THE FUTURE OF STEROIDS

M&F explores the advancements being made to PEDs, emerging drugs, and what this all means for the future of bodybuilding and other sports

- MICHAEL WEINREB

AS BEN PAKULSKI contemplates the future of performance-enhancing substances in bodybuilding and powerlifting, he evokes the 2011 Bradley Cooper movie Limitless. In the film, Cooper’s character, a struggling writer, takes a pill that expands the limits of his mental capabilities. It’s certainly not as simple as Hollywood made it out to be, but for Pakulski, a former IFBB Pro League bodybuilder who hosts the popular Muscle Expert Podcast, the central premise of the film provides at least a loose template for what the future might look like. Imagine a compound that can heal wounds or soothe sore muscles almost instantly, or imagine a pill that can directly trigger muscle growth and fat loss.

As science and genetics develop, Pakulski and other experts believe that the steroids of today, which have lingered in the background of competitive powerlifting and bodybuilding for decades, will soon be a thing of the past. Today, these drugs broadly target muscle-building pathways in the body and often come with crippling hormonal side effects that doctors like Thomas O’Connor, aka “the Anabolic Doc,” have to confront in his office multiple times per day. Those compounds, which date back to the mid–20th century, are always going to be around, O’Connor says, “because they work, phenomenally, and they’re accessible on the internet.”