An acquaintance of mine is very invested in it and wants to start a college bodybuilding club, arguing it’s a great sport for everyone? Putting aside the “for everyone” part (isn’t it pretty expensive and time intensive?) is bodybuilding a sport? I’ve guess always personally considered a sport as something where you’re physically competing with someone else. So isn’t it more of a hobby?
There are body building competitions. That should qualify it as sport. Running is a sport when people race each other. The runners spend a lot of time running non-competitively in training just like body builders.
Maybe. There are Pinochle competitions. Is Pinochle a sport? All categories in English are fuzzy, but I’ll put Pinochle way outside the penumbra of a sport.
Is the Miss America pageant a sport? It’s certainly a competition.
The “bodybuilding” competitions I’m familiar with are essentially beauty contests for a particular stylized and difficult to attain notion of beauty. In many ways they’re more like dog shows where the idea is to have bred and groomed the perfect Pekinese, bulldog, or whatever breed.
The perfect human body builder is not bred of course, but they are fed, watered, and worked quite deliberately to shape themselves as close to the “breed” ideal as possible.
Note also that that kind of “bodybuilding” is a very different idea from somebody going to the gym a lot to work out, get strong, and, oh by the way, get big. So they can attract the chicks. This is often called “strength training” although bulk is also a goal for many participants.
IMO those folks have a hobby, not a sport. Even if they are competing with themselves from week to week trying to set new “personal bests”.
Which in turn is different from the no-kidding sport of competitive weightlifting.
It’d be interesting for the OP to stop back by and tell us which flavor of bodybuilding / strength training / weightlifting his friend is really talking about.
That’s my personal take as well. The next question of course is whether bodybuilders are athletes.
I missed this before. I think it’s the “Mr. Universe” kind of bodybuilding.
You exert a bunch of physical energy and you’re judged by a panel in a competition.
Usually, in a sport, you exert a lot of the energy in front of a judge but I don’t know that, that’s the most important thing. One might say that for as much as a figure skater is being judged for the performance that she gives on the day of the competition, that performance is only as good as all of the work and practice that went into getting to that day - and that’s 99.9% of the difference between the athlete and a normal person.
That said, you could argue that it’s more like flower arrangement or movie making. Just because labor went into making the product and there’s a competition, that doesn’t make it a sport. There should be something like athleticism involved.
So it largely comes down to the question of whether bodybuilders are athletic? I’d say that they are, but it’s purely a side effect of their artistic endeavor. But, likewise, you might say the same of a figure skater. Intent aside, the reality is that they’re stronger and more well-conditioned than the average person, and that is a central requirement of the activity. They would do better at an athletic pursuit than your average couch potato.
Between an aesthetics competition, a mental game, or a sport - I’m fine with putting it in the sport category but it’s certainly right on the edge with aesthetics.
I think bodybuilding is an athletic discipline but the athleticism mostly occurs in the gym, so it’s not really a spectator sport the way we generally think of sports. It most definitely requires athleticism, not only strength but endurance and flexibility. The competition on stage during which the bodybuilders are judged is not an athletic competition though, not really. So I’d say bodybuilding is a sport, but the formal competition side of it is separate from the sporting part.
Everybody should try to include more exercise into their life. This includes everything from walking more often to strength training. All forms of strength training improve health, can be enjoyable and rewarding, and lengthen lives and healthspan. In particular, it makes seniors more mobile and independent and reduces serious problems like heart disease and fall and fracture risk. People who exercise may eat better or smoke less. Or not.
Yet strength training suffers from some stereotypes - some find gyms intimidating. Some people use illegal or unhealthy supplements to temporarily boost their strength or change their appearance. There are arbitrary divisions into different tribes, though powerlifters, weightlifters, Crossfitters and bodybuilders are more similar than different. People do not always have positive or informed opinions about these groups.
The division between sport and game and such is often arbitrary and depends on who you ask. It’s not that helpful. Personally, I think strength training is a good and useful pursuit. If you get motivation to compete with others, so be it. Most people kind of compete against themselves to measure improvement. But if you do unhealthy things to try to get a certain appearance, this can conflict with a health promotion message and the beneficial effects of exercise. I would not personally think that worth it, but I try not to judge others.
I’d say it’s more of a lifestyle.
At least, it is for me.
As opposed to the “Frankenstein” kind of bodybuilding?
There are a couple of aspects to competitive bodybuilding. Obviously the weight training that goes on behind the scenes is a requirement. Hand-in-hand with that are the steroids and other performance enhancing drugs that are pretty much essential for the major professional competitions. There are drug-free competitions but for better or worse the majority of competitors are on some type of gear.
Then there is the dieting. Contest prep lasts several weeks of very restrictive dieting to get lean enough to show off your physique. It’s difficult, uncomfortable, and many find it the worst part of the sport. If you’re not competing, this really doesn’t factor into it.
Finally, there is posing on stage. For the competitors who are exhausted from dieting, this effort can determine who wins. As a competition, this is something you need on game day. You need to be able to display your muscles, hit the poses and hold them.
So I think it can be considered a sport. There is physical training, preparation, and performance in front of the judges.
Yes, figure skating and synchronized swimming are good analogies, because we acknowledge that these three competitions are greatly based on aesthetic sensibilities, and we acknowledge that different people have widely different aesthetic preferences, so the most tempting conclusion is that the results are not objective, and therefore, these cannot be sports, which generally depend on an objective result.
Not a sport. A beauty pageant. Like Miss Universe.
Well, for the beauty pageants, the contestants raise money for charities to get in. So, in that way, they are at least good sports.
That would be the type that is a sport. You should know anyone who calls competitive body building a ‘beauty contest’ would not want to be seen posing for such a beauty contest. Getting every muscle in your body to pop at once is a physical activity, not makeup or grooming. Only dedicated athletes compete in this sport.
Regarding the need for the contestants to exert themselves physically, competitive video gaming is generally described as a sport by its followers, even though the players just sit in their padded chairs and twitch their thumbs.
So maybe it’s about the excited, involved crowd. And chess could be a sport if they play rock music and a laser show when Magnus Carlsen approaches the board.
Speaking of which: In Sweden chess clubs are organized under the umbrella organization for athletes.
Well, we’ve already got Chess Boxing.
Do you consider racing horses, riding horses, playing video games, fishing, playing chess, playing poker, playing backgammon, playing road hockey, doing free throws to be a sport? Do the people who do it? Does it much matter, or is this so the judger can do a superior dance?
I hadn’t really thought of it, but I do agree bodybuilding competitions are more akin to beauty contest than they are athletic competitions. I’m sure those young ladies competing for the Ms. America crown work out, starve themselves, and practice their walking and posing just as dilligently as body builders train for their event. At the end of the day, body builders are being judged for how they look. It’s not a sport.
I only think it matters in the sense that it’s useful for words to have definitions. I agree that some people think “sport” is a value judgment rather than a descriptor, and that’s (probably irrevocably) muddied the definition of the word.