Bull Testicles, Herbal Brews, and Fasting Rituals: Ancient Athletes Were Obsessed With Getting an Edge

We tend to think of performance-enhancing drugs as a modern problem — something that arrived with the Cold War, the steroid era in baseball, or Lance Armstrong's long-running deception. But the drive to chemically or ritually supercharge athletic performance is not a product of the 20th century. It is, in fact, nearly as old as competitive sport itself.

Ancient Greek and Roman athletes were relentless experimenters. With Olympic glory on the line — and with it, lifelong celebrity status, free food, and a statue in your honor — competitors were willing to try almost anything. What they came up with ranges from surprisingly logical to absolutely unhinged.

Eat Like a Champion (Or at Least, Like They Thought a Champion Should)

For much of early Greek athletic history, the standard training diet was remarkably plain. Competitors subsisted largely on figs, fresh cheese, and wheat. Simple. Carb-forward. Not exactly a pre-game meal you'd see an NFL running back posting about.

Then things got interesting.

Around the fifth century BC, Greek athletes — particularly wrestlers and combat sports competitors — began shifting toward heavy meat-based diets. The physician Galen later documented this shift with a mix of admiration and skepticism. Athletes consumed enormous quantities of pork, goat, and beef, believing that eating the muscle of powerful animals would transfer that strength directly to their own bodies.

And then there were the testicles.

Multiple ancient sources reference athletes consuming the testicles of bulls and other large animals as a deliberate performance strategy. The logic, crude as it sounds, was not entirely without a thread of intuition: testicles are rich in testosterone precursors. Modern sports science would eventually confirm that testosterone is central to muscle development and recovery. The ancient Greeks had no idea why it might work — but some of them believed it did, and they kept doing it.

Was it effective? Probably not in the dramatic way they imagined. But the instinct — find a biological shortcut to more power — is identical to what drives the modern supplement industry.

Herbal Concoctions and the Original Pre-Workout

Ancient athletes didn't just rely on food. Greek and Roman competitors used a range of plant-based substances they believed would sharpen focus, reduce fatigue, or increase endurance.

Strychnos nux-vomica, a plant that produces strychnine, was used in small doses by some ancient athletes as a stimulant. In tiny amounts, strychnine can produce a mild stimulant effect — in larger doses, it's a poison. Ancient athletes were essentially microdosing a toxin and hoping for the best. If that sounds reckless, it's worth noting that strychnine appeared in the 1904 Olympic marathon, when American runner Thomas Hicks was administered doses mid-race by his coaches. The ancient world and the early modern Olympics were more similar than we'd like to admit.

Other herbal preparations included mixtures of wine and various plant extracts consumed before competition. Wine itself was widely used — not just socially, but strategically, with athletes and their trainers debating the right quantity and timing to maximize performance without impairing coordination.

Herb-infused olive oil was rubbed into the skin before competition, partly for practical reasons (it helped remove dirt after events), but also because athletes and trainers believed certain plant compounds could be absorbed through the skin to improve endurance or reduce pain. Again — not entirely wrong in principle. Topical absorption of certain compounds is a real phenomenon. The execution was just a few millennia ahead of the science.

Ritual, Religion, and the Mental Edge

Not all ancient performance enhancement was physical. Greek athletes invested heavily in what we'd now call the psychological side of competition.

Fasting rituals before major events were common, tied to religious observance but also believed to sharpen the mind and purify the body. Sacrifices to Zeus and other gods were not merely ceremonial — athletes genuinely believed divine favor translated into physical advantage. Visiting oracles, performing specific prayers, and wearing protective amulets were all part of the pre-competition routine for serious competitors.

This is easier to dismiss than the dietary stuff, but consider: modern sports psychology is a multibillion-dollar industry built on the idea that mental preparation, belief, and ritual profoundly affect physical performance. The mechanism ancient athletes imagined was different. The underlying reality — that confidence, focus, and pre-performance routine genuinely matter — is not.

The Line From Olympia to GNC

Here's the thing that makes ancient performance enhancement so fascinating: the impulse has never gone away. It just got more sophisticated.

The ancient athlete eating bull testicles before competition and the modern weightlifter cycling testosterone supplements are separated by 2,500 years, dramatically different levels of scientific understanding, and the entire apparatus of WADA, drug testing, and international sports governance. But they are motivated by exactly the same thing: the belief that there is something you can put into your body that will make you better than the person standing across from you.

Modern sports nutrition — protein timing, creatine loading, carbohydrate periodization, caffeine protocols — is simply the rigorously tested, scientifically validated descendant of what ancient Greek trainers were improvising in the gymnasium. Most of what they tried didn't work, or worked only in their imagination. But some of it, as with the testosterone-rich organ meats, was pointing in a real direction.

The ancient Olympics were supposed to be a celebration of natural human excellence, a test of what the body could achieve through training and discipline alone. In practice, competitors were doing everything they could think of to tilt the odds. Sound familiar?

The obsession with gaining an edge didn't begin with BALCO or the Tour de France. It began on the packed earth of Olympia, where athletes prayed to Zeus, drank their herbal wine, and ate whatever they'd been told made champions.

Some things, it turns out, are truly timeless.