Bulk Up, PED
There have been shockwaves in the online fitness community after YouTube celebrity and renowned IFBB Pro fitness expert, Greg Doucette, suggested that South Korean heartthrob, Kim Jong-kook may have obtained his chiselled physique with the assistance of performance enhancing drugs! Kim Jong-kook was quick to dismiss the remarks but what‘s the truth and why does it matter?
It started with a man crush. "He was good-looking, and he was huge and he was popular," remembers Brian Cuban of the former professional football player who worked out at his gym. In other words, he was everything Cuban felt he wasn't.
So, when the former player mentioned that a nearby doctor could put patients on "weight-gain programs" – aka steroids – Cuban, then 26, made an appointment, got a prescription for an oral anabolic steroid called Anavar and began bulking up. "I started … working out even harder, getting bigger and more lean and more muscular," recalls Cuban, now a 55-year-old lawyer, author and eating-disorder and addiction-awareness advocate in Dallas who was 26 at the time.
But along with the muscle gain came "an uptick in anger" that he worried would damage his relationship. He flushed the rest of the steroids down the toilet at work, but began again about three years later after the pair, who had gotten married, divorced. By then, laws had tightened to penalize physicians and trainers who promoted anabolic steroid use, so Cuban turned to the "black market" at his gym to buy them in injectable form. And so "Big Brian" – Cuban's steroid-pumped alter ego – was born.
"This started a 10-year-cycle of steroid abuse because I liked 'Big Brian' – it made me feel good, it made me feel loved," Cuban remembers. "'Big Brian' would never be that guy … that never got to go to the prom; that never held a girl's hand." The only problem with "Big Brian?" He was also that guy who was never satisfied. "No matter how big I got, it was never good enough," Cuban remembers.
Mostly men, experts say – who use or have used steroids and other appearance- and performance-enhancing drugs in the name of vanity, versus for sports or bodybuilding competitions. "It's becoming more popular and mainstream because of physique," says Jim White, an exercise physiologist and registered dietitian with studios in Virginia. "It's to get the six-pack and muscles that they might not be able to get on their own."
While the appeal is understandable – the products, when paired with the right diet and exercise plan, can increase muscle strength, body size and bone density, and improve the body's ability to repair tissue, White says – steroid use comes at a steep cost to health, not to mention the legal risks and financial strain it presents.
In the short term, for instance, steroid use is linked to severe acne, baldness, infertility and impotence, to name a few side effects, White says. Plus, the ego-boost can be addictive. Long term, White adds, the products can lead to high blood pressure, circulatory problems, tumors, cancer and even death.
Some research has also linked long-term anabolic steroid use to memory problems, while other experts worry about the drugs' impact on muscles like the heart. "Is it causing growth elsewhere that we don't necessarily want growth? And taking synthetic testosterone might hamper the body's ability to make the hormone itself if and when a user wants to stop.
People have used appearance and performance-enhancing drugs – such as anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, unregulated dietary supplements or some combination of the substances – to help build muscle for "decades."
Anyhow, just a few days following the allegations, Kim Jong Kook has decided to take matters into his own hands—by taking hundreds of doping tests. On his YouTube channel, Kim Jong Kook uploaded a series of photos along with captions to explain the ongoing situation. And in like Kim Jong Kook fashion, he made sure to make light of it all with some hilarious memes.
His last and final update, which was less than a day ago, showed off the testing he has completed thus far. He also shared his future plans to complete all 391 KADA doping tests available in order to shut down these types of allegations once and for all.