In the intervening 8 years or so if anything he pace of premature pro bodybuilder deaths has picked up the pace and they just seem to drop like flies in their 30’s, 40’s and 50’s with major organ failure leading the pack as a cause of death.
Has any work been done in the intervening years that sheds more light on what exactly in their lifestyle is killing them? HGH? Steroids? Huge weight cycling up and down? Carrying and supporting 50-100 lbs of extra muscle mass?
It’s mostly due to the drugs.
Steroids can cause cardiomyopathy and other vascular problems, promote certain cancers, and can also damage the liver, and diuretics wreck the kidneys. All the other supplements (including stimulants to increase workout endurance) probably aren’t real great for the user either.
But difference in weight was not that much either, the discus throwers were only 207lbs on average. That is slightly more than the average population, 196lbs, but not lots more. I don’t know what the average weight of the weightlifters in the OP is, but I imagine it is much more than 207lbs,
If body-mass is a factor I can imagine it could increase exponentially once you get into drastically large body weights.
That said, it pretty well documented that weightlifters take a lot of performance enhancing drugs, so it seems like would be significant factor in any reduction in life expectancy.
Plus of course, a lot of well publicized deaths does not necessarily mean they are more likely to die (as witnessed by the tabloid attempts to claim there is a curse of X, simply because a couple of people associated with X passed away at apparently young age).
And it would be a reasonable speculation, as would be that there is some amount of muscle mass above that increases life expectancy (and/or disability free years) overall holding everything else constant and some that decreases it.
It’s just a hard question to give a GQ level answer to as the real world has selection bias of who does what based both on biology and psychology and what else they do.
It’s not just anabolic steroids - human growth hormone, which was mentioned, can cause excessive growth of the abdominal viscera, diuretics, insulin, crash dieting up and down, extremely low-carb diets, dehydration. Preparing for a bodybuilding competition is not a healthy lifestyle. Tom Platz once said that he looked his best when he felt his worst.
One other issue - if you recall the long-ago (not long ago?) “liquid protein diet” was all the rage in Hollywood and one side effect was heart problems… and crash diet risks heart problems…
When your body goes into starvation mode, one thing it does is “eat” muscle mass; since resting muscle mass consumes calories, so a survival strategy during starvation is to rid the body of as much muscle mass as possible. heart muscle does not seem to be immune from this.
To get that “ripped” look, where veins pop out and every muscle is sharply defined, body builders use diet to bring their body fat percent to almost zero, particularly the nice soft layer under the skin covering up and smoothing the muscle. Monkeying with body composition like this cannot be healthy, not to mention weird diets, steroids, dehydration, etc. What doesn’t put a load on the heart likely puts a load on kidneys, liver, messes with insulin production, etc.
Didn’t Governor Ah-nold have serious heart surgery a few years ago?
The drugs. The early deaths before the age of 50 is a pretty good indication. Even if the extra body weight were taxing the heart it’s not going to have that many people keeling over so young.
Arnold had elective surgery to correct a bicuspid aortic valve, which is a congenital defect and not the result of his steroid use. As a result of the surgery he had to give up lifting the heavily serious weights that he used to lift and that’s why he’s no longer as beefed up as he used to be. He still works out daily though, riding a bike in the morning for cardio and lifting lighter but still pretty damn heavy weights in the evening. He does both of these religiously, even when traveling.