Doper!

I’m a doper. A cheat. An un-American scallywag who has obviously put winning ahead of the principles of our greatest athletes. You know, folks like Roger Clemens, Marion Jones, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Wait, what?! Um, ok, never mind. Anyway, if I were subject to a drug test right now I would fail because I’ve been taking a legal substance that has recently been added to WADA’s banned list.

But here’s the rub: it does nothing. I mean, it’s complete garbage as an ergogenic aid. WADA claims it has some “anabolic properties” and, thus, they’ve banned something that’s been on the market for decades that has caused no great shakes in the performance world.

Early in the WFH I decided to dust off an old supplement strategy that I’d tried 20 years ago. It hadn’t worked then but I wanted to confirm that. One of these supps, Mesabolin, is actually a plant sterol called ecdysterone. It’s pretty common and shows up in a few plants. Anyway, I hit it hard, first with prescribed dosages and then with double that... and... nothing. Well maybe a little bit of gastric stress but not a tad of performance enhancement.

And now it’s banned, which I don’t care about at all except for the fact that it doesn’t work and I’d prefer it if WADA actually focused on things that are, well, doping and not some nutrient that you can get by eating completely natural plants.

So anyway, here’s the review of my WFH supplement strategies. Nada. I pretty well knew the argentine/pyroglutamate wouldn’t work because tests done on oral argenine have never confirmed what’s been done using injected argenine and I pretty well confirmed that. And now I've confirmed that ecdysterone does nothing, too. That is unless you are a competitive athlete. Then it will get you disgraced, turning you into a bitter scourge of society who’ll be bummed that you didn’t just suck it up and call Michele Ferrari and get on the real stuff so at least you could have gotten banned with some money in the bank.