ExRx.net

There is this linebacker in the NFL that was a rookie last year, won rookie of the year that plays for the houston texans named Brian Cushing and he recently was suspended for four games due to violating the leagues substance abuse policy. He strongly claimed that he did not use steroids and that he was suffering from what is called overtrained athlete syndrome.

He strongly was fighting his suspension and even got the owner of the texans involved and took him to NYC to talk to the commissioner Roger Goodell and also seek outside medical expertise. I have never seen a player fight a ruling for substance abuse so hard and I am curious to see if there is any information on overtrained athlete syndrome and if anyone on here has any knowledge about it.

Like I said I have never seen someone fight a ruling so vehemently and that makes me think there may be something to this "overtrained athlete syndrome". If anyone has heard anything on this I'd love to hear about it. Thanks.

Interesting.. I don't have any info about Overtraining Athlete Syndrome, but I do know Joe Defranco talks about Cushing a lot on his Facebook page.

Obviously, Defranco trained him prior to his Rookie Season and I think he was back training with Defranco during the Off-Season.

Cliff

Here's some of the only info I have found about the Syndrome.


http://www.rice.edu/~jenky/sports/overtraining.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1756078/ - Just read the Abstract

http://sportsmedicine.about.com/cs/over ... 62499a.htm

Cliff

At a glance, I don't see anything in there to explain why it would cause you to fail a substance abuse test?

I think because the tests don't necessarily detect a substance's presence, but detect abnormal levels of -test, estrogen, red cell counts, whatever- that is considered to be a sign of some kind of abuse. Otherwise, you'd never be able to detect blood doping, say, because you'd just find someone has X amount of red blood cells, everyone has them, so therefore, there is no evidence of an illegal substance.

So there is at least potentially an argument that an inflated level of whatever isn't always caused by taking some kind of performance enhancing drug or a masking agent.

Anyway, that's what I think the argument could be. I haven't been following this at all...

What substance showed positive in his test?

Testosterone levels decrease with overtraining.

Kenny Croxdale