
Hey, How’d You Get Those Quads?
The New York Times
The fitness influencer Kenny Boulet, who asks gymgoers if they’re “natty or not,” wants people to be more honest about their steroid use.
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.