At the Fit Club gym on the north side of Las Vegas, the fitness influencer Kenny Boulet approached strangers between sets of leg presses and upright rows and asked them the same question.
“So, are you natty or not?”
Mr. Boulet, 32, has amassed a social media following by asking gym rats, bodybuilders and other physical specimens about whether they used performance enhancing drugs, or PEDs, to achieve their enviable physiques. People who are “natty,” or natural, abstain from steroids and PEDs, also called “gear” or “juice” in the gym, while others use the drugs to develop muscle at an accelerated rate.
Some people are forthright when Mr. Boulet asks, with a cameraman in tow, a question that is often not spoken, or at most in a locker-room whisper. Jordan Wondergem, a trainer lifting at the gym that afternoon, said she was “currently natural,” but had used steroids in the past when she prepared for a bodybuilding circuit.
“I started competing in bodybuilding around 2018, and that’s when I decided to try steroids,” said Ms. Wondergem, 34.
Steve Shobert, 39, had just finished up a set of hack squats at Fit Club when Mr. Boulet came up to him. Mr. Shobert admitted to using testosterone and Primobolan, a steroid once famously used by the baseball player Alex Rodriguez, to bulk up for an upcoming competition.
“I was really hoping you were going to tell me you were natural,” said Mr. Boulet, whose own biceps are big enough to pique curiosity about whether he himself is natty or not.
Mr. Boulet’s audience — close to one million subscribers on YouTube alone — is not necessarily hoping for anything in particular when they watch his videos. They simply want to know, as a matter of fact, what they’re seeing: Is the body one they can attain if they worked harder at the gym, or one that has gotten more than a little help from steroids?
It’s a question increasingly on people’s minds. While a relatively small percentage of men and women in the United States say they have used performance-enhancing drugs at some point, some doctors have suggested the use of these drugs is probably underreported and have called it a “hidden epidemic.”
That could also help explain why the look seems more ubiquitous lately, not just among competitive bodybuilders and powerlifters but in the latest Marvel movie or summer rom-com, on social media and even in some budget gyms. The problem, Mr. Boulet says, is that many of those who aspire to eight-pack abs and preternaturally sculpted triceps are being misled.
“No one wants to be deceived, especially by people they look up to, whether that’s on social media or in Hollywood,” he said. “People just want transparency, they want the truth.”
‘Natty’ as a state of mind
Mr. Boulet has found that the definition of “natty” depends on whom he’s talking to.
Some people he has interviewed tell him they’re “just” on testosterone replacement therapy, or T.R.T. Doctors prescribe it to ease symptoms of testosterone deficiency — among them weight gain, muscle loss and depression — but dubious clinics also sell the therapy as a cure-all for a crisis of masculinity. The health care research company IQVIA recently found that prescriptions for testosterone grew to more than 11 million in 2024, from 7.3 million five years earlier.
Others may demur by saying they take only peptides, though that is a nebulous catchall term for a range of substances, many of which are poorly understood.
According to their conventional definition, performance-enhancing drugs include testosterone replacement therapy as well as anabolic-androgenic steroids like trenbolone acetate, or “tren,” and oxandrolone, better known as anavar.
“It’s a popular thing to say, ‘Oh, I use testosterone replacement therapy, but I’m not taking anabolic steroids,’” said Dr. Ruth I. Wood, associate dean at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, who has researched the effects of steroids on rats for the last three decades. “But my response is that you’re just using less anabolic steroids than someone using tren or anavar.”
Mr. Boulet has a similar view: “Any time you’re manipulating your hormones is when you cross into not natty for me,” he said.
His wariness is the result of personal experience. Mr. Boulet grew up near Lake Tahoe, Calif., in the 1990s and early aughts, when steroid use had a mostly shameful association with athletes like Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, whose record-breaking feats came with an asterisk. But when he became a football player in high school, Mr. Boulet began feeling pressure to beef up. “We started getting into strength training, and I noticed these massive dudes putting up insane weight,” he recalled.
When Mr. Boulet asked them what they did to get in such great shape, they would pontificate about the importance of a healthy diet and adequate rest. “But behind closed doors, there was a fundamental chemical piece they didn’t want to mention,” he said.
Curious, Mr. Boulet started taking supplements like prohormones, many of which are now banned because of dangerous side effects but at the time were available at stores like GNC. Not until Mr. Boulet was in his 20s, when he was training to be a local firefighter and competing in bodybuilding competitions, did he start taking anabolic steroids.
“Basically everyone at that level was using something because there was this collective realization of what it took to look a certain way,” he said.
Mr. Boulet soon moved to Las Vegas to pursue a full-time career in fitness, and he started posting videos poking fun at other bodybuilders and influencers on social media. But after competing for a few years and increasing his dosages of different PEDs, he realized he was exhausted. He worried, too, about the severe effects of steroid use, which include cardiovascular risks, liver issues and kidney failure.
“I just didn’t want to push it further and end up cutting years off my life,” he said.
He stopped taking the drugs in 2019. By his own definition, though, Mr. Boulet is still not “natty.” To this day he takes TRT, a standard treatment for longtime steroid users who need to balance their hormone levels after years of elevated testosterone production.
He runs his own supplement brand that sells selective androgen receptor modulators, or SARMs, drugs that mimic steroids. Many bodybuilders swear by them, but the drugs are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration and are banned in athletic competitions monitored by the World Anti-Doping Agency.
His followers who buy his supplements, Mr. Boulet said, are “not natural” either.
“I think about my son and the culture of fake bodies, steroids, and the machine profiting off people’s insecurities that keeps getting bigger and bigger,” said Sean McGill, 40, who follows Mr. Boulet on Instagram. Mr. Boulet’s antics can occasionally rub him the wrong way, he said, “but at least he is trying to be honest about what he does and what he takes.”
Training the eye
Over the years, Mr. Boulet has taught his viewers to spot the telltale signs that someone is on the juice. “You can tell by the size of their traps, usually” — the trapezius muscle that runs along the backside of the neck and connects to the shoulders. “That’s one of the first ones to show when people decide to hop onto PEDs,” he said.
Mr. Boulet may be doing for steroids what feminist blogs did for airbrushing in the 2000s, or what surgeons and celebrity dentists on TikTok and Instagram have done for cosmetic procedures: train the average person’s eye to be attuned to the signs of a brow lift, some well-placed filler, a new set of veneers or a photoshopped waist.
But knowing that a certain look isn’t natural is not necessarily a balm against wanting it anyway.
“We don’t have logical responses to those images, we have emotional ones,” said Charlotte Markey, a psychology professor at Rutgers and author of several books on body image. “The overwhelming reaction is, I want this, I want to be like this. The logical information is just not penetrating that more visceral response.”
Lately it seems men have more features to feel bad about and more ways to try to fix them. Worried about a weak jawline? Insecure guys might consider chewing rock-hard gum to chisel their profiles (potentially putting themselves at risk for temporomandibular disorders) or seeking out jawline filler.
Some men have formed a community around trying to meet these intensified beauty standards, calling themselves “Looksmaxxers.”
“I’ve had young guys coming off anabolic steroids that feel horrible: fatigue, depression, low libido,” said Kristin Feiss, a board-certified nurse practitioner and founder of Omni Medical 360, who has seen men in their 20s all the way to their early 60s come in asking for hormone therapy. “Many of them also suffer from body dysmorphic disorder.”
Coming clean
Mr. Boulet knows how difficult it can be to break through the louder cultural messaging that’s reaching his peers, and even to extract the small bit of honesty he’s seeking.
Occasionally, he encounters so-called fake natties — those who say they are natural but who Mr. Boulet claims are clearly using steroids. In one widely viewed video, Mr. Boulet asks the bodybuilder Mike O’Hearn whether he’s natural or not. Mr. O’Hearn, who has famously and gleefully denied using steroids at any point in his career, seems slightly annoyed as Mr. Boulet presses him for a straight answer.
“I haven’t witnessed a whole lot of transparency,” said Harrison Pope, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. His patients are typically forthcoming about their recreational drug use, he said. “But then I’ll have somebody where it’s obvious that he has taken massive amounts of steroids who will tell me that he has not used any performance-enhancing drugs.”
“It may be a little less opaque than it was a decade or two ago,” added Dr. Pope, who published the book “The Adonis Complex” in 2000 about male body issues. “But there still is a pretty strong tendency of these guys to not disclose their use.”
Most people with whom Mr. Boulet spoke at Fit Club expressed conflicted feelings about their fitness journeys, acknowledging the pressures to maintain a certain physique.
“When I was in my 20s, I was really tempted because it’s always a question of: How do I look my best?” said Stefan Grabez, 33, who said he had never taken performance-enhancing drugs. “And maybe you want to speed up the process a little bit or take a shortcut. But I was just thinking about the side effects and decided on skipping them. I want to see what I can do naturally.”
His workout buddy, Sean Testa, said he was on a testosterone replacement therapy treatment for six years.
He said he first started getting prescribed PEDs after overtraining in his early 20s caused his natural testosterone levels to crater. “It’s been amazing,” he said when asked about the effects. But despite his enthusiasm, Mr. Testa, who is a personal trainer, knows the drugs can’t turn back the clock. “I’ve been tempted to do other stuff, but I’m 41. I can’t compete with a 20-year-old on a full-blown cycle.”
Racheal Belen, a nurse, popped her earbuds out after a set of squats to talk with Mr. Boulet. “I’m natural,” she said. “There’s always that temptation as a committed athlete, you always want to be better — that’s the goal. But for me, I want my work ethic and discipline to speak for itself.”
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