Christine Marie LeMaster Fitness Model, Bikini Model

By: Maia Appleby

First, it speeds up your metabolism of fat. By this, I indirectly mean that your body becomes more efficient at burning calories. Picture two cars in a race. Car A is small in frame, but it has a huge engine. Car B is very large and heavy and has a very small engine. Which one do you think will go ten miles in the shortest amount of time? Your muscle mass is your engine, and the larger it is in proportion to your frame, the more efficient a machine you become.

Balancing Your Body

When you build muscle mass, your muscles actually gobble up calories from your food in order to maintain themselves. This leaves fewer excess calories lying around, turning into fat. In fact, if you lower your calorie intake just a little bit, your new muscle mass will eat up some of your body fat. There's a delicate balance that you need to strike here, though, because if you cut your caloric intake too dramatically, your muscles will shrink and your body might feel threatened by starvation and begin to store extra fat, as a precaution.

Use or Lose

The edge. In elite competition, it's the difference between first and fifth place. In the gym, it's the difference between 8 reps and 10 reps with the same weight. In the real world, it can be the difference between merely looking "fit" and looking hyper-muscular and lean.

Battlefield warriors, the ancestors of modern athletes, were some of the first to use performance-enhancing substances to get the edge over their enemies. The gladiators of Greece would take potentially lethal stimulants such as strychnine before entering the arena. Norse warriors known as Berserkers would ingest psychoactive compounds and rage into battle in a bloodletting trance.

The use of performance-enhancing substances is as long as the history of sport itself. Cyclists in the 1800's used something they called trimethyl  which, believe it or not, was a combination of alcohol, strychnine, heroin, caffeine, and cocaine and sometimes died from it. In the 1930's, amphetamines became widely popular. In fact, heroin and cocaine were openly used in sports until they were first classified as prescription drugs and later as illicit substances.

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Gustavo Badell pictures, from two weeks out from the Iron Man Pro at 259 pounds.