Prep athlete-oriented lecture on steroids set for Thursday, By: Joshua Lindenstein

August 29, 2006

With a new steroids or doping scandal seemingly every week for the past few years, Ryan Hale gets plenty of calls from athletes or parents of athletes wondering about different drugs or supplements.

Many of them had gotten bad information somewhere along the line, whether from television or talk radio or just a well-intentioned coach who didn't have time to research the subject thoroughly.

So Hale, an athletic trainer with the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine, decided to start giving lectures on the subject to set the record straight.

His next one will be at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the At Altitude clothing store at the Flatiron Crossing Mall.

The 90-minute lecture is geared toward high school athletes and their parents but is free and open to the public.

"I thought it would be nice to put everybody in the same room at the same time and tell people what creatine (for example) is so they don't get bad information about it," said Hale, who has given the talk at the University of Northern Colorado and Colorado State in addition to several Colorado high schools.

The lecture will cover the topics of supplements like creatine and protein as well as illegal performance enhancers like steroids and EPO. The talk includes information on chemical composition, how the substances affect the body, the latest research on each one, side effects and different facts and myths. It ends with strategies for maximizing training results through ways other than supplements.

"I really respect people's ability to make a decision with good information," Hale said. "It's really neither a pro or con approach. It's about what the research and science says.

"There's plenty of negative stuff with the illegals that I don't have to put a negative spin on."