A perfectly acceptable risk if your main goal in life is to get paid good money jack off in your jockstrap for guys who look like Andy Warhol.

Youtube is calling you fat.

Hah, that's a good observation. All of these guys, at one point, must have had close to an "ideal" physical physique. I can't imagine how much time and effort that'd take to achieve. But, they floored it into the ditch and now they're spray-tanned, pregnant, abominations of nature. This type of body building should be in DSM V.

Why assume attractiveness is the objective? I see these guys as sculptors interested in human extremes, not classical beauty, and I find their experiments grotesquely interesting, like looking at a Francis Bacon painting. From the very little I know about performance art and body-mod, general hotness is not a concern.

Very true, Two Jar. Yeah, I doubt classical beauty is even remotely the goal. I'd bet it's about transcending, in a way - like you alluded to. I don't "get it," at all, but man, it is interesting. I don't actually think they're nutty.

I think this is much simpler than you guys are assuming.

It's 'I have the biggest (muscle group) in the gym', related to 'I have the biggest truck/gun/engine/boat/house'.

It's probably exacerbated by their balls actively shrinking as they roid up

I've also always wondered if guys like this are really strong, relative to their size. Or are their bodies so over-taxed it's mostly decorative?

If you watch those strong man competitions, most of the competitors look like giant barrels, not much definition.

Solro, having a big ass truck that rolls coal is actually about transcending.

It's copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy syndrome. The elaborate grading scheme of bodybuilding has built a series of abstracted ideals, each separated from the others, for the sake of the parts being separate from the whole. And as each body dysmorphic teaches a body dysmorphic, and the natural innately male tendency toward fetishization kicks in, it goes into absurd directions that are not going to be discernible for a few generations still, as these guys voluntarily participate in weird self-eugenics. After a few generations of father and son bodybuilding happens, compounded with the likelihood that a good number of them are gay and unlikely to procreate, the possibility for inbreeding grows, as people with similar interests tend to have kids that they train in these similar interests, the kids fuck the kids of other health nuts, and we'll have gigantic bulldog people that are bizarrely topheavy and naturally hairless.

I'm excited!

Your fantasy seems to be based on assuming roiding up and working out 7 hours a day gives you big muscle genes to pass on?

If we can breed dogs with dog shows, we can breed people with people shows. It's a ghastly idea but instead of Aryan supermensches you'll wind up with chinless Boston Brahmins. The rich have been doing it for thousands of years. A certain degree of bodybuilding success is genetic... no matter the steroids you're not going to get fair if you're a thin wristed chubby thin serf like me. You need a predisposition toward a certain body type to succeed at a competitive level. So they fuck, I dunno, the broads who are into muscle dudes who are into bodybuilding. Then their kids get on the Holonet and meet other bodybuilders/bodybuilder women, and then they get on the Astralnet, etc. etc. etc. Hundred years down the line you get bulldog people with no necks.

We've already bred people for people shows.

Lincoln stopped it.

It could be something like anorexia. A lot of people with eating disorders develop them as a defence mechanism for taking back control of their own body, following some kind of abuse or trauma. I could imagine the same hidden logic drives some of these men.

anorexia is also about self-worth and self-image...all these runaway over-compensation issues probably have similar roots.

and it's a little funny to think a 300lb weight lifter with a 100 gun collection and oversize truck has the same mental issues as a starving 15 year old girl.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_dysmorphia

Also known informally as Bigorexia. It's a pretty serious problem for some people. It's weird posting this right before leg day, but yeah, one of the reasons I'm good with exercising at home is less feeling like I have to compare my body to others around me. Much better on the mindset I think.

>>and it's a little funny to think a 300lb weight lifter with a 100 gun collection and oversize truck has the same mental issues as a starving 15 year old girl.

If that's sometimes the case, it wouldn't be too surprising. Like alpha bros that get in fist fights constantly, they're essentially babies. Except dangerous. I'm sure tons of muscle freaks are nice and stable. I've known a couple big dudes, relative to me anyways, and they kind had that mellow St. Bernard tempremant, because swoll.

As to whether or not they are actually strong relative to their size, the answer is no.

Bodybuilding like this does not lend itself to functional strength, and aside from the drugs it also requires a really unhealthy diet. There's a reason a lot of these dudes die young.

During the off season (when not competing) bodybuilders live RELATIVELY normally, and focus on packing on mass through heavy lifting and eating. At these times, they look a lot more like competitive strongmen. But during the show season, they perform intense vascular workouts, starve themselves, and finally go without water in the days or weeks leading up, in order to attain that "shredded" appearance, making all the tiny nuances of their grotesque bodies visible to the judges.

I used to be friends with an all-natural amateur bodybuilder (no drugs, fairly normal lifestyle, job, wife, but ate 5,500 calories per day and basically lived at the gym). During the months when he was cutting for shows or photos, it was like talking to a drunk. He just wasn't getting enough food or water to sustain enough brainpower for a regular conversation. And he knew it, and hated it, and was miserable as hell, but was also determined to look his best for that one crucial hour.

Had a coworker that was a body builder. He was obsessed with getting bigger and more "swole." He didn't do steroids because her was afraid they'd make his balls fall off. No joke.

I asked him what he got out of it, and for him, it was a combination of endorphins with obsessive incremental increase, the feeder bar of "progressing." Plus, he wanted to look like the bad guy out of a Capcom game. Again, no joke.

I asked what his wife thought about it. He said anything that made him too tired for sex was a win in her book.