Human Growth Hormone Testing for the NFL

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It has long been suspected that the National Football League and its players are using performance enhancing drugs. Steroids and human growth hormone (HGH) is tailored made for the sports as football is about power, strength and speed.

Out of all the major sports leagues, the NFL has the weakest drug policies. NFL Football players are getting, bigger, faster and more powerful everyday and the sport demands players to be aggressive due to the nature of the sport.

In Major League Baseball the sheer amount of players getting caught with HGH leads to the notion that NFL’ers will be just as corrupt. It would be no surprise that a large majority of NFL players would be using HGH. Their sport demands it to be violent. In football, being enormously big and strong is seen as a good thing. In baseball, it’s seen as cause for suspicion.

So if someone uses performance enhancing drugs to get that way in football, it’s not viewed as such a bad thing. If he gets caught, fans are more concerned about when he’ll come back unlike in baseball where it is on front page news.

In a USA today report, nearly 1 in 10 retired National Football League players polled in a confidential survey said they had used now-banned anabolic steroids while still playing.

Sadly, HGH and steroids is almost accepted in that sport because people nowadays almost view it as a requirement rather than a violation. Human growth hormone is considered an anti aging drug as there are two major effects of HGH that are desirable for athletes.

First, HGH promotes the development of new muscle cells. A person’s number of muscle cells is determined by genetics. After puberty, the level of GH a person’s body secretes declines, and muscle cell development ceases. A person can then only work to increase the size of these cells through weight training.

Steroids are different from HGH in that steroids increase the size of muscle cells, mostly through water weight. When a person uses HGH as a performance enhancement drug, they gain only lean muscle mass and by taking HGH and developing new muscle cells, a person can alter their genetic capabilities and achieve results that wouldn’t be possible without HGH treatment.

The second desired effect of HGH treatment is increased energy and metabolism. Both of these are what makes the NFL and incorporating a HGH testing policy could open up a huge can of worms.

NFL owners and the players union are squabbling about in the latest collective bargaining negotiation which includes drug testing for human growth hormone.

Shawn Merriman

HGH tests in the NFL would still involve blood – something the union is against. The NFL spokesman Greg Aiello told The Washington Post, “Our position is that HGH blood testing has advanced to the point where we are taking steps to incorporate it into our program.”

George Atallah, an executive for the union, told The Post: “At this point, there’s no reason to believe that blood-testing for NFL players will or should be implemented. We should instead focus on preserving the drug-testing policy that we have in place.”

Though it’s being incorporated into the labor negotiations, adding HGH testing to the current steroid policy would not have the wait for a new labor deal. It could be implemented next season via a separate agreement.

Steroids and Human growth hormone is the NFL’s dirty little that nobody wants to expose because everyone knows it will hurt the game.

Though HGH is a great anti aging tool for regular people it is not for sports.

Tags: Anti Aging, hgh, HGH treatment, human growh hormone, NFL, NFL Football players, performance enhancing drugs, steroids