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Athletes Performance Enhancing Drugs

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Athletes partaking in performance enhancing drugs is another sport specific risk behaviour to achieve victory. Taking performance enhancing drugs gives an extra edge and is a short cut to good performance. It allows one to perform under any circumstances. In fact, stimulants are the most common types of drugs that are misused. Stimulants reduce tiredness and pain. Further, it increases endurance and explosive power due to the reduction of pain. The earliest reasons for the use of stimulants is because of the restricting barriers to pain. Nevertheless, this causes more injuries as they are pushing their bodies past what they are physically capable of. However, they are not aware of this because at the time the athlete is no responsive to pain. …show more content…

For example, body builders know that the stereotype is to be strong and built big. Hence they use drugs to try and fill that stereotype. Likewise, some athletes may need these drugs to feel like they are doing something more. This is because they want to perform at a level their mind desires, as they may feel like what they are capable of on their own is not good enough. On the other hand, athletes may feel like they have reached top capabilities on their own, and want more so they turn to drugs. In addition, athletes may turn to drugs because of pressure from peers and to fit in with the crowd. If one sees an athlete strive while consuming drugs, then the athlete may want that same performance outcome so they take part in taking drugs as well. All in all, performance-enhancing drugs have many side effects on the athletes and overall they damage the sport due to unfairness (Howe, 2004, …show more content…

With the ideal image the athletes feel like they can achieve victory. Nonetheless our society is pressuring one another to take these endangering risks, as we continue to present the ultimate athletes through the media. Since elite athletes look up to what we see in the media, they put themselves at risks when trying to attain top performance to feel accepted in our society. Athletes may then fall upon using performance enhancing drugs if they are unable to accomplish victory on their own. All in all, these factors are all reasons why taking risks for victory is becoming a social health problem. Our society needs to realize that there is more to sport then just damaging the body to come out on

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