Red Rick said:
I know what insulin does, but how is it beneficial for a rider, i'd sooner think that glucagon would be beneficial.
Maybe he has secretly got diabetes
insulin is what carries glucose into the cell (it will also push amino acids into the cell if they are present in sufficiently large quantity)
insulin’s other major role is to then stimulate the cell to transform this glucose into glycogen (glycogen synthesis)
in the end, the equation is plain simple: the greater your reserves of glycogen, the longer you can ride before getting tired
in Victor Conte’s own words:
<<insulin is used after strenuous training sessions. 3 units immediately after the workout, administered together with intravenous glucose, proteins and creatine because insulin is a “shuttle” for glucose and amino acids to gain entry into the cells. The purpose of that is to replenish the glycogen, and to kick start protein synthesis. >>
also, giving insulin concurrently with nutrients “loads” the cell: it starts swelling like a balloon. its walls are stretched. the cell’s response to that is to increase the thickness of its walls so it can more comfortably accommodate a larger amount of content. now this actual thickening of the wall is stimulated by the mechano growth factor
but insulin has many other effects. several people in the thread were mentioning a synergy with anabolics and growth hormone.
CORTISOL (human body’s natural glucocorticoid)
--reduces cell’s responsivity to insulin (e.g. you can get diabetes as a side-effect of prolonged treatment with oral glucocorticoid tablets)
ANDROGENIC ANABOLICS STEROIDS
--they block the action of cortisol -> preserve cell’s responsivity to insulin -> help insulin do its job better, as it were
--problem with anabolic steroids: there is often a rapid loss of muscle “growth” upon stopping the anabolic treatment. One role of insulin in the body is to prevent the breakdown of protein (and even to synthesise protein if amino acids are present in sufficiently large quantity)-> insulin preserves the new “growth”
GROWTH HORMONE
--increases cell’s responsivity to insulin
--both growth hormone and insulin create a favorable anabolic environment in the cell in their own way -> 2 complementary ways to help the cell grow
(but hgh and insulin are totally opposed as far as lipid, and carbohydrate metabolism are concerned)
(example of the anabolic effects of insulin as a medication: type 2 diabetic patients with badly controlled glycemia and who are not on insulin lose weight. they regain it when they are put on insulin, but then they keep on gaining a little bit more additional weight with continued insulin treatment. that additional weight, a non-negligible portion of which is fat-free mass, is due to the anabolic effects of insulin)
Fetisoff said:
Hypoglycemia leads to an elevation in growth hormone, and insulin causes hypoglycemia. But as far as I know nobody dopes with just insulin, it's used together with roids or HGH
Growth hormone is a stress hormone, so there are a lot of things that lead to an elevation of it (exercise, fear, hunger...) and if it was just for the surge in growth hormone i can think of 1 million things to try before having to inject insulin.
but for a surge of growth hormone i would simply suggest to use growth hormone, really.
Hypoglycaemia is not always very safe to play with. And hypoglycaemia is not what people should be after when they inject insulin. Insulin should always be injected to non-diabetics with plenty of glucose (or glucose + protein + whatever else, as per Victor Conte’s technique above). This technique is called a hyperinsulinemic clamp and it is perfectly safe, it is routinely used in the pharmaceutical industry on new drugs in order to test if they interfere with insulin metabolism.
A typical clamp would be: constant-rate infusion of insulin for 2 hours at 1mu/kg/min + infusion of 20% dextrose at variable rate to maintain the target blood glucose level during these 2 hours. And you can even get a software to make all the calculations for you of how often and how fast you should run the dextrose. The more professional doping doctors will have access to this type of equipment or they will rent it as a one-off to get a baseline for their athlete(s).
Lanark said:
Apparently didn't stop Bjarne Riis in giving his riders insulin (by Jaksche's testimony).
Stefan Matschiner says in his book (page 81) that he always refused to give insulin to his clients, except in cycling, “and even then only after the hardest stages in 3-week long races”.
From the book i get the impression that in general he had concerns about the health risks to his athletes and, because insulin is cheap and easily available, he was scared that they might go buy some and inject it to themselves (he does tell about a few non-cycling clients who always tended to use more of everything than he had told them).
I guess Bjarne Riis is just as concerned for his riders but he has the “benefit” of the experience: he can come along and say “i’ve used insulin and this and that when i was a rider, i didn’t get any side effect from those, so don’t worry”. and probably his riders rely very much on him for that
Talking about Jaksche: he had his big confession just as Alberto Contador was becoming a grand tour winner and around that time german television asked him what he thought of Contador’s win(s) of the tour de France, and his reply was: “that’s some big cinema” (“großes Kino”). So we can also count Jaksche among those who don’t believe in Alberto Contador’s performance
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