Tiger Woods: Adding Muscle Mass Is Always Welcomed By Athletes
By Sal Marinello
As the New York Times reports that Dr. Anthony Galea, a physician who has treated Tiger Woods, is being investigated for providing Performance Enhancing Drugs to athletes, debate is being waged on sports talk shows across the radio dial; did the revealed-to-be-a-horn dog golfing great use steroids or human growth hormone and if he did, how much, if any, did these drugs help?
As usual, when discussing athletes and PED use, logic and facts take a back seat to emotions, incorrect and inconsistent assertions, and misinformation about what these drugs can and cannot do.
Arguments are being forwarded in this debate that were used when baseball players got caught using steroids and HGH. Steroids don’t make the athlete, technique does; bulk doesn’t help these athletes; young athletes don’t really get any benefits from the recovery benefits offered by PEDs; the athletes were great when they were teenagers and young men, so why would they need to take PEDs to get any better, and the list goes on.
Different sports and different athletes, but the same bad info and faulty logic.
For the sake of discussion, let’s accept the” big picture” assertion made by some folks that athletic performance in golf is (somehow) different than all other athletic endeavors, and therefore, steroid use cannot improve the swing and play of a golfer.
So what?
Tiger has displayed such incredibly bad judgment in the way he has handled his personal life it’s entirely reasonable that he would use the same faulty decision making process regarding the use of PEDs. Knowing what we know about this mess, Tiger’s reasoning skills are obviously suspect.
What we know about athletes who use PEDs, their motivation is that they believe taking the drugs will help. It is also clear that many athletes are willing to go to extreme measures to be successful and to gain an edge over the competition. In this regard, could Tiger be that different from Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Rodney Harrison or any other uber-competitive, successful athlete?
The nonsense about increased muscle mass – aka “bulk”- and steroid/HGH use comes from what people think they know what these drugs can do as a result of stories about body builders and other meat heads. Unless the definition and physics of “athleticism” and “ability to perform more work” has changed, increased muscle mass is never a bad thing; a relatively small increase in muscle mass can reap large performance benefits.
A golfer, baseball player, tennis player, swimmer or any other athlete will benefit from increased muscle mass and athletes who use PEDs don’t have to look like this, they look like this.
By the way, Tiger is known to have hit the weighs hard and has added muscle to his body over the past several years, so it’s clear that Tiger thinks adding muscle to his frame will help his game.
Again, for the sake of argument if we accept the line of reasoning that adding muscle is detrimental to a golfer’s performance to explain why Tiger Woods would not use PEDs, how can this “no improvement” be measured? Whether from weight lifting and PED use, or weight lifting alone, if he wasn’t as muscular would he have won more tournaments? First, there’s no way to know this and second it is not logical to say that Woods wouldn’t use PEDs simply because he didn’t want to add muscle mass.
In the real world we can’t ignore the facts for the sake of argument and the unshakeable reality is that additional muscle is beneficial to any athlete, athletes are aware of this, and as a result follow many strategies – ethical and unethical, legal and illegal – to improve their performance. However, while increased muscle mass can’t be considered to be a detriment, there is no doubt that a golfer – or any athlete – can decrease performance and increase their risk of injury by following an improper weight lifting regimen.
There is no evidence that Tiger Woods has taken steroids, human growth hormones or any other banned PEDs. However, absent any proof, hackneyed and ignorant arguments cannot be used to explain why he wouldn’t.
