Go natural.
- Ban weightlifting.
- Reintroduce the idea of "seasons". No organized workouts or contact with coaches outside the actual playing season (and make sure those are relatively short, at least for high school and college athletes).
- Salary cap for professional athletes: no athlete can make more in one year than an average working man or woman makes in a lifetime.
Of course these ideas are probably all illegal, un-American, and unenforceable. That doesn't mean they aren't right.
A few semi-random thoughts. I was a professional athlete in the '70's. Weighlifting in many sports at the beginning of the decade was virtually taboo. By 1980 it was practically mandatory. What have we gained? For all the changes in body type and overall body weight that I think can be associated with weights at least to some degree, ballplayers overall aren't hitting the ball farther that Ruth and Gehrig, or Mantle and Mays. Maybe there's a running back more talented and aesthetically fun to watch than Jimmy Brown, but I personally don't think so. Same thing in basketball with Bill Russell or Oscar Robertson.
What have we lost? Well, I think a lot, beginning with the old-fashioned notion that sports are just games that provide pleasure in both the watching and the playing, worthy of making a darned good living even, but not something to fetishize. We now have year-round sport mentalities that take precedence over having fun and the simple joys of competition, unhealthy narcissistic body-fixations (I'm sorry, weight-room zeitgeists are weird, IMHO), and in football at least, the development of bodies that the brain apparently can't survive coming into contact with.
About the salaries. I made the minimum the last year I played my professional sport. It was $32,500 a year, and I was glad to get it. This was about $14,000 more than an average teacher salary then. The highest-paid guy I knew about was making $700,000, which seemed pretty outrageous but I knew how much the owners were making. Some time in the early 90's, as I recall, ballplayers went past two million a year, and for whatever reason that just struck me as obscene. It still does. Athletes with entourages - yuck! So I pretty much have quit following and watching sports, including big-time college athletics. Those coaches make as much as most ballplayers, and the last major college football game I attended was to me just one big push for maximum revenue from start (tickets, concessions, programs, advertising, etc.) to finish.
So of course it would shake the very foundations of our great and perfect capitalistic society to say no athlete or coach makes more in a year than a minimum-wage worker makes in a lifetime, but at least, as a guy who truly used to love to play, I can use that as my personal standard for watching or caring about sports in America.