“Like a Soho House Where Everyone Is Ripped, Attractive …and Over 45.”

This past January a group of founders and executives flew into north Scottsdale’s private airport for two days. Ray Lewis spoke. Ed Mylett had taken the same stage the previous October. Tim Grover, who spent a career keeping Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant on the floor, had done it the summer before.

The men in the audience were seven and eight-figure operators, which is to say a room full of people who are ordinarily the reason an event is worth attending.

Every one of them had paid, at some point in the previous year, somewhere between $10,000 and $30,000 to a company that, on the surface, sells body transformation.

But that’s only one of the reasons they came for. One member, asked what the room is, called it “like a Soho House where everyone is ripped, attractive and over 45.” Then he said the comparison falls apart in one place.

At Soho House, the money is the application.

The Part That Runs in the Open

Two days in January, at a Scottsdale venue the company would not name. Photo: Supra Human

Supra Human is neither small nor new. Founded in 2021, it did $50 million in revenue in 2025. It placed No. 273 on the 2025 Inc. 5000. It employs a around a hundred people across four continents, more than half of them coaches, handpicked and trained in Supra Human’s methodology.

The offer is twelve months, from $10,000 to $30,000, with an income floor of $150,000, well-documented within their online application. Then something almost nobody in this business will put in writing.

Get ripped or you don’t pay.

None of that explains why a room full of men who own companies sit still while one man tells them what’s wrong with them. That part is easier to understand in person.

Led By a Former NFL Tight End

John Madsen, 43, in Scottsdale. He played in the NFL for the Oakland Raiders. Photo: Supra Human

John Madsen is 6’5. He went undrafted out of Utah, signed with the Raiders as a free agent in 2006, converted from receiver to tight end, and made Oakland’s initial fifty-three-man roster as the only undrafted player on it. Three seasons there, then Cleveland, then a championship ring in Las Vegas.

He runs the company with his wife, Nineveh Madsen, who spent her career as a broadcast journalist, anchored for FOX and NBC affiliates, won an Edward R. Murrow Award, then left television for an operating role at a software company. She is the chief executive.

He is the only man most of them have met in twenty years who doesn’t work for them, doesn’t need anything from them, and isn’t impressed by any of their business success unless they have the body to match it.

Better Than They Looked In College

The men in that room don’t look like people who’d recently taken up exercise. Several are, by their own description, in better condition now than they were at twenty-two, and they mention it the way a man reports a quarterly number rather than a personal victory.

Which is the part my Soho House member was pointing at.

The income floor sounds like a velvet rope, and from outside it works like one. But the money only buys a man twelve months of access. What decides whether he belongs in that room is what he does with them, and no amount of money moves it. The company’s own guarantee is built on the possibility that it won’t move at all.

That’s an unfamiliar arrangement at this level. These men are used to buying access and then behaving however they like once they’re inside it. Here the purchase buys a seat at the start, and the seat has to be re-earned in a form anyone in the room can read across a table.

Get Ripped Or You Don’t Pay

The money buys a world-class system rather than a calendar full of appointments.

Training and nutrition are built for the individual. Bloodwork, hormones, sleep and energy live inside the same program instead of belonging to four separate professionals who have never spoken to one another. At the top tier a concierge medical team works the labs and the hormones directly.

The scheduling assumption is the piece engineered for this specific man. Madsen describes his clients as men with constant travel, long days, client dinners and social obligations every weekend. A program that assumes free evenings has already lost, and it will lose on a schedule you could set a watch by.

Which is where the guarantee comes in. The company has run that as its headline promise for years, in a category where every competing sentence is wrapped in three layers of maybe.

“We don’t sell sessions,” Madsen says. “Nobody gets paid for effort. We get paid for results.”

John Madsen at a Supra Human event. Photo: Supra Human

Why Personal Training and Luxury Gyms Fail

Before Supra Human, the arrangement usually looks like this. The Equinox membership runs $400 a month and he uses it less than once a week. The trainer there is 26, bills $200 per hour, and has spent the better part of two years telling a man with three children and a travel schedule to meal prep on Sundays.

“They see you for an hour, run you through a generic workout, and then send you right back into a life they don’t understand,” Madsen says. The trainer collects their fee whether the client sees results or not.

But the hour isn’t the real problem, and neither is the workout. The trainer works for him. So does everyone else he’s ever hired to handle something. He’s spent twenty years arranging his professional life to be responsive to him, and without ever deciding to, he removed the one condition under which this problem gets solved. Nobody on his payroll will hold a line he wants moved.

“Wealthy men pay for speed,” Madsen says. “They pay for convenience. And they pay for results.” Speed, in this case, turns out to be a function of who is allowed to tell him no.

The Only Way In Is An Application

An online enrollment, with income above $150,000. A referral from a man already inside is the common route, though nothing about the process requires one.

Which means the room largely selects itself. Members bring men they’d be willing to stand next to. “If they could have done it on their own,” Madsen says of the ones who make it through, “they would have done it ten years ago.”

What follows is twelve months in which the only thing anyone measures is whether he did what he said he would do.

The room is scheduled again. Most of the men who were in it will be in it again. Some will not be, and the ones who are not will not be discussed.

Which is where the Soho House comparison finally breaks. There, you keep the membership by paying for it. Here you keep it by looking like you belong in the room.

Leaving Scottsdale

I flew out of the same airport two days later and killed an hour at Volanti, the restaurant on the second floor with the windows onto the runway. You can watch the aircraft leave from up there. Some of them were the ones that had come in on Thursday.

At the next table two men in their fifties were waiting on their own aircraft, eating wings and talking through a term sheet. Both of them would clear the income floor easily. Neither would have made it into the room I’d just left.

What I couldn’t stop thinking about wasn’t Ray Lewis or the guarantee. It was that I’d spent two days among roughly two hundred people, men and women, most of them past forty-five, and not one of them looked it.

Which is the part the company can’t put in an advertisement, and the part its members won’t describe to anyone who hasn’t been. It isn’t only about the coaching or the protocols. It’s two days in a room where every person has done the same thing, and nobody has to explain why it mattered.

No one in that room got there by accident.