Where It All Began: The Gym in Jacó That Started Peptides Costa Rica
There's a banner above the ring at McCully's Fight Club in Jacó. It's ours. Most nights nobody looks up at it, and of course you don't, when you're working, but it's there, and every time we walk in and see it hanging over the ropes, it lands the same way. That ring is where this company started. Not the office. Not a business plan. A gym, a lot of injuries, and two guys who kept asking the same question.
The room where it began
If you've never been in a fight gym in the tropics, the first thing you'll notice when you visit one for the first time is the heat. Not gym heat, but Jacó heat, the kind that's already in the room before anyone starts working, that turns the mats slick by the second round of pads and makes the whole building smell like leather and salt.
The second thing you notice is that nobody is performing. There are no mirrors to admire yourself in. Nobody's filming. There's a bell, a clock, a coach who's watching you more closely than you'd like, and a room of people who show up whether or not they feel like it. Fighters, surfers, kids, expats, tourists who wandered in for one class and are still here two years later.
That's where Peptides Costa Rica came from. Not a boardroom — that room.
Two Californians who never went home
More than 15 years ago, I, Joey Webster and Sean McCully both left California for Costa Rica. Not together, and not with a plan between us. We came looking for the same thing plenty of people come here looking for — a better way to live. And we found each other in the same place a lot of friendships in this country start: a gym.
I had wrestled growing up in California, made it to the State Championships, and set the record there for the fastest pin in the tournament. Sean had spent decades in combat sports already. I started training with him in boxing, Muay Thai and MMA, and what began as curiosity turned into something considerably more serious.
Fifteen years later we're business partners. That took a long time and a lot of rounds.
Sean
Some people in the fight world have a résumé. Sean McCully has a lineage.
He's a three-time world title holder in Muay Thai and kickboxing, and he was there in the early days of mixed martial arts, way before it was a television product, when it was still a question nobody had answered yet. He's coached fighters who went on to win world titles across several disciplines. He founded LA Boxing, the franchise that put striking-based training in front of thousands of people across the United States who'd never have walked into a traditional boxing gym.
He could have stopped there. Instead he's in Jacó, on the mats, still coaching, beginners on Tuesday and pros on Wednesday, with the same attention to both.
That's the part worth understanding about him. Decades of titles, and what he actually seems to care about is the room. His gym's own description of itself is "not just a gym, a family and a legacy," and having spent years in it, I'd say that's accurate rather than marketing.
The year I thought I was done
Here's the part of the story that actually explains why this company exists.
I got hurt. Not one injury, but several at once. I ended up having two ankle surgeries and a knee surgery in the same period, which is the kind of thing that stops most people's athletic life permanently. A doctor even told me that I might never land an effective kick again.
If you've fought, you know what that sentence does. It's not really about the kick. It's about being handed a version of your future you didn't agree to, by someone who's probably right.
Less than a year later, I was back in the ring. I probably won that fight by first-round knockout.
We're not telling that story to be inspirational about it. We're telling it because of what sat underneath it: the months nobody sees. The rehab. The obsessive, unglamorous work of trying to get tissue to heal faster than it wants to. The reading. The questions to anyone who might know something. The constant, grinding search for anything that might move the needle a few percent.
That search is what eventually turned into a business.
What fighters figure out eventually
Everyone starts out thinking the training is the hard part. Then you get older, or you get hurt, and you realise the truth: the training was never the bottleneck. Recovery was.
Combat sports are unusually hard on a body. It's not just the impact, it's the accumulation. Joints that never get a full week off. Fatigue that stops fully clearing between sessions. Injuries that heal to eighty percent and stay there. Ask anyone who's been in it fifteen years what they'd change and almost none of them will say they'd have trained harder. They'll say they'd have recovered better.
So that's what we got interested in. Not shortcuts — recovery. What actually helps tissue repair, what helps you sleep, what lets a thirty-eight-year-old body absorb the same week of work a twenty-two-year-old body shrugs off. Peptides kept coming up in those conversations, at first from other athletes, then in the research we started reading properly.
We ran into an actual problem
We wanted to learn more. That turned out to be the easy part. Getting anything reliably, in Costa Rica, was the hard part.
Everything came from international suppliers, and that meant the same four frustrations every single time:
- Shipping delays — weeks, with no visibility
- Customs complications — packages held, packages returned, packages simply gone
- Unclear sourcing — no way to know what you'd actually received
- No one to talk to — an email address that answered in four days, if at all
For compounds that need cold chain, that last part isn't a customer service issue. It's a quality issue. Something that sat in a warehouse in the heat for three weeks isn't the same product that left the lab, and there was no way to know which one you had.
At some point the conversation shifted from "where can we get this" to "why does nobody here do this properly." Which, as anyone who's started a business will tell you, is the question that gets you into trouble.
What we built instead
Peptides Costa Rica exists to be the thing we couldn't find. That shapes everything about how we run it.
We only serve Costa Rica. No international shipping, no customs roulette. We could sell more by expanding. We'd also lose the one thing that made us want to start.
We publish every lab test. Our COA database is open. Third-party results, batch by batch. Because "trust us" was exactly the answer we got tired of hearing.
We check stock before you pay. Nobody sends money for something that turns out not to exist.
You are connected to an actual person. A phone number, a WhatsApp, a support guy who trains and knows what you're asking about.
And we're careful about what we claim. We're not doctors and we don't pretend to be. Our Info Center tries to lay out what the research actually shows, including, often, that the evidence is thinner than the internet suggests. You'll find pages on our own site telling you a compound has never been independently tested in humans. Transparency is important for us and so is your health.
We're still in that gym
This is the part people find surprising: nothing changed. We still train there. Still get hit. Still ice things afterwards and complain about it.
The banner above the ring isn't really advertising. Fighters in Jacó already know who we are. It's there because that's where this started, and because there's something clarifying about your business being visible in the room where the people who use your products can find you and tell you exactly what they think.
You can't hide behind a website when you have to spar with your customers on Thursday.
Come train with us
If you're in Jacó, living here, visiting, passing through on the way to the coast, go to McCully's. We mean that outside of any business relationship. It's the best striking gym in Central America and it's genuinely welcoming, which is a rarer combination than it should be.
They run MMA, Muay Thai and BJJ, from complete beginners to professional fighters. Day passes, monthly memberships, year passes, private lessons, and vacation camps if you want to build a trip around training.
McCully's Fight Club
- Where: Paseo Surfistas, contiguo Variedades El Amigo, Playa Jacó — find it on the map
- Phone: (506) 6486 5329
- Online: mccullysfightclub.com · @mccullysfightclub
- Classes: MMA, Muay Thai, BJJ — all levels
And if you want to see what this actually looks like: Muay Thai, kickboxing and boxing under K1 rules, local and international fighters, you can find all under one roof. Ringside, general admission and front-row VIP tables, and a lot more on is available on fight nights. Keep a tab on new fight events here.
Come and stand in the room. You'll understand a lot better than we can explain it here.
Still the same question
Every business has an origin story and most of them are tidied up afterwards. Ours genuinely isn't complicated. Two people got hurt doing something they loved, refused to stop doing it, and spent years trying to work out how to keep going.
That's still the question. It's just that now other people ask us instead of us asking everyone else.
If you're training in Costa Rica and trying to stay in it for the long run, have a look at what we carry, read the lab results, or just message us. And read the full story if you want the rest of it.
Or come to the gym. We're usually there.
Products offered by Peptides Costa Rica are intended strictly for laboratory research use only. They are not approved or licensed by the FDA for the prevention, diagnosis, treatment or cure of any disease. Nothing in this article is medical advice, and nothing here should be read as a claim that any product treats, heals or prevents injury. Anyone recovering from an injury should be working with a qualified medical professional. Not for human or veterinary use.
