By Dave Ellis
We caught up with Dave Ellis, a frequent contributor to our sister publication, Training & Conditioning, on his way to Major League Baseball Spring Training to get his thoughts on the recent headlines involving performance enhancing drugs (PED). Ellis, a Registered Dietician and a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist, specializes in recovery nutrition, body composition and frame assessment, and is an advisor to many college and professional sports teams as well as U.S. Anti-Doping Association and the Professional Baseball Strength & Conditioning Coaches Society Advisory Board. Athletic Administrators will find his advice useful and appropriate to share with coaches, athletes, and athletic trainers.
After watching all that 2007 brought with the publishing of the Mitchell report and the made-for-TV drama that unfolded during recent testimony on Capital Hill, I’ve decided to share what I’ve learned in my 27 years practicing in athletics and from conducting over 40,000 body composition assessments. Here are some methods I’ve come up with for identifying those athletes who may be candidates for PED testing and further conversation about the dangers of their use.
Reasonable Metrics
When I see an athlete add more then five percent of their body weight in an off-season (from a previous high), I typically start to look for secondary signs of use of PED. A formerly muscular athlete who has lost lean mass due to injury might make large gains as they bounce back from the de-conditioning that occurs when they can’t load a muscle, but when a healthy athlete starts to make five-, six-, even seven-percent increases in lean mass during the off-season you can’t rule out the use of PED.
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Unseen Dangers and Drawbacks
It’s been my experience that often athletes who do not organize their off-season workouts well tend to look for ways to make up for lost time. They want to speed recovery so they can make a run at gaining lean mass with the start of the season in sight. That is a mistake for a couple of reasons. Anyone who waits until late in the off-season to begin an effort to add lean mass is not thinking about just how long it takes to get new muscle ready to cope with all the metabolic and environmental stresses that come with the dynamics of spring training and preseason camps. These athletes often find that their newly gained lean mass feels like luggage and that the weight comes off when temperatures and reps on the field rise.
It just takes time to properly condition lean mass to become efficient and those who get a late start can only do so much to squeeze in all the work that it takes to get the job done. Some who get a late start attempt to get away with condensing all this work by augmenting their rate of recovery and by lessening the damage from training by using PED like human growth hormone and testosterone. Often when these athletes decided to take this route they cleaned up their diets, lifestyles, and quality of rest all at the same time. I have never seen a PED user who could not have made the same gains had they dedicated even 85 percent of their off-season to a well-organized training program with the same diet, supplementation and lifestyle. We have also seen athletes rationalize using PED to overcome what might be a career ending injury, with or without approval for therapeutic exemption.
Grassroots Deterrents
Is all the media coverage on this topic sending the wrong message to young athletes today? That goes without saying, but sometimes I worry more about the parents of the athlete thinking that PED are what it’s going to take to help their young athlete make the travel team or get a scholarship. Certainly, the young athletes themselves are connecting the dots that cheating might lead to individual recognition and a big opportunity (scholarship or contract). When a parent becomes convinced this is the case, look out!
Parents actually have the resources to facilitate execution of PED use even if they don’t do anything but make strong suggestions to “get big” and supply the money for their son or daughter to find a solution. We also have some holes in our laws yet that allow people like Balco to take on celebrity status after a short stay behind bars—that needs to be changed. This battle will have to be funded and waged at a grassroots level to be championed in the near future.
I have to applaud the efforts of groups like the U.S. Anti-Doping and the Taylor Hooton Foundation as they work to help young athletes and parents understand the physical and mental decrement that come with PED. Also, the work of the NSF Certified for Sports supplement testing program has set a standard for good manufacturing practices to ensure supplements are free of PED or banned substances.
This same message of caution needs to be reinforced by athletic administrators, coaches, athletic trainers, strength coaches, and personal trainers. You just can’t have authority figures who work with athletes carry a cavalier attitude about using stimulants like ephedrine, pro-hormones, testosterone, or growth hormone.
Earlier this year, ACSM and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency formed Professionals Against Doping in Sports (PADS) to discourage steroids and other banned substance use in sports, with a focus on ensuring that physicians, scientists, and other professionals who work with athletes do not encourage, support, or tolerate the use of banned substances. It’s also up to the administrations around teams to ensure that personnel close to their teams have no record of PED or street drug use. It’s now common to find highly evolved security teams around professional organizations to ensure this is the case. There are just too many gurus (often just big fans of that game) who will do anything to endear themselves to a high-profile athlete, including helping them obtain PED. Expect to see more pressure from teams to mandate athletes only use team resources for strength training and nutrition guidance. This created financial pressure on teams to ratchet up the quality of their team support services where team often cut corners. It’s a big time business for folks at all levels and most operate in the red.
Be Warned
Coaches need to warn athletes and parents where they should get advice about planning offseason training routines. There is no shortage of bad advice available now days, especially via the Internet.
How do you know if you are getting good advice? Not every day of the year is a weight gain day. Anyone who promises you big results without first asking where you are at with your offseason training does not have your better interest at heart, because if they did, they would look you square in the eye and make sure you understand that there is little time to waste during the offseason to make these gains. And secondly, they would ask who on your team you are training with who would have similar goals. There is no stronger anabolic agent then training with your teammates. Next, they would query you on the quality of your diet and rest. If the first thing you get is, “these supplements will …” or, "if you really want to get it rolling call this one guy,” then you need to politely excuse yourself from that conversation and warn your teammates to avoid going there.
To read about how college and high school athletic administrators are approaching testing for performance enhancing drugs, check out the cover story in Athletic Management February/March issue.
In 27 years of practice, Dave Ellis, RD, CSCS, has earned a reputation as a pioneer and leader in the field of recovery nutrition, body composition and frame assessment and is routinely sought out by professional sports teams.
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