jays52

The main difference between HGH and things like Decca or Winnie is that it mainly affects tendon regeneration. Anabolic steroids increase testosterone production, which leads to faster muscular recovery, not greater hypertrophy like you see in creatine or NO2 type products. However, when you train hard, you also place your tendons under tremendous strain and often a side effect of steroid use is ruptured tendons. When on steroids, your muscles recover in 12-36 hours as opposed to the natural two to five days. This enables athletes or bodybuilders to train twice a day, everyday, and often do a full body workout instead of muscle group specific excersizes of a normal training routine. The thing is, your tendons are also wearing down and not recovering nearly as fast as the skeletal muscle. This leads to weakened tendons and increases one's risk of doing some serious damage. Steroids are actually detrimental to athletes because they compromise true athletic strength.

HGH on the other hand enables the tendons to recover much faster (clearly Rodney's case). This is why you often see body builders or baseball players who wear #25 stacking HGH with Decca during their bulking phases. This would enable Rodney to make it back for a playoff push. It has almost no effect on skeletal muscle hypertrophy and is used almost exclusively to accelerate the recovery of tendon injuries.

Again, these are not things that you take an injection or capsule of and suddenly become superman, they simply enable you to train harder and more frequently.

Pat_Nasty

His level of play will decrease because of his age. The HGH will have nothing to do with it. It didn't help him before, and the lack of it won't hurt him now.

This isn't homerism. This is simply making an informed assessment based on what the medical community has actually discovered about HGH -- and more importantly, what it hasn't discovered, which is any performance benefits for those who don't have a significant HGH deficiency.

As HGH production doesn't start slowing down until your late 50s, Rodney does not qualify.

None of this changes the fact that Harrison believed that he was illegally benefiting from HGH, and took it anyway. In no way does this reduce his culpability for his actions. He is just as blameworthy as if he had actually been aided by it.

I fail to see, though, how not pretending as though HGH has efficacy as a performance enhancer qualifies as being a "homer."

cstjohn17

The homer part comes in because if this was Dwight Freeney I seriously doubt that there would be any attempt to discredit the performance impact of HGH. I don't pretend to know anything about HGH or steroids except that they have a proven ability to allow athletes to bounce back faster or recover faster. This gives them a performance edge, also I a pretty sure there is a reason that HGH is considered a performance enhancer by every sporting agency.

emoney_33

Medical facts are always changing. Just because many believe something TODAY doesn't make it true. New studies can prove other things in the future. As for Freeney, how do YOU know how some people in this thread would react if it were Freeney? You can't possibly know.

aluminum seats

I don't see anyone trying to discredit anything--just looking at what the information is. If it was a player not on the Pats, I suppose I wouldn't be as interested in seeing what the performace drop-off would be.

Jilla

Harrison is a cheater !