Steroid ar3e bad, m'kaY?

First of all let me be perfectly clear, I am talking about something that I KNOW about intimately. I used to be a habitual steroid user. I no longer use steroids due to the negative side effects that accompanied them. One of the worst side effects, besides the normal textbook ones, was how bad my cardio suffered when doing jiu-jitsu and submission wrestling. Although I should clear up one myth side effect- loss of erection. Unless you are taking Deca, you probably won't have that problem. In fact, most of the other steroids make you hornier than a goat. There are some forms of the juice that just increase muscle strength and endurance like Winstrol, and take that for any amount of time you will end up with huge knots on the side of your ass from the injections. The bottom line is this, people take steroids for one reason- to get big and cock strong.Before I ever thought about using juice I weighed about 170 pounds and was a cardio machine. I participated in numerous grappling tournaments and was teaching about six days a weak. I regularly trained about twice a day, cardio in the morning and grappling at night. The only problem was I started lifting weights in a "juice-gym". Every dude lifting in there was HUGE. It didn't matter that I could smoke their asses on the mats. These guys were regularly pushing between 450 and 600 pounds on the bench. Not only that, I notice that the chicks (gym bunnies) seemed to gravitate to the guys who were built like Ronnie Coleman. Remember, this was in the mid 90's before every slut wanted to bang a "UFC" fighter. I began to spend more and more time hitting the weights and less time grappling. No matter how hard I worked out I wasn't getting gains of strength and muscle like these guys were. One night after my workout I was bitching about how slow my progress was. I was like, "hell, I'm only pushing 285 and the guy next to me is doing 350 for reps of 10." My buddy smiled and said, "that's nothin', I'll hook you up and you'll be benching 400 in six months." I went for it and started on Vitamin-S. Over the next six months I was taking about 3 injections a week of Test on 8 week cycles. My bench shot up to 385 and my squat was over 400. My students and friends could easily tell the difference in my physique. I don't care what anyone says, the stuff is addictive- physically and psychologically. Once you see the benefits, you want more. I would go out and party and the first thing a girl would ask, "Oh, you work out?" Talk about an ego boost. Some guys out there were born with a good physique and are naturally big. They wouldn't have a clue what I'm talking about. Guys who aren't as blessed know exactly where I'm coming from.The benefits are immediate and obvious, the drawbacks come later. First of all you plateau, your body gets used to the drug and the dose verses the benefits begin to taper off. Those massive strength and size gains stop. The second thing that happens is you began to notice all of those side effects that you had always heard about but your friends told you that was all hype. Acne starts spreading in places you never had zits before. My back looked like a pizza. I already had a temper, now it was hair-triggered. My hair thin already but now I was seeing bald spots, that really freaked me out. And worst of all my grappling cardio that was always an asset of my was going downhill- big time. Another bad thing about juicing when training jiu-jitsu is that I used to constantly get nose bleeds during my train sessions. It got so bad that I would stuff my nose before I even stepped on to the mat to work out.I am a hard-headed bastard and the warning signs were staring me in the face for quite some time but I continue to use on a regular basis. As a matter of fact one of my biggest grappling tournament wins was when I was all juiced-up. Forget the fact that blood ran from my nose like a faucet during every match and no one even touched my nose. Although I did enjoy blowing blood out of my nose at the end of my final match and getting blood all over Ken Shamrock's jacket. He was working my opponent's corner and he was being a real arrogant jerk so I didn't feel bad at all about that stunt I pulled.To be perfectly honest, I really didn't began to think about quitting until I started getting chest pains- at 30 years old! That's when I started getting scared and decided to back off the juice. That's when things got bad for me. When I quit it did something to my body and I started getting sick all the time and would get real bad headaches. I had not only lost a lot of my strength and size, but now my cardio sucked too. It has taken me several years since I quit using steroids to get completely healthy and my grappling cardio is about up to 80 percent of what I once was. I figure I will return to 100% in the near future. Believe me when I tell you, steroids are sweet in the beginning, it's on the backside where they nail you.I have a buddy that used to lift with me and we wrestled together in high school. He juiced before I ever thought about starting and continued after I quit. He did eventually quit. He is two years younger than me and is on kidney dialysis now and has the internal organs of an 80 year old. I don't know how much more time he has but he would tell you straight that it wasn't worth it.