In fact, although not widely admitted, the sports supplement industry today is somewhat of a spin-off of the anabolic steroid movement of the latter part of the 21st century. This of course began with testosterone, which was first introduced in the early 1950’s as a performance enhancement agent. Believe it or not... the use of plain old straight testosterone started it all... and would help trigger the rapid development of anabolic steroids. It was the former Soviet Union that was actually the first to widely use testosterone for enhancing athletic performance, which is evident due to their dominance of Olympic Sports during the 1950’s and 1960’s. This secret abuse was uncovered by a U.S. Doctor by the name of John Ziegler. It was in an effort to regain U.S. athletic dominance in the Olympics that Dr. Ziegler teamed up with CIBA Labs to develop Dianabol® (D-BOL) in 1956. Although it was the first oral steroid, it is still probably the most popular to this day. Needless to say, the U.S. easily regained its athletic dominance! By 1964, the vast majority of other steroids were all invented including Anadrol®, Deca, Winstrol®, Primobolan®, all the Testosterones and Anavar®. Today, anabolic steroids are widely used by athletes and bodybuilders in all demographics as performance enhancers.

Anabolic steroids are compounds widely believed to possess the greatest potential for increasing muscle growth and performance in bodybuilders and athletes. This incredible muscle building effect, and the subsequent value created for bodybuilders and athletes, has incited huge demand for them. This demand, of course, is the reason why the highly lucrative black-market steroid trade exists today! It is all about the basic principle of supply and demand. During the last century, a growing number of health conscious entrepreneur has sought to capture some of this "illegal" demand and divert it to a legal business model, in hopes of course, to deliver the same muscle building effects of the steroids in the process. Basically, if companies could create legal products that would in some way effectively supply this incredibly high demand that the steroids had created for enhanced physical performance, high profits would surely abound... and that is exactly what happened! The pure need for athletic dominance has thrust the sports supplement industry to the mainstream.