Over the last two decades, the UK’s health and fitness industry has experienced a meteoric rise and the physical and digital spaces of bodily modification have become prime sites of late-capitalist leisure. In line with this, interest in hardcore training – be it bodybuilding, powerlifting, or even CrossFit – has steadily increased as ever more emphasis is placed on the physical form as a site of identity formation and consumption (Kotzé and Antonopoulos, 2019; Gibbs et al, 2022a). Committed bodyworkers are now able to choose from a wide selection of licit sports supplements, from flavoured whey protein powders to potent fat-burning stimulants and pre-workout products (Mooney et al, 2017), which can even be purchased at their local supermarket.

However, the well-marketed exterior of this lucrative economy belies a darker side, and it is this illicit underbelly that this book seeks to address. This monograph sets out to uncover the use and supply of image and performance-enhancing drugs (IPEDs) – or what I have termed ‘the muscle trade’ – in a post-industrial Midlands city that I have called ‘Potsford’, as well as the social media sites Facebook and Instagram. A growing body of literature documents the increase in IPED consumption domestically (McVeigh and Begley, 2017; Mullen et al, 2020) as well as globally (Sagoe et al, 2014; van de Ven et al, 2018), affording the study of these substances a relatively ‘newsy’ status (Wacquant, 2008) within contemporary drugs research. Although this context has generated a veritable tsunami of scholarship, most research into IPEDs falls within the schools of anti-doping (see Pineau et al, 2016; Backhouse et al, 2018; Andreasson and Johansson, 2019) or public health (see Van Hout and Kean, 2015; McVeigh and Begley, 2017) and the field can broadly be characterized by a paucity of theoretically charged critical criminological engagement (van de Ven et al, 2020). Therefore, although I acknowledge the important contributions of scholars working within both of these disciplines, this book seeks to provide a more nuanced and theoretically informed account of the muscle trade to support and challenge existing scholarship.