Supplementation In Boxing - When Did It Begin?

They werent performance enhancing though were they.Isnt that the point of supplements ,or have I missed some thing?

 

I'm quite curious as well, although I shudder at the price.

 

Maybe at the club level, but the boxers with good managers and trainers know nutrition.

The trouble is fighters do not listen. They eat too much, become lazy, drink, smoke, etc...

I also think your comment that every heavyweight is on Riods except Ruiz is way off.

 

My Trainer is one of the head people of USA boxing. I think he knows his ****. He does have me doin some bench press and dead lift for explosive fast twich muscle exercies, but we usually stick to body weight exercises(but very hard body weight exercises that u do with another person or weight on your back/knees). But Right now its more about learning boxing technique than anything else. Im already in fantastic lean muscular shape.

 

:yep

 

Nobody was into "supplementation," as its called now, in the '40s and '50s, R, that I knew of. The only added fuel that I saw (and there was plenty of it) was booze. Lots of great fighters came into the gym tanked and flattened everyone in sparring.

But, if there was even a hint of an edge, or an old-wives tale, we jumped on it, as long as it wasn't, heaven-for-fend, Marijuana. The cops didn't care and there was no public outcry.

For me, coffee was the drug of choice -- had me rarin' to go. Later, dexadrine, which I stumbled on after it was prescribed for lethargy at school. Talk about rocket fuel! I wanted to circle the globe before the bell rang.

 

It seems to have started around the time Holyfield and Morrison were on top in the heavyweights.

 

No it started when Figg was champion. Cocaine, Alcohol, Heroin, what ever it took to get an edge. Nearly 300 years later, little has changed....

 

Well Mr Garfield ,here,mentioned dexdrine,which is similar to amphetamine.Since,amphetamines were first synthesised in the late nineteenth century it is quite conceivable that quite a few trainers,from the last hundred years,might have slipped a "pep" to their fighters before a bout.

As for strength inducing performance enhancers, I think people should make a distinction between steroids(which are analogues of testosterone and which were first sysnthesised around 1939-and generally available on prescription around 1959 as dianabol) and human growth hormone (which was originally extracted pitutaries of dead bodies and was only commercially available in synthetic form around the end of the eighties).

I would argue that the general all round increase in power and heaviness of bone structure of heavyweights from the mid nineties onwards is due to HGH ,rather than steroids by themselves.

I may be totally off the base in speculating here,but it is quite conceivable that intake of HGH over a significant period may have really compromised the top-class game of shorter fighters like Tyson and Tua, late in the nineties. The extra muscle mass from HGH and weighttraining packed on their short bones would mean they would have lost the elasticity in their muscles-more so than a taller fighter with longer bones.Also the extra bone density would mean, while they were more physically robust and powerful ,they were at the same time less light on their feet.

Anyway....here are some articles on steroids and HGH,in Sports Illustrated from the last 40 years:

The Steroid Predicament

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Problems In A Turned-on World

Something Extra On The Ball

High Time To Make Some Rules


The story of drugs in modern athletics .This article provides information about the "difficulty" of beating modern drugs testing protocols (also incidentally how big of a moron James Toney truly is...).

Over The Edge