A viral montage shows legendary bodybuilders at their peak, then the worst photo anyone can find from later in life, and blames the difference on steroids. Tony Huge reacts to it frame by frame. His argument is not that steroids are harmless. It is that a before and after picture cannot tell you what caused the change, and that the benefits those men actually received keep getting deleted from the story.
Video: Steroids Ruined These Bodybuilders? Here’s What They Left Out. Published September 21, 2026. Watch on YouTube.
What the video covers
- 00:00 The claim: Peak physique, worst later photo, one explanation.
- 00:25 Arnold Schwarzenegger: The older photo looks like an old man, the third image is not even a bodybuilder, and the question of where Arnold would be without the doors steroids opened.
- 01:06 Paul Dillett: When was the second photo taken, what were his priorities, and why a physique built at peak effort does not survive stopping the effort.
- 02:23 Flex Wheeler: The poster on Tony’s wall at 16, and the kidney disease the montage skips.
- 02:57 Tom Prince: Kidney problems ended his competing, but he described sleeping better, sleep apnea resolving, and his knees improving at a smaller size.
- 03:30 The Superman comparison: Losing an advantage later does not prove the advantage made you worse off.
- 03:53 The controlled testosterone study: About 6 kg of fat-free mass in 10 weeks, with measured strength and size gains.
- 04:14 The risks still count: Serious health problems can occur and stopping does not guarantee full recovery.
- 04:41 Hiding the golden goose: Why retired athletes should acknowledge what enhancement contributed.
- 05:07 Photos are not causation: A montage of hospital beds proves nothing in either direction.
What a photograph cannot tell you
Tony’s first move is to interrogate the images themselves. The Arnold sequence starts with a healthy young Arnold, moves to an older Arnold who, Tony says, looks like what he is, an old man, and then drops in a third image that is not Arnold and not any bodybuilder Tony recognizes. That alone should raise suspicion about the rest of the montage.
With Paul Dillett, the question becomes evidentiary. When was the second photo taken? Was he training for a competition? Had his priorities changed? Without that context, there is no way to know what caused the difference. Tony’s reasoning is that a physique like Dillett’s is the product of daily training, strict dieting, and total focus. Steroids made the extreme version possible, but the maintenance depended on the effort. When the effort stops, as it does for most people once family, alcohol, and normal life take over, the physique goes with it. That is what happens to almost everyone’s college photos, enhanced or not.
Flex Wheeler and Tom Prince get a different treatment because both had documented kidney disease. Tony does not wave that away. He points out that the montage picks the single worst-looking moment of an entire life, and that Prince himself described benefits of being smaller: better sleep, sleep apnea gone, knees that stopped hurting, and continued training. Getting older, in Tony’s telling, tends to shift priorities from carrying maximal muscle toward being comfortable and healthy, and that shift is not evidence of damage.
The Superman comparison
The center of the argument is what Tony calls the Superman comparison. If enhancement helps you build something you could not maintain naturally, and you later lose it, you have not shown the enhancement made you worse than you would otherwise have been. You have shown that an advantage does not last forever. For a period of your life, you got to live inside that physique. Whether it was worth it is a bigger question than how your arms looked afterward.
“You’ve shown that an advantage doesn’t last forever. For a period of your life, you got to experience that physique.”
Tony Huge, 03:36
The advantage itself is measurable, and this is where the video reaches for a controlled trial. Tony cites a testosterone study in which men receiving testosterone and doing resistance training gained about 6 kg of fat-free mass over 10 weeks, alongside measured increases in strength and muscle size. Fat-free mass is not all muscle, he notes, but the size and strength measurements confirm that people are not imagining the benefit. Performance-enhancing drugs are named that way because the enhancement is real.
The costs are real too, and that is not the point
Tony is careful not to argue for safety. Serious health problems can occur. Stopping does not guarantee a complete recovery. The trial that proves the benefit does not prove lifetime safety, and he says so directly. What he objects to is the asymmetry: when everyone is talking about side effects, the benefits disappear from the conversation entirely, as though the advantage never existed.
This leads to what he calls hiding the golden goose. If enhancement contributed to your success, acknowledge it when you tell your story to the next person. You can regret what it cost. You can decide you would not do it again. But explain what you actually got from it, so the listener can understand the decision instead of hearing a career described as if the advantage was never there.
Why the montage fails as evidence
Tony closes by turning the method back on itself. He could assemble a montage of hospital beds and graves and point out that people who never touched steroids also get sick and die. That would tell you nothing about whether steroids raise anyone’s risk, and neither does the original video. Aging does not make enhancement harmless. It does make aging a poor substitute for evidence about what caused a particular person’s condition.
The benefits count even when they are temporary. The opportunities count after retirement. A dramatic later photo does not entitle anyone to delete those parts of a life. If the trade-off is going to be judged, both columns have to be on the table.
Cheat Sheet Pivot
This video is an argument about evidence rather than a compound breakdown, so the practical takeaways are about how Tony reads claims like this one.
- Before accepting a before and after comparison, Tony asks when the second image was taken, what the person was doing at the time, and whether a documented illness is being left out.
- He separates two questions the montage collapses: did the compound cause this outcome, and was the outcome worth it to the person who lived it.
- The benefit side has controlled data behind it. The cited 10-week testosterone trial measured roughly 6 kg of fat-free mass plus strength and size gains against training alone.
- The risk side is real and he does not minimize it: serious health problems can occur and recovery after stopping is not guaranteed.
- When he tells his own story, he expects to name what enhancement contributed, and he holds retired athletes to the same standard.
For the compounds discussed in this and other videos, the Miracle Molecules Cheat Sheet is the reference. For the cardiac side of the risk column specifically, read Steroid Heart Risk: Tony Huge’s Perspective on Cardiac Safety. For another case where a dramatic story got separated from its actual medical facts, see Zyzz Death at 22: Bodybuilding’s Cautionary Tale Revisited.
Where the evidence stops
The video does not claim that steroids were unrelated to Flex Wheeler’s or Tom Prince’s kidney disease, and it does not present evidence on that question either way. It also does not claim steroids are safe long term; Tony states that the cited trial proves benefit, not lifetime safety. The one study referenced is a 10-week trial of testosterone with resistance training, which measures short-term body composition, not decades of health.
What the video establishes is narrower and, Tony would say, more honest: a photograph is not a mechanism, a montage is not a cohort, and any judgment of the trade-off has to include what was gained.
Keep going
Tony’s own approach to putting both columns on the table is to publish his labs, which he explains in The Bloodwork Confession. Every new video gets a companion article, and the tonyhuge.is email list is where they land first. The full archive on steroids, TRT, and the evidence behind them is at tonyhuge.is.