Ask a teenager why he's thinking about a steroid or SARM cycle and, underneath the talk about getting "shredded," you'll usually find something deeper than vanity: he wants to be respected. He wants to be big, to be taken seriously, to stop feeling small — and he's watched a generation of muscular influencers seemingly earn admiration and confidence simply by being as huge as possible. He's concluded that the chemicals are the on-ramp to finally feeling like enough. The brutal reality is that he's far more likely to end up dependent on testosterone therapy for the rest of his life than he is to ever look like — or be respected like — the idols he's copying.
The Fantasy Being Sold
Open any fitness corner of social media and you'll find a wave of influencers — figures like ericthgt and countless others in the same genre — presenting extreme, chemically-assisted physiques to audiences made up largely of teenage boys. The implied promise isn't really about the muscle; it's about what the muscle is supposed to buy: respect, attention, confidence, the sense of finally being big enough to matter. To a 16-year-old who feels invisible or inadequate, the gear stops looking like a health risk and starts looking like a fix for his self-esteem.
What he's seeing is textbook survivorship bias. The lean, massive idols the algorithm serves him are the tiny minority who reached that look — usually with rare genetics, years of work, and a pharmacy behind them. He never sees the countless others who took the same drugs chasing the same validation and ended up with nothing but the side effects.
The Odds Nobody Posts About
Here's the part that doesn't make the highlight reels: for every massive idol a kid looks up to, there are countless thousands of guys who chased the same look and are completely unremarkable for it. Social media is saturated with enhanced bodies — being big is no longer rare, which means it buys far less of the respect and attention he's actually after than he imagines. And the genetic ceiling is real: most people, even on gear, will never look like the outliers they idolize, because those outliers are outliers for reasons no drug can copy.
So the odds of becoming as big, as admired, or as "successful" as the figures he's emulating are slim — and the chemistry barely moves them. The respect was always going to be hard to earn this way. The drugs don't deliver it; they just add the risk.
The Prize They Actually Win: TRT for Life
Now flip it around to the outcome that isn't a long shot. When you put powerful exogenous hormones into a young body, it responds by shutting down its own testosterone production — the brain stops signaling the testes because the job appears to be handled. For many users, and especially those who start young, run harsh compounds, or cycle repeatedly, that system never fully switches back on.
The result is the cruel irony at the center of this whole gamble: chasing the influencer body, a huge share of these kids will end up dependent on Testosterone Replacement Therapy for the rest of their lives — needing a prescription, injections, and regular bloodwork just to feel normal, have energy, and maintain libido and mood. They went looking for confidence and respect and won a lifelong medical condition instead. They become the very thing TRT was designed to treat — a man with a broken hormonal axis — except self-inflicted, decades early, and permanent. That's the realistic jackpot, and almost nobody chasing the dream is told about it.
What It Does to a Developing Body
This is so much worse at 16, 17, or 18 because an adolescent male is already in the most anabolic window of his life — natural testosterone surging, growth plates possibly still open, and his hormonal axis still calibrating. Without getting into specifics that could read as a how-to, the documented risks in young men include premature closure of growth plates (stunting final height), cardiovascular strain and unhealthy cholesterol shifts, liver stress, mood instability and aggression, depression and anxiety during the post-cycle crash, gynecomastia, testicular atrophy, and impaired fertility — on top of the testosterone shutdown above. Some of these resolve. Some never do.
The People Who Sold the Dream — and Paid for It
The cost of this lifestyle isn't theoretical, and some of the very people who helped popularize it are the clearest warnings. Rich Piana, one of the most outspoken faces of the steroid lifestyle, built an entire brand on being larger than life and openly admitted to using for nearly his whole career — he died in 2017 at just 46, after years of well-documented health problems. Zyzz (Aziz Shavershian), the figure who arguably launched modern online "aesthetics" culture, collapsed and died in a sauna in 2011 at only 22. He had an undiagnosed congenital heart defect — and the combination of that condition with steroid use and a hard partying, raving lifestyle is widely believed to be what killed him. Dallas McCarver, a 26-year-old pro many saw as the future of bodybuilding, was found unresponsive in 2017; his autopsy revealed an enlarged heart that years of heavy use and extreme training likely worsened.
The pattern is hard to ignore: the larger-than-life lifestyle that looks so aspirational online has repeatedly cut lives short or left lasting damage. These weren't careless beginners — they were the people who sold the dream, and the dream still came for them.
Muscle Dysmorphia: Why the Bar Keeps Moving
Underneath the whole pursuit is often muscle dysmorphia — "bigorexia" — a body-image disorder in which a young man perceives himself as small no matter how much muscle he actually carries. It's the mirror image of anorexia, supercharged by endless comparison to enhanced bodies presented as natural. He never feels big enough or respected enough because the standard he's measuring against was never human-natural in the first place. The drugs don't fix that feeling; they feed it.
Where Testosterone Therapy Actually Belongs
None of this makes testosterone itself the villain. There's a legitimate, evidence-based use case — and it's almost the opposite of the teenage scenario. TRT exists for men, typically older, with a genuine clinical deficiency: diagnosed hypogonadism or a real age-related decline accompanied by symptoms like persistent fatigue, low libido, lost muscle and bone density, and depressed mood.
The difference is diagnosis and supervision, not just the molecule. Proper TRT means a physician, low bloodwork confirmed more than once, a real symptom picture, and ongoing monitoring of hormones, red blood cell count, prostate, and cardiovascular markers — aiming to restore a deficient man to a normal range. An older man whose testosterone has genuinely declined, treated and monitored by a doctor, is doing something completely different from a teenager who destroyed a perfectly healthy system chasing clout. If you're that older man, the right move isn't a website or a gym contact — it's a conversation with a qualified physician and proper lab work.
The Bottom Line
Strip away the fantasy and the trade is stark: a teenager taking steroids to feel respected and as big as his idols is staking a slim chance of ever matching them against a very real chance of lifelong hormonal dependency — and, as the figures above show, sometimes far worse. That's a terrible bet. Meanwhile, a young man's body is already flooded with the most powerful muscle-building hormone he'll ever have for free — and the fundamentals (progressive overload, enough protein, consistent sleep, and years of honest work) will build a genuinely impressive, respect-worthy natural physique with none of the irreversible downside.
Use CrossTrainer to track your lifts, nutrition, and progress over months and years, and let the data show you what natural work actually produces. The respect you're chasing was never going to come from a needle — but your health, and a body that's truly yours, can be earned and kept.
This article is for education and awareness only and is not medical advice. If you have concerns about hormones, body image, or anabolic substance use, please speak with a qualified healthcare professional.