Doping has always been a hot topic in the world of mixed martial arts. A sport that was once riddled with PED abuse is nowadays regulated by the US Anti Doping agency. At least as far as the UFC goes. This effectively means it has gotten much harder to cheat – but it’s not impossible. As with any situation where a huge amount of money is on the line competitors are looking to get ahead any way they can.
This is why there’s a lot of scrutiny around fighter’s physiques in particular. So it’s no wonder that fans notice any bodily changes. Changes such as these:
Recently UFC up and comer Khamzat Chimaev got a lot of scrutiny for this picture:
Seeing as how Jon Jones has a troubled history you might be tempted to jump to conclusions. However these two aces are not the only prominent UFC fighters spotted with big stomach bumps.
P2P Champion Kamaru Usman was also noticed with plenty of bumps on his stomach at different times – as did one of the greatest of all time Georges St. Pierre.
But it doesn’t stop there – a proven PED user Vitor Belfort was also spotted in the past with some giant bumps.
So are all these injection spots to facilitate PED use? Not so fast, one doping expert claims. Derek of the infamous More Plates More Dates channel recently shared his opinion on what these bumps are saying:
“This is a fatty deposit, that’s a very slow growing, it’s essentially a benign tumor. This is something that is non carcinogenic, or at least you’d hope. So, as far as I know, the majority of them, if not all of them are essentially benign. And they are just slow growing like fat deposits in the subcutaneous layer. So this is something that is genetic, to some extent as well. I don’t know if it’s diet related, if it’s any, like a lot of it is genetic predisposition at the end of the day. And the reason you can see it in these guys mainly is because they’re so lean. So when you have this mark up here, this mark up here, these bumps all over the f–ing place, it’s a result of your lack of body fat and lack of subcutaneous water to for a lot of these guys doing heavy weight cuts, and you see any sort of abnormalities appear on the surface of the skin or otherwise they would have been shrouded in fat and water. ”
He later continued: “How do you know it’s not HGH and insulin? Reason being is you would never inject your HGH and insulin up here at the top of your stomach – down here is where you would inject the intramuscular is in general, where you would pin oil based compounds…”
“So hypothetically, if you’re trying to avoid doping, you know, you might intramuscular chute your insulin or your HGH or your whatever, depending on the circumstance, sometimes the pharmacokinetic profile will not make it actually clear faster, if you do it intramuscular. Tt kind of depends on the situation. But anyways, like in general, if you pin something intramuscular fat is going to take longer to absorb something. So it’s why you can altered the kind of like half life of a testosterone, for example, if you pinned it into your subcutaneous fat layer, because this is an oil based compound that takes a long time to otherwise, you know, cleave the ester and get fully absorbed into the serum. And when you’re introducing into fat tissue, you’re just making it more difficult for your body to break it down essentially, whereas for you know, water based compounds.”
You can watch the full video below: