Or was that PEDs in general? They don’t all have the same effects. Anabolics versus HGH will have different effects, particularly long-term effects. There are an awful lot of compounds that can help a person improve athletic performance, and they don’t all act the same way. The funny thing is, most people who spend any time trying to improve their physical condition use some form of supplement (creatine, glucosamine, omega-3, various protein forms) and end up with some kind of injury. The two are not necessarily related; training in itself can get you hurt. The injury problem can be exacerbated by congenital defects and prior injury, or some other kind of predisposition.

My point is that there are much simpler ways to explain his injury. The idea I see here a lot is that “steroids” (without any mention of the specifics) make your muscles bigger but don’t do anything for your connective tissues. Of course, you can’t make those muscles bigger without also using your tendons and ligaments and thus training them, and exposing them to immediate injury. If anything, a PED user would suffer an overuse injury to the connective tissue from such a situation, which would heal in a few weeks of off time.

That doesn’t explain Merriman’s problem nearly so well as the reality. He suffered a severe (and extremely common for his vocation) injury and had surgery. Coming back from surgery can take a long time for an athlete (or anyone), and it varies considerably from person to person. Merriman overcompensated for weakness in his knee by using other muscles and the associated connective tissues to perform the same tasks. Those tissues were injured. Big surprise. Now he’s come back, trying to make an impression because he knows this is an important season, and he re-injures an old and recurrent problem in his achillies.

It’s awfully easy to say, “he used steroids and that’s why he’s hurt”, but that doesn’t mean it makes sense. You have to make assumptions about what he used and why it took so long to have an impact that should have been immediate (overuse injuries come from training more than actual use such as football). It makes a lot more sense, though it’s less dramatic, to take a look at the realities of the situation and understand that an athlete at the NFL level coming back from a severe injury will be subject to variable and significant complications, and congenital defects such as a shortened achillies will only impede progress.