Have you ever heard of doping? Doping is the act of cheating for athletes by using drugs. Even though they know how dangerous and illegal doping is, they do doping because of the benefits they give. In this article, I’ll tell you all about doping, including their benefits and side effects.

What Are the Benefits?

Doping is definitely illegal. Then, why would they do it? To list the benefits of doping, there is faster recovery, stronger strength, and training capacity.

Starting with the first benefit of doping, faster recovery, it doesn’t only mean that athletes heal faster, but it also means that they get less damage from the training and the games themselves. As an example, many professional boxers use steroids – a type of performance-enhancing drug– to strengthen their stamina and tenacity. This is also the reason why they don’t easily get knocked out. Boxers are not the only ones who use steroids. Some bodybuilders also use them, though it is legal outside “natural” bodybuilding contests.

Next benefit, stronger strength, is just as it sounds. Doping helps their maximum muscle capacity to increase. This may not sound like much of a problem, but especially in soccer, football, and basketball, this is a huge advantage. Those 3 sports that I just gave as an example require physical advantages to win against their opponent. If the athlete has a stronger body, it would be easier to push the opponent and score the goal. Even though it is very hard for short athletes to beat taller athletes, when they have very strong muscles, they might win. But we all know that it is very hard to obtain a strong and muscular body just through effort. Because of that, athletes use drugs to easily grow muscles and get stronger.

Now at the final benefit, we have higher training capacity. Doping isn't always used right before the actual game. Rather, to increase their strength and stamina, they also use it during their training. When they are training normally they would try to increase their skills rather than increasing the power of their muscles because they know that they have reached their limits. But when athletes dope, they do training using their power rather than skills. Since we know that doping helps us to increase the maximum capacity of strength, it also means that our training capacity is also increased.

What are the side effects of doping?

Now, let’s move on to the side effects of doping. Physical side effects of doping are mainly divided into three parts: sudden heart attack, liver cancer, and mood swings.

Heart attack is the most common way humans die. But usually, it happens when we are old or if we are in serious heart disease. But the reason why doping causes it is because of the hard training we do right after we dope. A type of doping that athletes do is blood doping. They put drugs inside their blood and increase the amount of red blood cells. Since the heart is one of the most important organs related to blood, when blood pumps faster than usual, heart attack becomes more likely to occur. Also, by taking drugs, our liver cells are damaged, which can cause liver tumors and even cancer. Doping not only causes physical damage to an athlete’s body but also certain mental disorders and huge mood swings. When athletes dope, they are likely to get more anxious about their work and become extremely depressed. Not only that, it causes huge mood swings and even manic disorders.

Conclusion

Through my article, I hope you guys can understand how dangerous doping and drugs in general can be to our lives. Even though everyone, including people who use these drugs, knows that it is fine, they use it to show off their skills. What do you think about people who dope? Is it fine because they are throwing themselves into danger, or is it unethical to break the limit of the human body?

Listen to the article as read by the author: