Hollywood Muscle

When Harrison Pope published his conclusion on body image and the action dolls becoming much more muscular, many people were shocked. They believed young kids would strive to look like their hero’s, just like little girls took accepted the body-proportions of “Barbie” as normal.

Whenever an actor gets jacked for a movie, many people immediately wonder: is he on steroids? Cavill in Man of Steel, Hemsworth in Thor, Jackman in X-Men, Pitt in Troy, Bale in Batman, Butler in 300.

Whenever one of these types of physiques pops up on the silver screen, gals swoon, guys rush off to the gym, and the fitness industry has a field day. Men’s Health invents workouts that the stars most definitely didn’t do, supplement companies start rumors that their products were responsible for such impressive gains, and wannabe gurus weigh in on how we too can get ripped like so-and-so.

But amazing Hollywood transformations also always beg the question: were these guys on steroids? Do the drug-free mortals have any chance at making similar gains?

Actors and Steroid Use

The first thing that has probably already jumped out at you is the speed with which certain actors have gained muscle and lost fat for movie roles. We’ll often hear outrageous numbers like gaining 20+ pounds of muscle in a few months while staying lean, or even reducing body fat.

Well, you now know that such gains just aren’t possible without steroid use. If you’re brand new to lifting and drug-free and can gain .5 lbs of muscle per week, you’re doing superb. You MIGHT be able to gain around 1 lb per week for your first couple of months if you make really good newbie gains. If you’ve been weightlifting regularly for several years, you’ll be lucky to gain more than 3-5 pounds of muscle in a year of consistent, intense training.

So the simple answer is that yes, many actors use steroids to prepare for movies. 

Did the guys I named earlier do this? I don’t know. But I don’t know why they wouldn’t have.

Think about it for a second. Most actors aren’t dedicated bodybuilders that stay in great shape year-round, and they have some pretty strong incentives to use steroids to prepare for a role:

• A multi-million dollar payday.

• Fame, which will bring more multi-million dollar paydays.

• A tight schedule to get big and lean.

• Access to the best doctors to ensure nothing goes wrong in terms of possible side effects.

The only disincentive would be a personal distaste for drug use and moral qualms about the illegality of steroids. And Hollywood actors aren’t exactly known for their clean living habits and lawfulness.

The prevalence of steroid use among actors preparing for movies is also glaringly obvious when we look at how they trained and ate. 

We’ll often hear that so-and-so worked out for 2+ hours per day, 7 days per week, and then did conditioning work on top of that. Sometimes they worked out for 4-7 hours per day, which would crush even the most well-conditioned natural athlete, yet they did great. And diets? Thousands of calories per day with huge amounts of protein, yet somehow they stayed lean.

You simply can’t do these things without steroids. If a drug-free guy were to try such an approach, all that would happen is he would wind up overtrained and fat.

Let’s take a look at Manu Bennett, who played the fearsome gladiator Crixus on Spartacus. In 2007, at the age of 35, he got a lead role in The Smashing Machine, the story of ferocious Mark Kerr, an MMA fighter and drug addict. Bennett was to face off with Jean-Claude Van Damme. It was a dream role, his real break, so Bennett went all-in. "I try to build myself as a physical representation of the character, and I knew Kerr had problems with steroids," says Bennett. "So it challenged me to, uh, fully embrace the role."

It's an echo of what Mickey Rourke said when asked about steroid use during his Oscar-nominated role as a veteran grappler in The Wrestler: "When I'm a wrestler, I behave like a wrestler." Or Tom Hardy's more caustic explanation of his Dark Knight Rises physique: "No, I took Smarties," he replied when a reporter asked if he'd juiced for the role. "What do you fucking think?"

Bennett says he began doing two-a-day workouts with a former Mr. Australia and began taking injections. He put on 44 pounds in three months.

On the picture I made a comparison between two great guys, to show the difference between a continuing bodybuilding lifestyle of training, diet and drugs and stopping all that.

Sylvester Stallone was born in 1946 and will be 70 years old in 2016! He looks great for his age but much of his youth (muscle mass) is down to his vigilant use of drugs. It’s extremely difficult to maintain a good level of muscle mass over 60, let alone keeping your body fat levels below 10%. One of the biggest causes of this is due to natural testosterone gradually dropping off as you get older. Many famous athletes, musicians and ‘Hollywood’ turn to private doctors to prescribe them with steroids/HGH to combat false ‘medical’ conditions (such as AIDS or muscular dystrophy) or simply ‘anti-aging’ to allow them to legally take the drugs. However, in many cases they are supervised by doctors, but the drugs they take are completely illegal.

Sylvester Stallone was active from a young age and its clear from various sources that he actively built muscle. By 1970 he was in decent shape and began to appear in well-known films.

His career really took off after his 1976, appearing in Rocky and at this point  in time it is unclear whether he was currently taking steroids, because he had a naturally attainable physique. However as time progressed, the likeliness he was able to maintain an increasingly impressive physic decreased and telltale signs of anabolic use such as extremely low body fat with tight/dense muscle mass increased. He would have soon realised that to maintain and build his ‘move star’ physique, he needed to stay on steroids. Certainly for later Rocky and Rambo films Sylvester would have been using religiously.

In 2007 he was caught by Australia customs with 48 vials of Jintropin, a Chinese human growth hormone. Sylvester was then later seen throwing vials of testosterone from his room when police came to search his hotel room. He went to court and stated during the trial that he has a prescription for Jintropin, however the drug is not legally available under prescription in the USA and found him guilty. He apologised for the misunderstanding and explained his need for the drug:

“As you get older, the pituitary gland slows and you feel older, your bones narrow. This stuff gives your body a boost and you feel and look good”

Did Sylvester Stallone build his body with steroids?

In 1991 an interviewer asked him directly: “Did you ever use steroids to build yourself up?” Stallone's Answer:

“In 1987, when I was making Rambo III, I used to take an amino acid that's nearly as strong as steroids. It's about 15 times more powerful than the typical amino acid, but gives none of the raw rage - the anger - that comes with steroids. All steroids do is make you a cumbersome, apelike goon.”

Movie stars and athletes are unlikely to answer these questions honestly when put on the spot; they understandably have a brand image to protect.

More interesting is the fact that many writers on the internet connect Sly with his bodybuilding supplement company: “Instone Nutrition”. The company is now defunct – bankrupt and out of business

One writer asks himself;

“If Sylvester Stallone really knows of an amino acid that works nearly as well as anabolic steroids, couldn’t he have marketed it through Instone and saved the company from bankruptcy? If he’s really aware of such an amino acid, couldn’t he have made it the premier product of his company and spared athletes from possible future liver, kidney, and cardiovascular problems associated with chronic steroid abuse? With such a “miraculous amino acid”, he could do a lot of good and reap even greater financial prosperity than he ever did making movies. Think about it: if such an amino acid existed – one that’s even “almost” as effective as steroids – synthetic testosterone would be obsolete and the revenue the drug companies make from it would be shifted to the output of this safer alternative.”

On a Today Show in January 2008, in an interview with Matt Lauer, Stallone explained himself and said: “ It’s archaic to think of hGH as a steroid. “It’s amino acids all 191 of them.”

In the same interview he said:

“The most important thing about hGH is that it enhances.. A lot of people should really be aware of… is that it takes off the wear and tear that, especially if you’re an athlete, the amount of beating your body takes. The power to recuperate is very, very limited. So, all it does is expedite [recovery]. People think that it changes… If that were the case, everyone would be a superhuman being.” And: “You have to put in years and years and years of hard labor to stay in shape.”

In a Time magazine interview (2008), the then 61-year-old actor Stallone revealed that he increased his body mass to 209 pounds while using prescription testosterone: “Testosterone to me is so important for a sense of well-being when you get older,” he says. “Everyone over 40 years old would be wise to investigate it because it increases the quality of your life. Mark my words. In 10 years it will be over the counter.”

Sylvester currently uses steroids and growth hormone under the medical supervision of his Beverly Hills doctor Robert Huizenga.

Time proved that Sylvester Stallone was right, just watch these pics on YouTube:

Sylvester Stallone (68) and his Incredibly Fit Wife Jennifer Flavin (46) Shows off their Perfect Bodies during a Family Vacation in South of France. Do you think they are the Fittest Couple in Hollywood right now?

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=taDyQKEfGhg

How much Growth does Sly take?

On February 16, 2007 Stallone was detained in Sydney, Australia at the airport after he arrived to promote Rocky Balboa. Customs officials searched bags and confiscated items.  Customs officials found 48 vials of the human growth hormone (hGH) Jintropin in Stallone’s personal luggage. Three days later Stallone’s hotel room was searched and items (synthetic testosterone) were confiscated.

Interviewing officers asking Stallone why he took Jintropin reported that he said: “Doing Rambo is hard work and I am going to be in Burma for a while. Where do you think I am going to get this stuff in Burma?” Stallone was preparing to go on location near the Thailand/Burma border to film Rambo 2008, for three month.

48 vials of 10 iu = 480 iu 3 month = 13 weeks. 480 : 13 = 36.9 iu/week 37 iu: 7 = 5.2 iu per/day

And Sylvester Stallone was right, the combination of testosterone and growth hormone is effective, at the time when he knew, the white-coats still didn’t, if you want to have a good laugh:

From usatoday in 2008: Popular among athletes, bodybuilders

Growth hormone stimulates growth and cell reproduction. It is produced in the pituitary gland, the pea-sized "master gland" that sits at the base of the brain. It has been popular in recent years with bodybuilders and athletes because they believe it will increase muscle mass, decrease fat and allow them to more quickly recuperate after punishing workouts. It's also a drug of choice at many anti-aging clinics, where it's given with the promise of restoring energy, strength, vigor and sex drive.

But does it do any of those things?

Studies have found that it can slightly, but only slightly, increase muscle mass. And because it cuts down on body fat, it can give bodybuilders the "ripped" look they want, says Alan Rogol, a professor of endocrinology at the University of Virginia and Indiana University School of Medicine.

Not a sure thing

But there's not a lot of evidence that the hormone does anything else, says George Merriam, a professor and endocrine researcher at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Seattle.

"If Mr. Stallone is taking his growth hormone shots to improve the way he looks without his shirt on, the benefits that he's talking about may be real," Merriam says. But he says most studies have consistently shown that "there isn't improvement in physical or physiological performance."

As for the anti-aging effects, it's based on the notion that growth hormone production peaks in adolescence. It begins to decline when normal aging begins in the early 20s, Blackman says. By the time a healthy person is in his or her 60s, growth hormone levels are 30% to 40% of what they were at age 30.

But despite years of research worldwide, no one "has yet been able to show that supplementing growth hormone improves the function of the body," Blackman says.

And it can do harm. Early symptoms are aching joints, fluid retention and swelling. Some plastic surgeons give it just for the effect of fluid retention on wrinkles, says Roberto Salvatori, a professor of endocrinology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

//usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-02-05-human-growth-hormone_N.htm

I can’t help myself I have to paste this remark on a thread. The poster is soooo right:

“While there are no doubt those who make false claims about the positive effects of HGH, I have seen even more, especially within the medical community, make false and/or misleading statements about the negative effects. For example, some notable doctors have taken a clinical study in which massive dosages of HGH were used and negative side effects were encountered and then associated these effects with any HGH use. This is not only illogical, but goes against any reasonable definition of medical ethics. The same is true of the FDA's illogical and immoral unwillingness to recognize aging as a disease which can be treated with medicine (such as HRT). I'm not quite sure what the agenda is here, although the most logical one would be a desire to limit the use of anti-aging medicine to so-called elites so that the "little people" of the world will not increase the strain on government-run social security programs which are already near-bankruptcy in many western countries.”