• Leading trainer Dean Weiss admits he once used steroids
• He says the lows, including low sex drive and depression, which come with taking testosterone convinced him to quit
• With brutal candour he admits ‘I know some blokes who are so dependent on drugs, they can’t stop because they know they’ll crash if they do’
• The leading personal trainer has been clean for several years
• He now runs Cutting Edge Performance, seen as one of the fastest growing PT businesses in Queensland
• Dean Weiss and his clients regularly take part in the National Natural Body Building Championships 

Dean Weiss is quickly building a reputation as one of Australia’s leading personal trainers, and it’s a world away from the dark days of steroid abuse.

Weiss, 30, readily admits he ‘crashed and burned’ on illegal substances a few years ago and his advice to teenage boys wanting to ‘get on the gear’ is to ‘forget it, there’s no quick fix and it’s not worth it’.

He told Daily Mail Australia his story of trying body-building drugs and how damaging the experience actually was and his fears for the new generation of young gym junkies.

 Dean pictured with competitors he trained for the recent International Natural Bodybuilding Association competition held in Brisbane

‘I’ve been training since I was about 17 and was in mining when I started (using),’ he admitted.

‘It was before I knew what I was doing, I thought that (taking steroids) was the answer, the people I was hanging around at the time, they did it and they were telling me how good it was and so I gave it a go.

‘But I just didn’t get the results, there were massive highs but then terrible lows, you’d crash and burn.’

The burgeoning business of illicit performance enhancing substances led to more than 10,000 detections by Customs in the 2012-13 year – a record number – double those of Ecstasy and five times more than cocaine seizures.

Dean calls himself a Body Transformation Specialist and hopes to keep spreading the message of hard work and good nutrition, taking teams to natural body-building events as proof it works .. but he fears the new generation of gym junkies are doing themselves harm.

‘The problem for these kids, 18, 19 or in the early 20s, is they see all the images out of America and all the pros, who live on steroids, and they want to get like that, quickly,’ Weiss said.

You’ve got to ask though, are they gonna crash out in 10 years. What’s gonna be the state of the body and the state of mind, if they have been cheating.’

But worse still, he said, is the affect it can have on sex drive.

‘Look, fact is, when you are on it (a cycle), you have so much testosterone in your system, it isn’t a problem but when you come off it, it’s not the same, it’s a lot harder to sustain anything or even feel like it (sex), you could say it’s a bit of a problem,’ he said.

‘And that’s when a lot of the guys just stay on it, you get sick of not maintaining normality, so they choose never to get off the drugs – it’s like any other addiction.

‘Like a junkie, you can’t function a normal life.

‘The thing is, you are judged if you are a heroin junkie, many see it as disgusting whereas if it is steroids you’re using people are a lot less likely to judge, but the fact is they are both Class A drugs, they are both considered as serious as each other by authorities.

‘All those substances are so foreign to your body, and the part of the brain which controls the hormones and endocrine system senses an overload of testosterone and shuts off the normal production and it says “ok we don’t need to produce any more”, it can have a long term effect.

‘That’s why people get so dependent on it, I know a few guys who are dependent on it because they have had so much and in their minds they have to keep going, otherwise they just crash. It’s one extreme to the next.’

‘I’ve competed in six or seven natural body-building events and I’m proud of what I’m doing now for myself and my team’ Dean Weiss said

But Dean is proud of how he turned it all around.

‘I decided in 2012 that I needed to leave the mining and construction lifestyle behind and come back into something I really loved doing, going to the gym every day,’ he said.

‘After I bottomed out, I recovered and got back into training and thought that (drugs) was not the answer and I had to learn how to actually train properly and did a fitness business course and changed my whole perspective on what is healthy and what is not.

‘That’s why that happened to me, I learned of the physiological changes that happen, learned a lot more about nutrition and got out into the workforce.

‘We work hard for natural body building preparation, I’ve done about 6 or 7 shows, the difference is simple, rather than amazing big highs and equally big crashes, naturally you are fit and strong and stay that way by training properly.

‘I love training people properly, so that’s why I became a PT, it’s full bore ahead from here.’