The big idea: A fitness retreat that gives you steroids

Changing your body with drugs is more accepted than ever before. What if someone went all the way?

Note: This article contains discussion of body issues and steroid use. If that’s not your thing, come back next week — we’ll be onto something else.

People are a lot more jacked than they used to be. Every Hollywood actor has an 8 pack, Instagram is full of guys with 8 packs, and bodybuilding forums are massive (and full of guys with 8 packs). It seems like everyone is taking steroids these days.

I’m not going to say I’ve never thought it’d be cool to gain 20 pounds of muscle! But I vaguely know that steroids are bad for you and am not super interested in asking the jacked old men in my gym about their exact cocktail of drugs.

What if there was a place to do a cycle of steroids under supervision of a doctor, while going through an intense training and eating regimen? Introducing: Shred Retreat, a six to ten week program where you do a cycle of steroids. It’s the fastest way to the elusive 8 pack.

Retreats are the big new thing

Imagine a luxury retreat, with a large on-site gym and a beautiful villa. There’s a whole staff dedicated to helping you get absolutely shredded — a fitness director doing a body scan and leading workouts, a chef cooking a high protein menu, and a somewhat unethical doctor who injects you with steroids and monitors for side effects.

At the end of six weeks (which Google says is the minimum time) guests have gained a ton of muscle. All you need is a locale — apparently it’s basically legal to buy steroids in Mexico? — and you’re ready to buy some Instagram ads.

The rest of the model is pretty well established. Yoga retreats are super popular: food is provided, you’re guided through your workouts by a charismatic teacher, and you hang out with other attendees. You could also go with the men’s retreat model: groups of highly successful but vaguely defined entrepreneurs lift, eat, and scream as an emotional outlet. That might be the right energy — there’s going to be a lot of aggression for these attendees to work through.

No need to choose one or the other; there’s a clear opportunity to run different themed retreats throughout the year that curate the experience to the crowd. You can imagine getaways organized by job type (Dentists getting ripped), religion (Baptists getting ripped), region (Vermonters getting ripped), or interests (photographers getting ripped). A single location could create dozens of sub-brands, testing out market demand across demographics and homing in on those with the highest willingness to pay.

Can this really exist?

There is 100% a market for this. Sad to say, all of the 8 packs are giving men body issues at an unheard-of rate. Dudes want to get ripped so that they can find love, then lose that love because they won’t leave the gym for date night.

The core challenge is finding someone who can disappear to Mexico for 6-10 weeks and work out for multiple hours a day. That means remote workers, self-employed folks, unemployed people with lots of money (crypto millionaires), and people with nontraditional living situations (students, clear your summer and take out some more student loans).

The economics actually seem…pretty good? It looks like fitness retreats run at ~$4,000 per week on the low end. If you target 10 person retreats, that’s ~$2M in revenue per year.

In Mexico it seems like you can hire a personal trainer for about $10k per year, a doctor for $43k per year, and a chef for $15k per year. I guess you need a location, but you could just buy a hotel and build a nice fitness center on it? Let’s call it $150k per year to service the loan. It’s not so crazy to think you could get to 80%+ operating margin on this type of business (NDI readers: would you want to see a full financial model?)

It’s not just about the retreat

Why stop at getting ripped? You’re disappearing for 2-3 months and coming back as a whole new person. People do that all the time in Turkey for cheap plastic surgery. Why not add a recovery week, get a hair transplant, maybe some veneers, a nose job, and any other insecurities they can get you to pay for?

You could easily frame this as a total transformation package. Enter with body dysmorphia, leave jacked with a full head of hair, white teeth, and even more body dysmorphia.

Aren’t steroids bad for you?

In my research for this article, I was informed that this idea is actually the worst possible way to do steroids.

The exact quote was:

This is basically a combination of all the warnings about what not to do if your goal is to take steroids as safely as possible

After the resort, there would be a need to continue taking therapeutic drugs to restore your hormonal balance. Without it, customers would experience a post-cycle hormone crash throwing them into a catabolic state, causing their muscles to break down. They would be at “the greatest possible risk for permanent testosterone deficiency, requiring lifelong hormone replacement therapy.”

At this point I’m ready to say that you shouldn’t open the grey-market drug resort that might permanently injure people. But if you did —

Can we make this into recurring revenue?

Does the program need to stop after the retreat? Customers need to take a new set of drugs: why not partner with anti-aging clinics in the US to get off-label use of Post Cycle Therapy (PCT)? It seems like there are already medical offices that specifically work on this problem (although you might have to find a particularly unethical one to form a partnership). Bundle it in with remote consultations and blood tests with the ethically flexible doctor in Mexico, who monitors for side effects and health issues.

You also don’t need to stop at home; by doing this trip, guests spend weeks with a group of the most steroid positive people in the world. It’s not so crazy to think that one session won’t be enough for some of the attendees; there will be pressure to do it over and over again. Maybe they can even coordinate to see the same friends from the previous trip and…I don’t know, talk about entrepreneurship while taking their next cycle.

You could even imagine having something special for the regulars. MMA training, social media sessions, bodybuilding coaching, an advanced “level two” session — this might be the new lifestyle club for a very specific type of person.

There will 100% be a version of this

You might think this is a silly NDI article investigating an unhinged business idea to learn something about the world. It sort of is, but also — this could totally be a real thing. Take this exact same idea and replace steroids with Ozempic. If that doesn’t exist yet, it will soon — buy me a cup of coffee the first time you see it in the news.

We’re entering a world where changing your body is becoming less of a lifelong project and more of a product (body as a service, BaaS). Ozempic went from a niche drug to a cornerstone of the zeitgeist, and ancillary services will move from the shady clinics to the mainstream. Wherever you see perfect results, you’ll see someone trying to sell them to you.

I am already dreading the first GLP-1 camp with a Private Equity Pastel™ design.

I asked AI to generate it. Sorry.

Official Business Rating

2/5. This could absolutely be a viable business, riding the relentless algorithmically driven campaign to give everyone body issues. The economics are strong: a low cost locale and high income customers with a high willingness to pay. In every other way, it’s pretty bad — Shred Retreat would leave a wave of destruction in its wake. It would most likely just end in tears and a huge number of lawsuits from past participants.

If you, dear reader, decide to start this maybe stick to a drug free variation (or better yet, don’t do it at all).

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