Lusardi preaches the dangers of steroids, By: Bob Decker
04/08/2007
Owner of health and training center says big muscles fast is a ‘powerful lure’ for youths
With all the news about testing as being a means to discourage drug use - especially illegal steroids - among young athletes today, Tony Lusardi stands firm on education being more important than testing.
Lusardi, 49, has co-owned Lusardi’s Health and Training Center in downtown Rockaway with his brother Joe, the head football coach at Randolph High School, since 1982 and the brothers do everything they can to maintain their “clean and natural” reputation at the gym.
Lusardi has also spent the last two years at Morris Hills, from where he was graduated in 1976, as the high school’s health and conditioning coach an an assistant football coach.
Lusardi feels that the threat of testing doesn’t stop people from using, it just makes them smarter as they find ways to avoid testing.
“If an individual is using and knows he is going to be tested at a certain event, he or she may not enter that competition,” Lusardi says. “Or they might withdraw their application from a job ... or they just don’t show up ... or - and this is becoming more and more common - they’ll find a way to beat the test.
“If users want something badly enough, they’ll find a way to get around testing. Even in the Olympics, where they use a very sophisticated form of testing, athletes can still beat the system.
“That’s why education is so important ... if we get to them while they are young, hopefully it will get stuck in their brain.”
One of the things the Lusardis and their kind are up against is the pure and simple fact that steroids work ... they do as advertised.
Users get bigger and stronger quicker than if they did it the natural way, with hard work, a good work schedule and proper diet.
“These kids see themselves in the mirror,” Lusardi says. “They see themselves getting bigger and they know they are lifting heavier and heavier weights.
“And nothing scares them because they are the strongest they have ever been and they feel as if nothing can touch them ... nothing.”
It is Lusardi’s contention that education will show these users that there are many reasons to be scared of steroid abuse.
Cancer Risk
“Steroids help make muscles grow, true, but they also cause a lot of other things in the body to grow, too ... things you don’t want to grow” Lusardi begins. “Cancer cells can grow from steroid use ... that’s what killed former pro football player Lyle Alzado, who died from brain cancer.
“Different drugs do different things to the body. One of the main themes I use when I talk to young athletes is on how drugs disrupt your body’s chemistry.
“We have a blueprint of our body and what our body needs and drugs can destroy that blueprint.
“We have a specific amount of testosterone in our bodies, for instance, and when drugs alter that level, the body gets a different signal and the glands that promote hormone production don’t have to work as hard or, in some cases, don’t have to work at all.
“Once you go off the drug, there is a strong possibility that these hormone producing glands may not come back to their full function ... and that causes more problems.
Healing Process
“It’s like when you break an arm and have to put it into a cast, meaning your arm doesn’t move around during the healing process.
“When the cast comes off, your muscle has atrophied and you have to work on it to get it back to normal.”
Lusardi has been fighting against drug use in one way or another since his power-lifting days after he got out of college.
“I had college football teammates come back to school bigger and stronger and didn’t think anything of it ... I just figured they worked out harder than I did over the summer,” Lusardi says. “That’s how naive I was a that time.
“It’s a powerful lure, this getting bigger and stronger quicker. But I tell my kids I can get you there better and safer ... I tell them we can kick butt doing it the natural way.
“But I’m also telling them at the same time that it is going to take a lot of hard work and dedication and proper diet. I also tell them it’s going to take longer.
“I give them both sides of the story, something the steroid or drug salesman doesn’t do.”
Lusardi tells the boys that they will develop breast tissue and that their testicles will shrink. He tells the girls that their breast tissue will shrink, they will develop facial hair and their voices could deepen.
“I have a video that I have been using since 1984 that will tells them the same thing,” Lusardi says. “The kids laugh a little when the sexual changes that are mentioned, but I want that ... because then I tell them that it’s not as funny when it happens to them.”
Lusardi says these are the main physical changes that occur in steroid abuse, but he also adds that by the time these changes surface, “it might be too late and the changes are irreversible.
“Sometimes it takes reconstructive surgery to undo these changes.
“For extra muscle and an extra 100 pounds on the bar, the consequences can be freakish.”
Lusardi reads where area coaches have said they want their athletes to do their weight training at the school under supervision of the school’s coaching staff.
Even though there is a possibility that this could hurt business at his and his brother’s gym, he tends to agree with these coaches but adds that “they have to also make sure their kids are being educated about the downside of steroid abuse at the same time.
“We have to learn to recognize what changes come into play when people use steroids,” Lusardi continues. “It’s not just the bigger muscles or the ability to lift heavier weights and otherphysical changes, it’s the psychological changes, too.
“And it’s not only teacher and parents who have to learn to recognize these changes, either. What about the young girl who is dating a steroid abuser ... what if she is with him when he has one of his mood swings or erupts into a ‘roid rage? She has to know what is going on so she can take care of herself.
“What a lot of people don’t know about steroid users is that a lot of them are unstable already and taking steroids leads to them being even more unstable.”
When Lusardi was still power lifting in the early years that he and his brother were operating their training center, a man came up to him after a competition and told him he could make him a better competitor.
“After coaching and teaching everybody, I was flattered to find out there someone who was going to coach and teach me,” Lusardi says. “I made an appointment to meet with him at our gym one day to see what he had to say.
“The guy shows up in a nice suit with a nice leather briefcase - very professional looking - and he comes into my office and sits across the desk from me.
“He started out by telling me how he was glad I was going to allow him to help me and then he opens his briefcase.
“It was full of bottles, vials and syringes ... I slammed the case shut and told him to get out and that I never wanted him to even speak to me again.
“We were new in the business at that time and the first thing I was afraid of was that somebody saw us. Luckily, the few people we had in the gym at that hour didn’t notice anything.
“I’m sure he would have loved to have got his hooks into me because then I’m sure he figured he’d have free reign with my customers, too.”
Years later, a muscular looking man enrolled at the gym and began working out on a regular basis.
Phone Calls
Lusardi watched him at first to see if he needed any help but soon realized the guy knew what he was doing with weights and the machines.
“Soon after, I started getting phone calls wanting to know if the guy was in the gym,” Lusardi recalls. “When he was there, he’d get a visit and the two would go into the locker room for a couple of minutes and then the guy would go back to working out and the other guy would leave.
“We couldn’t prove anything but we suspected everything and finally we just asked the guy to leave and not come back. He didn’t say anything ... but he didn’t come back, either.
“We have a lot of young kids here and you work at getting their trust and getting the trust of their parents. So you’d rather be safe than sorry.”
Lusardi says he doesn’t think he will ever stop talking to young athletes about things that can destroy their bodies.
“What we promote to a kid at 15 we hope he is still using when he turns 50,” Lusardi says. “We want to teach them how to improve their body when they are young and take care of it when they get older.
“We hope that some of the exercises they are doing today will become a life-long activity.
“Drugs are the complete opposite of what we teach ... and we need the kids to know that.”
