The Rock's Never Said He's on Steroids, but Let's Just Use Our Eyes for a Second

There's a lot of hullabaloo surrounding performance enhancing drugs, which is understandably a problem in competitive sports that have certain reputations to uphold and maintain. The idea of an athlete wanting to "naturally" compete and only win a contest or gain an advantage through old-school hard work gives many people pause.

But the "steroids debate" extends well beyond the world of sports and is often-geared towards stars like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.

Personally speaking (and this is just my opinion, I'm not a medical doctor or qualified expert on the matter), I think it's possible that The Rock has been juicing for a very long time and continues to do so as he gets older. His results are absolutely wild, and as a great meme puts it: Only The Rock can make the Rock look small.

Seriously, just take a look at these photos. The first was from the WWE in around 1998 and the other is from 2021. Dwayne Johnson was born in 1972. Let that sink in.

OK, I know what you're thinking. Well he hasn't really changed that much in size, he just got more cut up, is dieting better, doesn't take days off, is consistently going to the gym, and he's eating lean protein and slow-burning carbs with plenty of veggies every two to three hours.

Yes, I hear everything that you're saying. But I also want to submit some other photographic evidence of the pro-bodybuilder-esque physique The Rock's forging for Black Adam.

One of the biggest "open secrets" in athletics, professional wrestling, and Hollywood is steroid use. I've worked out with guys who were "on" and "off" cycle. Heck, I messed around with growth hormone and anavar in the past before myself. And while my body dysmorphia didn't really allow me to see how much size and definition I gained, when I look back at photos from that time period I realize just how much it helped. MAN did it help.

So if you're an actor who needs to look a certain way to start filming in three to four months, you're not going to get a six pack overnight. What you can do is put yourself on an extremely restrictive diet, get a ton of cardio in, and focus on "glamour muscle" workouts that'll help you pop on the screen. Then, on the day of said shirtless scene you need to get as dehydrated as possible and pump yourself up in between takes.

But even all of that won't give you a redoubtable physique that is "superhuman" because we're contracting mortals to literally portray mighty gods and comic book creations. Considering the fact that The Rock was involved in sports, pro-wrestling, and now the highest levels of Hollywood, and he's sporting a similar kind of body that people who literally just work out for a living, it's not without the realm of possibility to think that he's on steroids.

Steroids are often painted as the big bad boogeyman of the sporting world with horror stories about people misusing them with disastrous results. However, there are also plenty of people who do 'roid up and they do it "the right way." In fact, there's a number of pro-wrestlers who famously admitted to juicing and while some regret the obsession, others think that there is a safe way to do it.

Jose Canseco even delineated how to get a doctor to prescribe you steroids, and if you have the money, as The Rock does, have a doctor to regularly check your blood work and testosterone levels and endocrine system to ensure you aren't doing permanent damage to your ability to produce hormones or your organs' ability to function.

The Rock can also afford "pharma grade" steroids: testosterone and growth hormone mixed with some other medications in order to create a delicate biological balancing act that allows him to work even harder than he already does. That's the thing: Steroids are a "shortcut" to a better body, but in order to get the kinds of results that massively defined and muscular individuals attain, then you're going to need to work out hard. Which The Rock does.

So is Dwayne Johnson on steroids? If he is, he can definitely afford to do it "safely" — like so many have argued is possible in the past — and he seems to be doing a great job of making it work for him to fulfill the kind of life he wants so far. Plus, it's not like he's competing in the Olympics: just entertaining a bunch of people in movies and TV shows.

And if that upsets you, then I've got some bad news about the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.