“A Faustian bargain with the Devil” – George Lynch confesses to using steroids

DOKKEN guitarist George Lynch has confessed to using steroids.

Speaking on the Full In Bloom podcast, the 68-year-old axeman says he took up performance-enhancing drugs for several years while competing in bodybuilding competitions.

“The things that were required, that I got into in bodybuilding, were worse for my health than anything I’d ever done in rock’n’roll,” Lynch said.

Asked if he used steroids, Lynch answered: “Oh yeah, absolutely.

“Nobody gets looking like that naturally … it’s very, very common. You really can’t compete without doing it. 

“It’s really disingenuous. Call it sport in quotes. It’s really a drug contest. 

“That’s why it kinda miffs me every time I see any kind of documentary or any article of something about bodybuilders. 

“The first think I look for, ‘are they talking about the elephant in the room’. No, very rarely.”

Lynch says he became involved in bodybuilding to spend more time with his sons, who were competing.

Asked about the impact of using performance enhancing drugs, Lynch says: “First of all, there’s all kinds of levels of steroids.

“The football, go to beach and bars level of doing this and that.

“Just to get an advantage, look good for the girls, impress their friends, beef up for football and that kind of stuff.

“Then there’s the next level, which is staying on these cycles for extended periods of time, doing multiple cycles and stacking and stuff.

“Stacking means adding different steroids on top of each other to get complementary effects, compound effects.

“Then you go to another level which means you add in the growth. Growth is a whole other level. Any time you see these pro guys, they’re taking growth as well.

“Growth is a completely different animal and it will get you into freak zone. It will strip away fat and you’ll put on muscle like crazy. Of course you still have to work out, you still have to diet.

“But you can’t get these freak bodies or even these admirable looking physiques without doing some kind of cheating. 

“And you pay the price for all cheating.

“There’s just no free ride. You’d going to get some advantages, you’re going to feel great, you’re going to look great, you’re going to be awesome and then you’re going to pay for it. It’s a Faustian bargain with the devil.

“I never went into Growth or insulin or IGF-1 or anything like that, pro-level stuff.

“But I did some serious cycles. I’d say I was sort of in the middle bracket for a while, for a good number of years.

“What that can do to you is you end up having cardiovascular and heart problems develop, definitely joint problems.

“What you’re doing is you’re building more muscle fibre than your joints and your tendons can naturally deal with because of the design of your particular body.

“We all have a homeostasis point, the set point where our bodies want to be at ideally, just naturally, cellular level.

“And you keep tricking that to get an advantage, you’re going to pay for that some other way. There’s always a week link there, that weak link will pay.

“There’s a lot of different things that can develop because of that later in life.

Asked if he suffered from heart or join pain, Lynch answered: “Yeah, both.

“I manage everything pretty well because I do a … I’m not saying I am a purist but I do a pretty close to a whole food, organic, plant-based diet, which has been proven to reverse heart disease.

“I do low inflammation eating so I can reduce the pain and inflammation in my joints and I’ve successfully addressed that issue to a very large part just by doing that.

“Continuing to work out .. I do more cardio and low-impact stuff. I still do weight training, just not anything that’s damaging. I still want to put stress own my muscles and I want them to at least not atrophy as I get older.

“I do drink. I average about a drink a day. Again, everything’s in moderation.”