. The problem isn’t the muscle mass itself, however.
I weigh about 330. My doctor always says that it doesn’t matter if I am 20% BF or 50% body fat that the heart still has to deal with the mass either way - implying that the composition is immaterial for heart consequences.
See the parts in bold. That’s what’s still squishy to me. What’s “kept fit” mean? What’s “high” body fat? The latter is probably more definable, for sure but I don’t know that “fit” is objective enough to guide your training or eating.
Sure they could be, in certain populations. This is why there is still active pharmaceutical research into anabolics as it is – treatment for wasting syndromes associated with cancer, AIDS, etc. The issue is that it’s historically been difficult to adequately separate the anabolic effects from the androgenic effects, as well as other adverse effects from activating the androgen receptor.