The Truth About Supplements + Steroids Most Men Waste Money On

Most men who start spending money on their physique follow a predictable path. They buy a pre-workout, then a protein powder, then BCAAs, then a multivitamin, then some peptide they heard about on a podcast, and before long they're running a monthly supplement bill that rivals their car payment. And the thing nobody wants to say, because almost everyone in the industry profits from that behavior, is that most of it does nothing measurable for them. Josh puts it plainly: you guys are throwing thousands of dollars at shit that you don't need.

What makes that statement land differently coming from him is context. This isn't someone outside the industry throwing stones. As he says, I own a supplement company, I own a peptide company, I own a testosterone replacement clinic, okay? I own two coaching companies. He profits when people buy supplements and peptides and hormones. And he's still telling you to stop buying most of it. That should tell you something about how wide the gap is between what gets marketed and what actually moves the needle.

So before we talk about what does work, we need to understand why so many of these products don't, and why the small number of interventions that matter are the ones most people skip or underdose while chasing the newest compound they saw on TikTok.

Start with the supplement side of the equation. BCAAs, or branched chain amino acids, are probably the most widely sold performance supplement after protein powder. The pitch is simple: leucine, isoleucine, and valine are the three amino acids most directly involved in triggering muscle protein synthesis, so flooding your bloodstream with them around training should mean more muscle growth. The logic seems airtight on the surface, but when researchers actually test this in controlled settings, the results are thin. A 2021 narrative review by Plotkin and colleagues published in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism looked across the available literature on isolated leucine and BCAA supplementation for muscular strength and hypertrophy, and the conclusion was that there is no compelling evidence that BCAA supplementation alone enhances muscle growth or strength when total protein intake is already adequate. The mechanism is real, leucine does activate something called mTOR, which is the primary signaling pathway that tells your muscle cells to build new protein, but BCAAs only contain three of the nine amino acids your body needs to actually construct that protein. It's like turning the ignition on a car with no gas in the tank. The signal fires but nothing gets built because the raw materials aren't there.

A 2025 study by Aguilera and colleagues in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition found that amino acid formulas containing all nine required types, with added leucine, did support whole body anabolism after resistance exercise, but the key distinction is that those formulas contained the full complement of amino acids your body can't manufacture on its own, not just three. So the research doesn't support the isolated BCAA product sitting on most people's shelves. If you eat sufficient protein from whole food, somewhere around 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight per day, you're already getting more than enough BCAAs in the context of a complete amino acid profile, which means buying them separately is just paying twice for something you already have. Even in populations where you might expect them to help, like a 2021 study by Bagheri and colleagues looking at postmenopausal women doing resistance training, BCAA supplementation didn't produce meaningful additional benefits beyond what training and adequate nutrition already provided.

That's the pattern across most of the supplement aisle. There's a real mechanism buried somewhere in the marketing, but the product as sold either isolates the wrong part of the mechanism, delivers too little of the active compound, or solves a problem that food already solves. Which is exactly what Josh means when he says You don't need the fucking vitamins and minerals, you don't need the BCAAs, you don't need the MOTCs and the fucking SS-31s and all the bullshit. Those last two, the mitochondrial targeted compounds and experimental peptides, are even further out on the evidence curve. Some of them have promising cell culture data or early animal research, but cell culture data means a compound did something interesting in a dish. It doesn't mean it does that thing in your body, at the dose you can afford, through the route of administration you're using.

Now the steroid side, which is where the financial and health costs get serious. The compound Josh specifically calls out is DECA, which is nandrolone decanoate, a 19-nortestosterone derivative that's been popular in bodybuilding circles since the 1960s because it promotes significant muscle growth and joint lubrication at relatively modest doses. The problem is that nandrolone and its metabolites interact with the androgen receptor, the progesterone receptor, and the estrogen receptor in ways that create a cascade of sexual side effects. It suppresses natural testosterone production, as all anabolic steroids do, but it also produces a metabolite called dihydronandrolone which is a much weaker androgen than dihydrotestosterone, the hormone primarily responsible for libido and erectile function in men. So while your testosterone is being suppressed, the replacement compound your body is running on is worse at maintaining sexual function. That's why the joke in bodybuilding has always been "DECA dick," and it's why Josh says Don't waste your time with the trend, okay? Your dick's gonna stop working or you're gonna be angry and throw yourself through the drywall like Kyle, okay? Don't do the DECA because then your dick will really stop working.

The anger and emotional instability he references come from the estrogen management problem. Testosterone and many of its derivatives aromatize, meaning they convert into estrogen through an enzyme called aromatase. Some estrogen in men is necessary and healthy, it's involved in bone density, cardiovascular protection, and brain function, but when levels climb too high or fluctuate rapidly because someone is running supraphysiological doses of hormones without monitoring their bloodwork, the result is water retention, mood swings, irritability, and that puffy look Josh describes when he says You'll look like you have a fucking water balloon for a head because you don't know how to manage your estrogen, okay? The subcutaneous water retention from elevated estrogen is most visible in the face and midsection, and it's the visual signature of someone who's using hormones without understanding the downstream endocrine effects.

So if most supplements are redundant and most steroid stacks create more problems than they solve for the average man who just wants to look and feel better, what actually works?

Josh's list is short and specific. Walk on the fucking treadmill for 45 minutes, three times a week, okay? No beer, no fucking whiskey, liquor, make sure you sleep, steak, reda, testosterone, HGH. And that covers it.

Take that apart piece by piece and every item on the list targets a foundational system that, when broken, no supplement or peptide can compensate for.

The treadmill walking is low intensity steady state cardio, and it does something no pill replicates: it improves insulin sensitivity, reduces visceral fat, and enhances cardiovascular function, all of which directly impact testosterone utilization and sexual function. A 2017 review by Kizilay and colleagues in Sexual Medicine Reviews documented the relationship between metabolic dysfunction, particularly insulin resistance and diabetes, and sexual dysfunction in men, finding that the metabolic environment is often a more significant driver of erectile problems than testosterone levels alone. You can inject all the testosterone you want, but if your body can't use it efficiently because your metabolic health is in the gutter, you're trying to fill a leaking bucket.

The alcohol restriction matters because ethanol is directly toxic to Leydig cells, the cells in the testes that produce testosterone. Research published by Emanuele and Emanuele in Alcohol Health and Research World in 1998, and again in Alcohol Research and Health in 2001, showed that chronic alcohol consumption suppresses testosterone production through multiple mechanisms: direct damage to testicular tissue, disruption of the hypothalamic pituitary gonadal axis, and increased conversion of testosterone to estrogen through upregulation of aromatase activity. So alcohol simultaneously lowers your testosterone, raises your estrogen, and damages the cellular machinery that would produce more testosterone to compensate, which means there is no dosage level where it's working in your favor if hormonal health is what you're after.

Sleep is where growth hormone secretion primarily occurs. About 70 percent of daily growth hormone release happens during slow wave sleep, which is the deepest phase of your sleep cycle. If you're sleeping five or six hours a night or your sleep quality is poor because of alcohol or late night screen exposure or an untreated breathing disorder, you're gutting your natural GH output before you ever consider an injection.

The food recommendations, steak and red meat, provide the most bioavailable forms of the nutrients that actually matter for hormonal health: zinc, iron, B12, creatine, carnosine, and complete protein with a high leucine content. This is the whole food version of every supplement on the shelf, delivered in a form your body evolved to extract and use.

And then there are the two hormones he does endorse: testosterone and HGH. When administered properly through a clinic with blood work monitoring, testosterone replacement therapy in men with documented hypogonadism, meaning low testosterone confirmed by lab values and symptoms, has a solid evidence base. A 2024 study by Pencina and colleagues in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found that testosterone replacement therapy significantly improved sexual function and reduced hypogonadal symptoms in men with confirmed hypogonadism, with benefits appearing across libido, erectile function, and overall sexual satisfaction. Bassil's 2011 review in Medical Clinics of North America documented the broader syndrome of late onset hypogonadism, noting that it affects a significant percentage of aging men and that replacement therapy, when appropriately prescribed and monitored, addresses the root endocrine deficit rather than masking symptoms.

The distinction Josh is making isn't anti-science or anti-intervention, and it isn't about doing nothing because the whole point is that he's endorsing a specific set of interventions pretty forcefully. He's drawing a line between the five things that account for 90 percent of the result and the other hundred things that account for the remaining 10 percent, if that, and telling you to stop spending money and metabolic risk on the wrong side of that line.

The supplement and performance enhancement industry survives on a specific cognitive distortion: the belief that the next compound is the missing piece. That once you add this one peptide, this one amino acid, this one novel anabolic, the results will finally come. But for most men the missing piece was never a molecule. It was walking consistently, sleeping enough, eating real food, not drinking, and if their hormones are clinically low, replacing them under supervision. Everything else is noise built on top of an unstable foundation, and no amount of noise fixes a foundation problem.

The men who look and feel the best ten years from now won't be the ones who found the most sophisticated stack. They'll be the ones who did the boring things every day and never stopped.