Thanks Kevin. I keep waiting for folks to engage me on the facts. Then if something is wrong or partially true or in doubt, we can engage the facts. One thing i noticed is that some modern HWs seem to be listed as smaller in the chest & upper arms than they might actually be. Tyson & Holyfield reached around the max that they could have naturally, but much less chest-& they looked bigger than 44"/46" expanded. Janitor good point about Mcvea. Steroids were not invented until 1936. There have always been some natural outliars like Carnera.
I’ll play Devil’s Advocate for a minute: Tyson displayed plenty of uncontrollable rage at various points which can be influenced by use of steroids. Ditto uncontrollable sex drive. He bulked to 239 and 234 for the Nielsen and Lewis fights. He admitted to using a fake ***** to pass drug tests, but claimed it was because he was using narcotics. Eventually went bald.
He was already huge as a young teen, but I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if he was on roids or HGH at some point in his career, particularly post-prison. Testing was especially lax then so there was probably a lot of using.
Sure No Neck, thanks for the input. By the way, you really got no neck. As in very short & Tyson-esque thick. His was ~ 20". Standard US dress shirts, 3 XL is only 1/2" larger than 2 XL, so you wear & button that, approaching 19". Anywho, what you describe could be from steroids, but not necessarily at allor even showing it is much more likely. he was mugging people from his early teens. Always had rage issues, family problems, no Mom & only imperfect D'amato eventually as a Father figure... Showing no boundaries with sex is not so unusual for a kid in a candy store. He did use plenty of drugs, which would dramatically increase mental instability. Now that extra weight-I know about it, but is there any indication that it was not all, or virtually all, fat? Think about how he looked...If he was ~10% bodyfat at 220, even near 240 that is still only ~ 18% bodyfat. Don't you think he looked near 20% BF at 239? I think he just went from pretty lean to slightly overweight, staying heavily muscled. Could well have used, if so in the 2nd career. But may well not have.
Are you going to address the elephant in the room? He has admitted to wearing a fake p enis to pass drug tests.
There is absolutely no evidence that Tyson was using steroids in his prime. Whether or not he used them in his post prison career may be another story. But, there is still no real evidence there either. Tyson was always an incredibly strong and explosive man.
This. People need to realize that some people are just born genetically gifted for certain things... Guys like Tyson and Foreman never touched weights in their prime let alone steroids, but were naturally muscular and big...
What´s the problem? Me and HerolGee both agreed that BMI is easy to use in therms of simplicity. Same goes for morphology, which is widely used all over the world. Disrespectful? In no way. And no, there´s nothing wrong with pullups and dips beeing harder when beeing endomorph (higher BMI), not so for squads and pushups, since there´s gravity on earth.
He probably was, but I know very similarly sized guys. None of them nearly as fast as Tyson. But once again I defer to the expert opinion of Nick Diaz here This content is protected
I thought I DID address it, by implication. He used drugs, including he said occasionally before fights. Many are showing how he was naturally big & muscular from very young. There is no Holyfield-type growth OR 'Evan Fields' evidence such as being on the rolls of a drug lab. So if he wore a prosthetic in order to use someone else's urine because of recreational drugs, again while he could have also been using PEDs, we have no special reason to suspect that is likely. You wanted to play devil's advocate, so what about the other things I answered? Such as you agree that getting fatter likely made up all his later weight gain? Just as Frazier just got heavier by the time he fought Foreman.
1) I do not think you were at all disrespectful. In the first word of the paragraph describing that issue, I said "Combates..." Before & after my comment he was being demeaning/insulting instead of just disagreeing with posters. You have been perfectly fine! 2) Again, BMI is a poor measure of fitness & body fat for many. You can find endless critiques of it. Do you not see how due to variations of bone & especially muscle mass, it poorly classifies many people? It would not be very hard to consider skeleton & muscle mass: there are various easy to use, inexpensive or free body fat tests. 3) Another outdated & somewhat erroneous concept is the 3 strict categories of morphology. I described several problems. Very few fit easily into one type only. Excercise & time can morph what you look like; they are not natural, black & white facts. You confused what are supposed to be endomorphs with mesomorphs-but the one thing you singled out about what you meant, that they are short, is not factually accurate. Many can be muscular or fat & tall... 4) You combined both concepts & that SHOWS a problem with BMI. You defined endomorphs as "higher BMI". But the biggest salient characteristic of them is tending towards fat. But one can be kinda chubby or more with a modertae BMI due to bird bones &/or little muscle mass. And what you call a mesomorph can have a high or very high BMI due to bone & mainly muscle mass. Sometimes with very low body fat levels. 5) OK, from how you phrased things it seemed you were saying one needed to add more WEIGHT for the exercises you claimed. You meant that being heavier makes dips & pullups harder than squats (you said squads now, must have been a typo) & pushups? Then I agree. Because though you still need to push up weight for pushups, it is only about 2/3 of it, since the legs support some weight. And with squats you are still moving all of your weight...But having some extra weight tends to help a bit with bearing the load.
No, he was found as the same exact specimen that rocketed to fame "in the wild", long before he would've been associated with anyone that could afford designer steroids of the day to catalyze such a transformation in a normal tween. He was a natural phenomenon of a combat athlete.
Tyson withered away in prison. His neck never completely came back either. His neck used to be huge. He even had a tick, probably because his neck was so over developed. Even so, Tyson has a big head. However he developed his body his head was always supposed to be that size and I imagine his body naturally should have corresponded to that size of a head. What is nature and what is natural? All boxers develop themselves one way or another. John L Sullivan trained to be strong. I don’t suppose he would have been much good if he didn’t. Is training natural? No, how can it be? Maybe somebody ought to research Tyson’s hat size and find out what weight the dudes with that size hat are.
If he weren't pushed toward being any kind of athlete he would've likely ended up (especially once puberty subsided and his metabolism slowed) as do most guys with his frame & cranial diameter, just that sort of really squat, beefy, fat guy.
