Hormones with anabolic properties such as growth hormone (GH), insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-I), and insulin are commonly abused among professional and recreational athletes to enhance physical ability. Performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) such as these are also commonly used by recreational athletes to improve body aesthetics. The perception of increased muscle mass due to supraphysiologic hormone supplementation, or doping, is widespread among PED users despite a paucity of evidence-based data in humans. Even still, athletes will continue to abuse PEDs in hopes of replicating anecdotal results. It is important to educate the general public and potential treating physicians of the risks of PED use, including the dangers of polypharmacy and substance dependence. It will also be important for the research community to address the common challenges associated with studying PED use such as the ethical considerations of PED administration, the general reticence of the PED-using community to volunteer information, and the constant need to improve or create new detection methods as athletes continually attempt to circumvent current methods. This review highlights the anabolic mechanisms and suggestive data implicating GH, IGF-I, and insulin for use as igf1, the specific detection methods with cutoff ranges that may be utilized to diagnose abuse of each substance, and their respective side effects.Skeletal muscle is critical for execution of movement, thermogenesis, and nutrient metabolism. Proficiency of these processes is dependent on skeletal muscle mass which is largely regulated by exercise, nutrition, hormones, and to a lesser extent, genetics and ethnicity. As skeletal muscle is a plastic tissue, it responds to progressive overload, such as resistance training, or amino acid ingestion by altering protein synthesis and degradation in favor of tissue growth, or anabolism. Hormones with anabolic properties induce similar responses in skeletal muscle, increasing protein synthesis and/or decreasing protein degradation through a variety of downstream pathways after binding their respective receptors.