Braden Peters, known online as Clavicular, has built his entire brand around the idea that deliberate, measurable self-optimization leads to measurable results.
The 20-year-old looksmaxxing influencer, who earns a reported $100,000 per month from his daily online sessions and was recently profiled by The New York Times, has rarely presented himself as anything less than a walking proof of concept.
Recently, he admitted that despite currently using an anabolic peptide, his gym performance appears to be moving in the wrong direction.
In a video circulating online, Clavicular revealed he has only been able to manage seven reps at 115 lbs (52.2 kg) on the barbell. For someone openly using PEDs, that number alone raised questions among followers.
But it was the trajectory, not just the figure, that seemed to concern him most. “My strength going down and down every single f**king week over week,” he said plainly.
The admission sits awkwardly alongside the narrative he has carefully constructed around himself. In a recent interview with Piers Morgan, Clavicular defended his use of pharma interventions going back to his teenage years, describing testosterone, human growth hormone, and aromatase inhibitors as tools for optimizing physical development during puberty.
“It’s a lot of pharma intervention, especially during puberty,” he told Morgan. “This is going to be the time where it’s most important for people to optimize their growth mechanisms and their growth pathways.”
His transformation between ages 16 and 19 is something he regularly points to as living evidence that the looksmaxxing philosophy works. The correlation between his physical ascent and his financial and social rise is, to him, not coincidental.
“My life is kind of on a one-to-one linear timeline with my exact ideologies that improving your looks is going to have a direct correlation with improvement in your life,” he explained. “As soon as I started really ascending and really getting into those high percentile looks, look at what happened to my life. I became that millionaire. I became famous.”
That worldview rests on what he insists is objectivity rather than ego. “It’s based on objectivity. It’s based on real world data that shows looks are extremely important in the workplace. Looks are extremely important in dating,” Clavicular told Morgan, firmly rejecting the suggestion that his methods come from a place of personal inadequacy.
His approach to optimization goes well beyond hormones. Clavicular has long been a proponent of bone smashing, a practice he frames not as recklessness but as precision. “If done properly with the proper precautions, it can be a good thing,” he maintained during the interview, describing the method as creating “very intentional localized micro traumas” designed to reshape facial bone structure over time.
When Morgan pressed him on the responsibility of promoting such techniques to a young audience, Clavicular held his position, suggesting that critics were simply missing a mechanical understanding of how the process works.
