It Came from the ‘90s: Bodybuilding Supplements

Some Rambling Thoughts and Reflections on Bodybuilding Supplements of the ‘90s

     I came of age in bodybuilding, so to speak, in the ‘90s.  Oh, I started lifting in the ‘80s when I was a middle-school teenager, mainly to improve my strength and power in martial arts, but it was the early ‘90s when I went from weighing 135 (when I graduated high school) to 220 pounds of (primarily) solid, lean muscle tissue over the course of a handful of years.  If asked at the time what my “secrets” were to gaining so much mass, I probably would have rattled off the usual suspects: hard and heavy training, a massive, copious amount of calories on a daily basis (at one time I was eating between 6,000 to 8,000 calories each day), and the use of good supplements.  But I’m not so sure about that last one anymore.  Indeed, and eventually, at least, there were some good supplements that came out of the ‘90s—or, at the very least, there was one good supplement: creatine.  Overall, however, it was more the wild west of supplementation, with all kinds of pseudo-scientific, not to mention pseudo-effective, supplements being advertised in the pages of the monthly muscle rags—and consumed by a willing bodybuilding public desperate to discover some sort of holy grail of supplementation that could make all of our muscle-building, strength-gaining, fat-loss dreams come true.

     Almost all of the supplements before creatine were pretty much crap, however.

     And yet, I cannot help but look at that decade through a nostalgic lens and a love of all things ‘90s bodybuilding.  Sure, the ‘90s had its degree of really weird stuff—Chris Duffy anyone?—and even weirder supplements, but it will always be the “good ol’ days” for me, even if it really doesn’t feel all that long ago to be “old.”  I have a feeling—no matter the decade or the person—that nostalgia simply can’t be helped when the decade, any decade, is the time when you fall in love with a thing.  And my thing, at that time, was certainly bodybuilding.  (I also have the same sense of nostalgic yearning for the ‘80s when it comes to martial arts.)

     I suppose I must give a word of warning before we continue.  If you’re expecting this to be some sort of historical essay on all of the supplements that came out in the ‘90s, this piece ain’t it.  Rather, this is nothing more than some of my own memories—without doing any research, so I might even be wrong about what supplement was supposed to do what—of the various supplements that I tried back then.  In some ways, if I’m being honest, I’m writing this just to amuse myself, and to see what memories come to the fore as I do so.

     I also suppose that the first time I took supplements was actually in the ‘80s, but I don’t think, at that time, I ever used anything other than a multi-vitamin, perhaps a protein powder, and an occasional foray into one of the “Mega Mass 2000” weight gainers, or something similar.  Weight gainers.  Or more specifically, Joe Weider’s weight gainers.  What a waste.  But the bodybuilding magazines convinced scrawny 16-year old me in 1989 that I really needed them.  That’s the purpose of magazines, bodybuilding magazines maybe particularly: to sell you stuff.  The magazines sell advertising, and the advertising is geared towards readers naive enough to think that all you maybe, just maybe, need to start gaining mass (as if you’re on an array of performance-enhancement drugs, by the way) is the latest mass-gaining supplement with crud such as yohimbe or smilax, and then packed with tons of sugar and plenty of ultra-highly processed ingredients; along with all those calories, of course.  I can’t remember, but I’m pretty sure Weider’s mega mass gainers reached something like 5,000 calories per serving; hence, it became Mega Mass 5000, at that point.  I suppose you were meant to drink those 5,000 calories over the course of a day, but you would have been much better simply eating some good, quality food, then getting whatever other calories you need in homemade protein shakes.  I still don’t think you can go wrong with whole milk, some ice cream, a banana or two, a couple raw eggs, and maybe a tablespoon or two of natural peanut butter as a go-to method of healthy bulking.

     It was probably the early ‘90s when I tried my first pill supplement other than the standard multi-vitamin.  And it was really a “throwback” supplement that had been around for, I’m not entirely sure, maybe decades.  Bob Hoffman’s “weight gaining tablets.”  At least, I think that’s what they were called.  So it in many ways wasn’t even a supplement of the ‘90s—we’ll get around to the first one of those very shortly—but a remnant of the Golden Era of bodybuilding that had, from a historical perspective, at least, been very recent.  But to my young adult mind—I think I was around 18, by this point—an era that was almost in a distant, mythical, Venice Muscle Beach past, a vision of what once was but can never, really, truly be again.  Anyway, I’m not sure if those pills did anything.  Other than make my poop as black as coal or ink, in an almost startling way.  The pills were really nothing more than desiccated liver tablets, with some various B-vitamins thrown in for good measure.  They were probably a decent supplement, especially considering how amazingly cheap they were, but they didn’t make me gain weight.  They would probably be better for me now, in my 50s, than they were for me back then.  In fact, liver might just be a supplement in need of a comeback, but more for health and longevity instead of hypertrophy.

     The perennial question of what came first, the chicken or the egg, is pretty much how I view what came first for me when it came to consuming supplements that first came out in the ‘90s.  So for me the question is what came first, vanadyl sulfate or chromium picolinate?  I don’t know, at what point, these two supplements fell out of use in the bodybuilding world—they were probably relegated to relative obsoleteness by the late ‘90s—but in the early ‘90s, they were all the rage.  And if I have to answer my own question, then I think that answer is chromium picolinate, which I might have also taken as early as 1990.

     Chromium picolinate was, I’m fairly sure, regarded to be a good supplement to regulate insulin.  Somehow, anytime a supplement hits the market that is intended for diabetic use, that supplement finds its way into the hands of, perhaps not scrupulous, but at least willing bodybuilding companies looking to make a buck among those young men—or sometimes not so young—seeking hypertrophy.  And there is probably some truth to this, as insulin is a highly anabolic hormone.  But it seemed as if everytime something new came out it was touted as being “the first supplement that can compete with anabolic steroids” or some such thing, rather than just being promoted as an insulin-controlling substance that might hold a small degree of anabolic promise.  Chromium picolinate was no different.  If I got anything even remotely “anabolic” out of my chromium experimentation, I’m pretty sure that it was nothing more than a placebo effect.  Heck, placebo might be the best way to describe almost the entirety of ‘90s supplements, with a few outliers scattered here and there.

     Then there’s vanadyl sulfate.  I actually, kind of, liked this one.  It was another supplement meant to be a glucose regulator, but if my memory serves me correctly—and it doesn’t always do so, I’ll be the first to admit—it did give you a fuller, seemingly more “total” pump, perhaps due to its ability to shuttle glucose into the muscle cells.  I don’t know.  It also may not have contributed to any more muscle growth, simply a better pump.  The one isn’t always indicative of the other.

     My workout partner throughout much of the ‘90s, Dusty, liked vanadyl sulfate.  He certainly thought it gave him a better pump, and he was pretty sure that “da pump” was the key to muscle growth.  Whether it is or it isn’t may be up for debate, but we certainly both believed it at the time.  Or, at the least, we thought it was one of the driving factors to more muscle growth.

     Dusty and I tended to try supplements together, so we could see how they worked for both of us, and not just one.  Sometime during this whole vanadyl sulfate craze—it was the supplement at one time, if the advertisements in the magazines were any indication—another supplement came out that promised to be the next big thing, and one that Dusty and I were incredibly eager to try once we came upon all the glossy advertisements: colostrum.

     The other day, I saw an advertisement online for colostrum as a muscle-growth supplement, so apparently this one is still around, or has made something of a comeback.  It’s another one, however, that I would place somewhere between little-to-no difference to downright worthless.  But Dusty and I didn’t think that way at the time.  Nope.  All the muscle rags advertised it ad nauseam, and assured us that it would be the one supplement finally capable of producing truly steroid-like gains.

     For those of you who don’t know—and Dusty and I certainly didn’t know when we first started taking it—colostrum is a fluid packed with all sorts of growth-inducing nutrients produced by female mammals just after they give birth, humans included.  The ones sold by the supplement companies contained bovine colostrum; still do, I suppose.  When Dusty did discover this, he became somewhat incensed that colostrum was simply nothing more than the milk of lactating cows.  But then he realized something that came to him as an epiphany: his grandfather had a cow—he lived with his grandparents on a small farm in west Alabama—who had just given birth.  So he decided, wise young bodybuilder that he was, that we could save money on buying colostrum supplements if he simply milked that cow.  Which he did.

     As long as I shall live, until I take my final breath, I will never forget the gag-inducing experience of attempting to drink a glass of fresh, raw, lactating cow milk from a new cow mother.  Gross doesn’t even begin to describe it.  In fact, I don’t know if there are words that can describe it.  “I think I’ll stick with the colostrum pills,” I told my training partner.  Somehow, however, he managed to drink most of a glass, and then proudly told me, “Hell, I’d eat cow turds if they were anabolic.”  Sadly, or perhaps humorously looking back on it, he was most likely telling the truth.

     In the years after, he and I would laugh each time we thought of that raw milk.  He was always proud that he managed to actually drink most of what he milked.  I miss my dear, beloved friend.

     Before we get around to the one supplement to rule them all, creatine, let me just mention a few supplements that were popular at the time, but that I never really tried, or didn’t try enough to be able to give an accurate answer on whether or not they worked.  However, I must note that I’m pretty sure the answer to whether or not these supplements were actually good would be a rather emphatic no!

     Hot Stuff was one.  If you opened up any bodybuilding magazine in the ‘90s, then you know exactly the supplement I’m talking about.  Apparently, as I just did a cursory search on the internet, they still make and sell this stuff.  It was supposed to be some kind of testosterone “potentiator”—whatever the hell that means—but I think it was mainly just filled with whatever were the supplements-of-the-day.  I believe at one time it had some of our aforementioned supplements within it—chromium picolinate and vanadyl sulfate—along with crap such as ginseng, yerba mate, gamma oryzanol, and various plant sterols.  Plant sterols, in general, it must be said, had been a popular supplement for perhaps a decade.  Whether they worked is a different question.  The answer, not surprisingly, is, again, probably no.  Anyway, I bought one container of Hot Stuff at one time, and it tasted pretty, well, terrible, so I gave it up since I didn’t want anything that might bring back raw, colostrum-milk induced nightmares.  If memory serves me well, it seemed to have an odd, sour, almost vomit-like taste to it because of all the crud that was in it, and no amount of flavoring—banana, chocolate, vanilla, or otherwise—could hide its rather rancid flavor.

     No essay on ‘90s bodybuilding supplements would be complete without mentioning the first bodybuilding “kit” (that went on to inspire a slew of imitators): the “Cybergenics Total Bodybuilding System.”  Although it wasn’t really a supplement per se, but was, rather, a host of supplements that you “stacked” together, along with a detailed training plan and nutritional regimen.  It was also the supplement that popularized before and after pictures.  The bodybuilding magazines of the day were filled with dramatic transformations of all the various Cybergenics users.  And, although I have a feeling there wasn’t anything really “good” in the kit, at least nothing more than what you would get out of taking a protein powder and a good multivitamin, Cybergenics was effective for a great many people because, if you actually followed the system, you were lifting weights brutally hard, doing plenty of fasted cardio, and eating like a pre-contest bodybuilder.  Whether or not you needed to pay $150 for a kit instead of just doing those things on your own is another matter.

     Now we come to, at last, the penultimate bodybuilding supplement of the ‘90s, perhaps the penultimate supplement of all time.  Creatine monohydrate.  I don’t think there’s any other supplement (we’ll leave aside protein powders as they are truly just supplemental food choices) that has lasted as long, and has been so effective for so many people, as creatine.  To this day, it seems as if there are constantly new studies coming out showing a slew of benefits to creatine aside from just muscle-building.  But we’ll stick with the muscle-building benefits for this essay.

     I haven’t used creatine in a long time, although perhaps I should, as I just read a study showing how good it might potentially be for mental health.  The last time I took creatine with the hopes of gaining performance benefits from it was around 20 years ago when I was powerlifting.  I stopped because, though it was causing me to gain muscle, it wasn’t causing me to get stronger, so, seeing as how I was attempting to stay in a weight class, I decided it wasn’t a good supplement for strength athletes who were not trying to get bigger.

     I think this is because creatine is best for “cellular volumization,” at least, that’s how its benefits were touted in the ‘90s, and I believe that’s pretty much still correct.  In the ‘90s, it was recommended that you “load” the creatine, by taking 5 to 10 grams of it 4 to 5 times daily for a week or so, usually with a “high-glycemic” beverage.  After this loading phase, you then would just consume a few grams of it once-per-day. For some reason, grape juice seemed to be the creatine beverage of choice, so 4 times-per-day, I’d consume 5 to 10 grams of it mixed in the juice.  And it worked.  The first time I tried it, it was as if I was experiencing “newbie” gains all over again.  It must be noted, however, that some lifters and bodybuilders, for whatever reason, didn’t seem to get much gains out of it.

     I saw a video the other day “debunking” the need to load creatine, so maybe the advice we read about in the ‘90s wasn’t all that accurate.  Then again, it was effective for me at the time.  If I was to use it again, then I’d probably load it the same way I did back then, current evidence to the contrary be damned.

     Before we end these musings, I must admit that I haven’t touched upon some of the “diet” or “energy” supplements that were around in the decade—Ripped Fuel, I’m looking at you—but I thought I’d save that, and a few other reflections for a piece on ‘90s fat loss, as it deserves an essay all it’s own, assuming there may be interest in more of my rambling ponderings on all things ‘90s bodybuilding.

     As I finish writing this, I can’t help thinking of my friend Dusty.  I could probably do a whole series on our ‘90s bodybuilding misadventures, when we discovered that the sport (or beauty contest, what have you) we loved so dearly was filled with a seedy, dark side that, once seen, simply couldn’t be dismissed.  But if I don’t get around to writing that, I hope he’s looking down upon me as I type these words—perhaps, his presence is even here with me in my study—and grinning at all the memories of our times together.  Dusty, this glass of lactating milk meant for a newborn calf is for you.

If you wish to read more “It Came from the ‘90s” pieces, here’s a few of them I’ve written over the years:

Roger Stewart’s Wild and Crazy Diet

The Warrior Diet

Dinosaur Training

The Anabolic Diet

Big Beyond Belief, HIT, Phil Hernon, and Other Things from the ‘90s