4 min readYES, YOU CAN take drugs to build more muscle and weight room strength. But if you want to actually do athletic things with all that muscle and strength—if you want to sprint and swim faster and barbell snatch planets—you need more than that. (At least for now. More on that later.)
This isn’t the sales pitch that Enhanced Games CEO Maximilian Martin wanted when his roided-up Olympics descended on Las Vegas over Memorial Day Weekend. Martin and Enhanced promised shattered world records galore, and a showcase of the athletic brilliance that can happen when ‘elite’ athletes and semi-questionable (but FDA-approved!) peptides/steroids/PED-cocktails-to-be-named unite.
What we got was not that. Yeah, Martin showed up onstage post-event and said the Enhanced Games had “arrived in mainstream culture” and “changed the world tonight.” But mostly, it was meme-mocked for showcasing what PEDs didn’t do. The 100-meter men’s and women’s sprints were won by two athletes who declined to take drugs, running at sundial-slow speeds (compared to world class sprint events). The Olympic lifts were so sleepy that Canada’s Boady Santavy, after failing to set a world-record on the snatch in his standard three attempts, got a “bonus” attempt. The only recognized world record holder competing, strongman Hafthor Björnsson, failed to raise his 515 kilogram deadlift attempt up past his knees. It wasn’t until the final event, the 50-meter freestyle swim, that a world record was broken. And Kristian Gkolomeev pulled out all the stops, blending gear in his body with gear on his body (an illegal swim-supersuit banned from competition 16 years ago) to finish in 20.81 seconds, a whole .07 seconds faster than the world mark. (Officially, this won’t stand as a world record, given the obvious differences from typical sanctioned competitions.)
The crazy thing: These underwhelming results made perfect sense. Because despite their catchy, make-any-sport-instantly-hand-out-suspensions mythos, the PEDs available to Enhanced Games athletes were never going to singlehandedly “enhance” athletic performance. Enhanced Games athletes used a mix of testosterone and testosterone esters, HGH, anabolic agents, peptides, metabolic modulators, and stimulants, according to a still-ongoing clinical trial involving 36 of the 42 Games athletes. All were FDA-approved. All are sold by the Enhanced company too (if you’re interested).
All have top-tier effects if you’re like most gym-bros and just want to build muscle and strength. But athleticism demands more—and demands different training, too. Peptides like BPC and hormones like testosterone and HGH work not by simply building the muscle for you—but by allowing you to train harder and longer and with less recovery.
This works exceptionally well for packing on muscle. You’ve seen these results, too, in Hollywood movies, and on the social media accounts of influencers who discuss their PED use, and maybe even your local weight room. But as tough as it is to build muscle, it’s a relatively simple training goal as far as progressive overload. Move more weight for a few more reps on key exercises over and over, and you’ll gradually add the size and strength you want—especially with testosterone to speed recovery and BPC to help your tendons and ligaments stay healthy.
Oversimplification here, but . . . when you’re building muscle, you’re building the tool that lets your body generate more force. Sprinting and swimming and even Olympic lifting are applications of that force, which at the highest levels is a training goal that can’t simply be solved by “do more reps!” Yes, T can help you recover faster between workouts and maybe push for a few more reps to beef up your leg press, for example. Translating a bigger leg press to a faster 100-meter dash that requires perfect acceleration and deceleration and footstrike moments isn’t so simple.
This isn’t to say that BPC and testosterone and the other gear on the Enhanced Games’ alphabet soup menu are useless. But fitness protocols (apparently, judging by the Enhanced Games results) haven’t fully unlocked the best ways to train with these enhancers. Maybe an enhanced sprinter can work harder between all-out runs in a workout, sneaking in a few more reps. Maybe an enhanced Olympic lifter should be training nearer to his 1-rep max ceiling. Maybe after a decade of Enhanced competitions, when trainers have more time fine-tuning mesocycles for HGH and Deca users, we’ll see dominant results.
Or maybe the Enhanced Games team just didn’t really understand what it was getting into. By creating an event full of only single-rep lifts and explosive runs and swims, Martin and Co. limited the impact that their athletes’ supplementation regimens could have. That might have changed with a few longer-distance events, maybe a 10k run or a long-distance cycling event. The raw strength built by PED-enabled training regimens could help more here, and athletes who’d made aerobic system improvements would have been able to cash those in, as well.
Then again, the lack of actually-impressive performance didn’t stop Martin from droning on about the event, anyway. “With the power of enhancements,” he told his athletes, “we can prove we are the best we can ever think of, and you are living proof of that. For the last three days, Enhanced took over the internet.”
Which means someone, somewhere bought some of those supplements available from the Enhanced website—the enhancement they were all playing for in the first place.
Ebenezer Samuel, C.S.C.S., is the fitness director of Men's Health and a certified trainer with more than 10 years of training experience. He's logged training time with NFL athletes and track athletes and his current training regimen includes weight training, HIIT conditioning, and yoga. Before joining Men's Health, he served as a sports columnist and tech columnist for the New York Daily News.
