The craving to look good and perform better: Be careful of supplements

We live in a world where the need for instant gratification is rife, and the desire for validation is ever so increasing.

Google and social media have made information available at the click of a button, and the rise of Instagram and TikTok have made teenagers do some crazy things to get hearts, likes and shares.

The desire to be someone special or famous can push some teenagers to the point of depression and behaviours outside the norm. 

How do you think a young teenager would feel and react after showing the world, or at least her followers, a fitness dance routine, and she gets comments that her bum is too big for the cellphone screen?

What happens when a teenager decides to post a rugby training video of himself and suddenly receives cyber bullying from anonymous pupils from his school?

Children and teenagers are not taught in schools or at home to manage and process these attacks have on their self-image. 

As a parent, you could be saying right now that your child will not be allowed to use these platforms, but you are wrong. 

Not due to good genetics

You cannot be with them every hour of the day, and if they don’t have an account, they are browsing through their friends’ phones and being exposed to Instagram’s “unattainable” physiques and chiselled rock-hard bodies.

The sad part is that most of these bodies are not due to good genetics but rather filters, cosmetic surgery, and steroids. 

Your sporting child wants to look like his or her hero, but as he or she starts their training journey, they will fight the urge for a quick fix and after the many hours of hard training and eating chicken breasts and eggs, will get frustrated with themselves.  

Even after all the good nutrition he or she has been dedicated to, your child will start to gravitate towards protein shakes, fat burners, creatine, and anything else they are coerced in to buying in the supplement aisle at your local pharmacy.

Your child will start to see small gains but nothing that of what were imagined or expected. 

Most teenagers take supplements because they want to change their aesthetics. 

Few seek expert advice and assess and analyse what their bodies are missing from a nutrition and recovery standpoint.

Taking a supplement for performance is a tricky topic, and even though creatine can help with performance and recovery, factors such as age, quantity, body type, and sport, need to be considered, or your child runs the risk of liver and kidney damage.

Therefore a sports nutritionist has to be consulted rather than getting advice from your local personal trainer, who more than likely has done a few chapters on nutrition but by no means is an expert in the field. 

When your children realise that supplements are not giving them the desired physical gains that were falsely advertised, they will start to google and ask similar “supplementing” friends what they are using.

This begins the journey of experimentation with harder, banned performance drugs.

If your son finds out that members of the senior rugby team are using a banned substance, he will rationalise taking the drug based on the external appearance of the person taking the drugs.

He might justify that it is safe to use if he looks good outside, irrespective of the warning labels. 

Quick and fast gains

Gains start to come quick and fast but so do the side effects. Increased acne, headaches, violent mood swings, dizziness, difficulty sleeping, increased anxiety, shrinking of testes, concentration problems, depression, and increased breast tissue growth are some of the side effects of steroids.

It will become harder to give up the steroid abuse once the journey has started, and the minute there is any harsh side effect, that will lead to a change in dosage of steroids or additional drugs added to help with the side effects. 

It’s not to say this is the typical life cycle for everyone.

There are a variety of factors such as your personality type, the environment you grow up in, types of friends you hang around with, and sporting pressure to play first-team or win at all costs in a prestigious rugby league. 

Injectables

The next level of abusing steroids leads to injectables. This is when he might start injecting steroids directly into the various muscles to bypass the digestive system. 

This may lead to hardcore addiction because the problem with steroids is that the minute you stop taking it, you will revert to your typical body type but run the risk of being left with excess muscle, which will turn to fat if your diet and nutrition are not up to scratch.

No child would want to be seen as small or inferior in size and this fear drives continued behaviour. 

Parents must communicate the dangers of steroids, watch for side effects, teach them to delay gratitude and that gains come through hard work, there are no shortcuts in life. 

If you have a higher-performing child, seek professional and expert advice, especially in the supplement department.