When Fake Muscles Go Wrong

This is what happens when fake muscles go wrong!

August 23, 2023・

16 min read

Let’s face it, we’ve all got insecurities about our bodies. But for some people, the ways they try and fix them only make things worse much worse. Let’s not be quick to judge anyone but, hopefully, there’s a lesson or two we can learn from their mistakes. From boulder biceps to exploding butt cheeks, let’s find out what happens when fake muscles go wrong!

Synthol Rambo

When it comes to the perfect male physique, everyone has their own ideals. Whether that’s Tyler Durden, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or like one Brazilian man, your favorite 80s action hero. But he’s less Rambo and more Ramb-oh-no.

Despite most of this guy’s body looking average and healthy, his biceps are horribly inflamed and infected. We don’t know for sure what happened, as there’s very little information out there about him, but he was almost definitely using something called synthol. And lots of it.

Synthol is a grotesque mixture of oil, painkillers, and alcohol that bodybuilders sometimes inject into their muscles to make them look extra swole before competitions. But some people, like our Brazilian friend, have all the gear and no idea. He’s used it as a kind of cheat code to look super jacked without shifting any iron at all.

Unsurprisingly, pumping your arms with a load of slimy cocktails really isn’t good for you. There are obvious muscle deformities that don’t exactly scream peak aesthetic and there’s also an increased risk of nerve damage, infections, and much worse. We hope his big arms make him happy. At least he’s modeled himself after Sylvester Stallone because his future might get a little Rocky.

Candice Armstrong

Synthol is very dangerous but it has potentially fewer side effects than the alternative anabolic steroids. These are medicines often misused by bodybuilders to enhance their muscle growth. Unlike synthol, they do actually stimulate real growth. But their side effects can be severe, something Candice Armstrong from London, UK, knows all too well.

Candice suffered from terrible body dysmorphia, a mental condition where you get hung up on perceived bodily flaws that realistically no one else would notice. So, she began working out to improve her self-image. After two years of daily three-hour workouts, however, she still wasn’t happy. She wanted better, faster progress.

One of her fellow gymgoers recommended trenbolone, an anabolic steroid that works by mimicking natural hormones like testosterone and Human Growth Hormone, or HGH. It boosts muscle growth by increasing how much protein your body can absorb and generates large amounts of muscle tissue.

The more Candice took, the bigger she grew, and the less insecure she felt. But her body responded to this spike in hormones in a truly shocking way. Only a few weeks after starting her new regime, Candice began growing facial and body hair, and her voice became deeper.

Because trenbolone mimics testosterone, the male sex hormone, it can very literally make women more masculine. For Candice, these changes started off gradually. However, after two years of trenbolone use, Candice was almost unrecognizable from her past self.

She’s even taken to wearing men’s clothes to escape the abuse she was getting on the street! That’s horrible. Last I’ve found, Candice was seeking professional help to manage her image issues. I sure hope she’s feeling better now, she’s been through a lot!

Kirill Tereshin, The Russian Popeye

The world of fitness influencers has become super competitive in recent years. But Russian Army veteran, Kirill Tereshin, has taken extreme measures to keep an arm in the race and you probably haven't seen an arm quite like his.

Kirill, also known as “Russian Popeye”, started injecting synthol into his arms at the age of 20. After four years of pursuing his ideal male physique, he had to undergo emergency surgery to remove excess fluid and dead muscle from his triceps. Despite this, there’s still a huge lump of petroleum jelly in his bicep which he refused to have removed.

In fact, he’s only gone further with his surge of body modifications. Kirill briefly switched his attention to his legs, getting silicone implants in his calves. As a lifelong fan of extraterrestrials, Kirill’s current plan is to turn himself into one. So, he’s shaped his jaw, forehead, cheeks, and lips to appear as otherworldly as possible.

Darryn Lyons

The 2000s were a weird and unsettling time but one of the most disturbing things was the invasive and bullying paparazzi culture. So, when one of its pioneers, Darryn Lyons, was caught on the other side of the camera, people were quick to give him a taste of his own medicine.

When appearing on the British reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother in 2011, one part of Darryn’s body seemed to be disproportionately toned compared to the rest. And he certainly wasn’t keeping those architectural abdominals under wraps either. But then, if I’d coughed up almost $15,000 on them, I’d be showing off the goods, too!

But Darryn wasn’t grinding out crunches and situps every morning. He’d flown to Poland for a muscle sculpting operation that removed most of the fat between the layers of muscle. The issue was, by only focusing on his stomach, he had the perfectly reasonable body of a 46-year-old man, but the abs of a 23-year-old pro athlete.

Bullying is wrong, but this guy made a killing from harassing and selling invasive photos of various celebrities. Karma’s got a funny way of coming back around.

Jake Paul

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of YouTuber turned pro boxer, Jake Paul. His recent rampage of beating retired MMA fighters old enough to be his dad hasn’t been without its fair share of controversies.

But there’s one photo from his first amateur fight against fellow YouTuber Deji which really caught fans' attention. The self-proclaimed "problem child" seemed to have one minor problem of his own. It’s not entirely clear where his shoulder stops, and the backdrop begins.

So, what’s the deal? Has Jake become one with the supernatural? I know shadowboxing is a big part of his training, but I’ve never seen a right hook thrown from another dimension. In reality, it’s just some dodgy editing. Probably some keen-to-impress intern on Jake’s team tried bulking him up a little on Photoshop to look more intimidating.

And compared to a more recent photo, they either didn’t get the job or brushed up on their editing skills. Whether you love him or hate him, you have to give him credit, after all these years he’s still got that same deranged twinkle in his eyes.

In Fitness and in Health

You know the saying, “Couples who train together, remain together”? That couldn’t be truer for George and Susan Koprash. These lovebirds are Canadian Bodybuilders who’ve competed in the sport for a whopping 30 years! But it’s not always been sunshine and rainbows for this literal power couple.

In 2014, they caught a whole lot of flak online when they showed off some pretty unconvincing silicone implants on stage at a competition. George cleared the whole controversy up by later stating they’d sought out a professional who claimed to have performed the implant procedure on hundreds of bodybuilders before.

Unsurprisingly, he also stated he was very unhappy with the results as was his wife. Still, they’d decided to attend the competition anyway, because their daughter was competing and it’d be the first time all three of them had competed as a family.

However, the internet and people love to point fingers at someone’s flaws without knowing the full story. As such, these photos were broadcast across every fitness meme page worth shaking a dumbbell at! The 30-year veterans of the game ended up cutting a lot of hate for it.

Six-Pack Tattoo

A video posted on tattoo artist Dean Gunther’s TikTok shows his client struggling with motivation in the gym. So, he tried getting the body of his dreams a different way. After two long, painful days under the needle, he got his incredible body transformation.

The detail in the tattoo is actually pretty good, but it's far from perfect. It doesn’t look like the colors even match his skin! However, fresh tattoos always take time to settle, so maybe, just maybe, it’ll turn out fine. And Manchester-based tattoo artist Dean didn’t charge him a penny for it.

Edouard Gheur

Whether you like bodybuilding or not, there’s no denying that many bodybuilders push themselves to their very limits to achieve their goals. Some, however, like Belgian-born Edouard Gheur, push themselves way too far.

Gheur lived a chameleonic life, starting off as an athlete, before switching to bodybuilding, modeling and even working as a Hollywood stuntman, which is the coolest job like ever! But for a whopping 15 years, he was taking steroids to pack on the muscle mass.

The problem is, as well as making you into a hulking muscle machine, steroids can also increase your blood pressure, so if you overuse them, it can put a huge strain on your heart. Sure enough, in June 1997, while cooking dinner in his kitchen, Gheur had a heart attack to the point his heart literally stopped beating!

In this situation, any logical person would say that’s game over, but not this Hollywood Hero. Amazingly, he lived! After countless surgeries and procedures to repair the damage, Gheur kept on kicking on. How incredible is that? Despite his heroic recovery though, Edouard sadly passed on in 2015 from other complications. But it doesn’t detract from his resilience, both in his sport and his recovery!

Photoshop Flops

It’s not just celebrities that edit their images on the internet. And some people’s attempts are far worse than others. Take the kid in the image below.

He’s ripped alright, ripped those muscly arms straight out of a magazine to pose with. Then, we have the cool dude in this image below.

If you’re wondering what’s up with that odd-looking body, take a closer look at the bottom left. He bought a t-shirt with a muscly body print on it, took a pic, and then edited out the white parts of the top! Incredible skills.

But in the first place for sheer audacity, you need to give the medal to the guy in the image below. That arm is twice the size of his head! So, even if anyone did believe this pic’s unedited, they’d have some serious questions about what he’s been up to with that left arm.

In all seriousness, it’s sad that anyone would feel the need to do this! However, the more worrying thing is it’s often far more subtle. The point is, don’t believe everything you see on Instagram

Oneal Morris, the "Toxic Tush" Doctor

Women’s bodies come in all different shapes and sizes. Some are heavier on top; some are heavier on the bottom; patients of Oneal Morris are definitely heavier on the bottom. Much heavier.

Oneal ran a back alley beautician in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. While she told her “patients” her products were the crème de la crème though, she was really injecting a cement concoction into their derrieres.

Oneal’s mix contained cement, silicone, and fix-a-flat, which is for sealing flat tires, not sealing an entire breezeblock’s worth of cement inside a woman’s bottom. The procedure is not a standard practice. Plus she didn’t have a license. The whole operation was illegal!

All in all, over 30 people have come forward claiming they paid for dodgy cosmetic procedures. Sadly, many of these women were in desperate situations, unable to afford reputed cosmetic surgeons and trusting in Oneal’s cheaper service.

All of them suffered from disfigurement, illness, and even hospitalization due to the bogus treatments. So, in 2017, this toxic tush doctor was sentenced to 10 years in prison. you could say she got off lightly.

Natty O’Neil

Here's a guy who shares more than just a name with Oneal Morris. But Canadian bodybuilder Kenny O’Neil isn’t putting anything weird in or around his bottom, at least publicly. Instead, he prefers to keep things above the belt.

Kenny’s never been quite clear about what was going on with his muscles in the photos from the 2016 Vancouver bodybuilding championship. It could be a less severe version of our Brazilian Rambo from earlier in the article. However, Kenny was insistent he’d never even seen synthol before, nor had implants.

But his fans were quick to share photos from a few months before the competition, where his shoulders look unnaturally swollen. So, what was his explanation? He blamed the lighting. Unless the lights were inside his actual shoulders, we all know that’s not true.

Later, Kenny fessed up that he’d had infections in both deltoid muscles from overusing water-based testosterone in his shoulders. Apparently, his doctor drained the excess fluid and gave him antibiotics, but it didn’t fix the problem before the competition. Only Kenny knows the real truth, we just hope he got those meaty mounds fixed before they popped.

Ronny Rono

As we’ve already learned, synthol is not something to be messed with. And while some people who dabble in it are lucky enough not to suffer a great deal of harm, others aren’t so fortunate. Ronny Rono was a Kenyan bodybuilder who sadly lost his life as a direct result of synthol use.

In early 2017, he noticed a small swelling in his right arm, which by April had spread to his left hand. After an MRI scan at the local hospital, the severity of Ronny’s problems was exposed. The synthol had reacted badly with his muscles, disfiguring them and causing some of them to lose all function.

His chest muscles had become so grossly enlarged there was no coming back. It wasn’t long before he was bedbound and unable to carry his own weight without fatiguing. And, to make matters worse, because he was no longer able to work and fend for his family, his wife left him along with their five-year-old child.

In 2020, Ronny passed away at the age of just 30 and he could never admit to using synthol. Instead, he claimed he was a heavy drinker during his bodybuilding days and that someone must’ve injected him without him knowing. Whether that’s true or just a story Ronny told himself to feel better, we’ll probably never know.

Sajad Gharibi, The Iranian Hulk

Ever wondered how to get that hulking superhero physique without having to eat chicken and rice 14 times a day? Take a few tips from Sajad Gharibi. You may be familiar with the mammoth guy, he’s known as the Iranian Hulk and has racked up over a million Instagram followers in awe of his impossible size.

Rumored to weigh around 400 lbs and standing about 13 feet tall, Sajad looked like a behemoth of a man. So, when a fight was booked between him and 6’6” British giant Martyn Ford, fans were pretty hyped to see which of these Herculean Heavyweights would come out on top.

However, things didn’t exactly go as expected. It turns out, Gharibi had been tweaking his proportions on Photoshop to look much bigger than he was. He was actually 6’2” and weighed about 300lbs. He’s certainly a big boy but the fans wanted Sajad Smash, and all he really smashed was his reputation.

As the fight drew closer, it became pretty obvious that Gharibi’s biggest fight wasn’t in the ring, but with himself. After a press conference to build hype, he was seen crying inconsolably.

Unwilling to beat a guy who’s already beating himself, Ford pulled out over concerns around Gharibi’s health, and Gharibi deleted all the edited images he’d put on Instagram. That’s a rough way to get outed. Nowadays, he keeps posts to a minimum and seems to just be focused on training.

Valdir Segato

If you don’t have them already, you’d better get your tissues out as you'll get all teary-eyed just reading up on Brazilian Bodybuilder, Valdir Segato. He gained internet notoriety for his heavily artificial synthol physique. But, in Valdir’s case, a picture doesn’t always tell a thousand words.

He’d grown up around Sao Paolo in the 1970s and ’80s and had a tough adolescence, slipping into bad habits and an unhealthy lifestyle that left him worryingly underweight. In an attempt to turn his life around, Valdir joined a gym, hoping the structure and exercise would pull him out of this rut. And it did, for a time.

But then, in 2013, someone at his gym introduced him to synthol, and Valdir was immediately hooked on the way it made him look. He began pumping his chest, shoulders, and arms full of the stuff, to the point his biceps swelled to a gargantuan 23 inches. That’s almost as big as a soccer ball!

By 2016, his doctors warned him that the risk of nerve damage or worse was alarmingly high. But none of that mattered to Valdir, he enjoyed the attention it brought him too much. He even changed his Instagram name to Valdir Synthol! It turns out however, the doctors were right.

Sadly, back in August 2022, Valdir’s vices got the better of him. It was only his 55th birthday. Even worse, although he’d amassed over a million followers on TikTok, it was in no way a reflection of how the dude lived. In reality, he was almost completely alone. we just hope Valdir’s found some peace now.

Mia Maffia

Social media bombards us with images of unattainable beauty standards that can have a massively negative impact on how we see ourselves. For 23-year-old Mia Maffia, from Leeds, England, that was especially true.

She’d become absolutely enamored with the Kim Kardashian figure, the tiny waist and big bottom combo. But at a petite size eight, this seemed totally impossible for Mia to attain. That is until she discovered a clinic in Belgium that could do bum augmentation surgery and silicone implants for your booty.

So, after saving around $8,000 she traveled over to get the body of her dreams. But things didn’t exactly turn out how she wanted. The doctor told her that she couldn’t have implants any larger than two inches, much smaller than Mia had planned. However much she begged though, the clinic refused. So, Mia cut her losses, accepted the doctor’s proposal, and had the procedure.

After the work was done, Mia couldn’t sit down or put any weight on the operated area while it healed. So, she faced a grueling journey home, and at points had to lie face down on the train platforms just to rest! Then, ten days after she got back to Leeds, she awoke to a grisly shock. Her mattress was soaking wet. One of her new implants had burst and leaked all over the bed!

She immediately rushed to hospital, but begged the surgeons not to take the implants out, despite the high risk of infection. that might seem crazy, but if I were in Mia’s shoes, I’d probably put up a fight too.

Think about it, if you had a crippling insecurity that you’d paid a lot of money to have corrected, then someone threatened to take that away, how would you feel? Luckily for Mia, she got her blown-up backside fixed, had new implants fitted, and is now much happier.

If you were amazed at what happens when fake muscles go wrong, you might want to read our article about the weirdest fake bodybuilders. Thanks for reading!