Society advances. We know more about the human body, exercise and nutrition now than we did 20-30 years ago. Add to this fact that obtaining and sharing this information is so effortless nowadays, its no surprise that what qualifies as “extremely fit” today is an overall “improvement” from what qualified as such 30 years ago
Yes, I made this observation in the this thread.
Your average in-shape gym rat is likely to be more muscular than the “musclemen” of a half-century ago.
You mean starved. Anorexic people. Extremely low body fat does not mean they are “fit.” And they are not an common sight, happily enough.
This is bullshit. These people are not starving themselves, they’ve systematically lowered their bodyfat thru careful, educated and informed dietary choices. The aim for fitness-minded people is the reduction of bodyfat while simultaneously retaining as much lean body mass as possible. No anorexic gives two shits about what sort of weight they lose, the number on the scale is the bottom line.
You sound a bit jealous of these folks, to be quite frank.
Color me me skeptical. The basic fundamental principles of progressive resistance training have not been rewritten since Milo of Croton apocryphally carried that calf in ancient Greece, and trained with boulders and halteres. StrongLifts 5x5, for example, is essentially the same program that Bill Starr created in the '70s. The gains by finessing the programming are more optimizing to the particular result desired, more hypertrophy vs more strength vs more power, and significant only because even small improvements matter greatly once someone is getting close to the asymptote of their genetic potential.
Are there more men more concerned about their beach bodies and cutting down to body fat percent levels (while still sustaining muscle mass) that previously only male models and competitive body-builders hit? I have no idea. Maybe on the beaches in So Cal that HoneyBadgerDC goes to. Certainly more males from even young ages are unhappy with how they look.
Let’s also be precise with the terms Ambi … nothing wrong with competitive body building as a recreational activity, and nothing necessarily wrong with working to get the Holy Grail of washboard abs (may their name be praised). But stating that such is the “aim for fitness-minded people”? No. Getting to that low level of body fat percent is a goal for some for a variety of reasons, I judge not, but it does not define “fitness” by most usages of the term.
I didn’t say they were trying to get down to *competition * bodyfat levels. I said they were trying to minimize fat while preserving/gaining lean mass. And if you ask the average person in the gym, I bet they’d echo those sentiments.
The people being referenced were
That is most definitely not the average gym rat. And even for you body-builders it is often only in competition season with more fat mass being allowed at other times.
This is not correct. As a point of clarification, steroids are a class of drugs that includes catabolic steroids (like cortisone) which do not build muscle (but instead reduce inflammation) and anabolic steroids, which do.
Even if we are talking about anabolic steroids, they can be legally prescribed by a doctor for any number of conditions. And if you see an “anti-aging” clinic being advertised (which typically promote male hormone replacement therapy), they are prescribing anabolic steroids, like testosterone injections. Now, it is true that they are giving it in dosages much lower than what a bodybuilder would consider sufficient, but your statement doesn’t reflect that nuance.
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where exactly are you seeing these people? Have you been in a Walmart lately?
I frequently go running on a trail that passes near a fitness center and most of the people coming out of the fitness center do not by any means have “killer bodies” which I assume you mean indicates someone starved down to an unhealthy level of body fat so their muscles are visible.
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I disagree that a person needs to “starve down” to an “unhealthy level” so that their muscles are visible. For one, most people’s muscles are visible, to the extent that they aren’t covered by clothing. And if you are referring to the abdominal muscles, you can start to see them at about 12% bodyfat, and they’ll look like you can poke your finger in them at about 5% or 6% bodyfat. Neither is particularly unhealthy, although the lower number would be hard to maintain for any length of time, barring some genetic tendency, as it requires a pretty strict exercise and nutrition regimen.
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As for the OP, I think three things are going on:
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If I understand the statistics correctly, there is a very large number of overweight people in this country. So, the “average” American is more out of shape, making a person who is in good shape stand out more, thereby making it seem like there are more “in shape” people then ever before. Confirmation bias, I believe.
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Fitness has developed in our culture, and working out with weights has supplanted running and jazzercise as the popular culture means of “getting in shape”. What was once literally considered a perverted interest in one’s physique has become maintstream, such that men can even “scape” themselves. Naturally, some people are going to emerge at the fringes of that cultural shift, and those people are now being noticed.
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Like all things, the internet has made knowledge about fitness and nutrition ubiquitous, enabling more people in more places to become involved. In addition, the extent of the knowledge of how to achieve certain fitness goals has increased. Combined, that equates to more people with a larger base of knowledge on how to shape their physiques.
We also have a fairly large number of MMA training facilities in the South Bay area of Los Angeles county. These gyms are a hot bed of the type of bodies I am referring to.
Extreme fitness = Drugs
It may not be that simple of a formula but it’s a pretty safe bet. To think that this it’s just nutrition and training methods is extraordinarily naive. For example, look at the college lineman in the NFL draft. In 1979 the heaviest guy was 272. 7 years you had Tony Mandarich at 315 pounds of muscle. It wasn’t training methods. It was drugs:
MMA training facilities are also a hot bed of PED use.
In a number of cases, yes - when Christian Bale puts on 90 pounds of muscle in less than a year moving from one role to another, it is a very safe bet that PEDs were involved. Likewise, top level athletes in the Tour de France, Olympics, and other fields are very likely occasional or frequent users of PEDs.
However, it is still clear that there have been real advances in nutrition and programming - again, when high school students are able to match and exceed olympic records of 20 and 30 years ago in multiple fields, it is highly unlikely that a good percentage of them are on PEDs.
A lack of opportunity, credit cards for online ordering, and lack of disposable income (by all accounts, even routine PED’s are fairly expensive on a monthly basis, and the exotic ones can cost many thousands per month), on top of the medical fact that steroid use at a young age can have permanent negative health consequences to present growth, future testosterone production, and future fertility discouraging coaches and other adults from taking the step to offer PEDs, all make it very unlikely that a good proportion of students are using. And yet, they can still exceed olympic level performance of decades ago in multiple sports. How is this? Evidence based advances in programming and nutrition.
There are a large number of genuinely, magazine-cover-level fit people out there who have never touched PEDs, and their physiques are fueled by these advances. Conversely, there are plenty of men out there actually on steroids who don’t have head-turning physiques, because even on gear it takes incredible discipline, hard work, and nigh-obsessive nutrition measurement applied consistently for years at a time to maintain sub 8% body fat and decent muscle mass.
And incidentally, there is another factor beyond the PEDs debate, often called out by Greg Nuckols - back in the 70’s, the number of people interested in bodybuilding and magazine-cover level physiques was negligible.
Today, not only has overall population grown, but broad interest in building great physiques has grown significanty as well, and there is a much bigger pool of talent to pull from. Assuming a standard distribution, the fact that the pool is much bigger means you will see many more instances of people who were formerly on the far end of the bell curve, and the ends of the bell curve themself will be further out as well due to the larger population bringing more outliers and expanding the range of possible physiques.
The end result of these factors would be that A) magazine-level physiques are no longer so far out on the bell curve of physiques you see, and B) there are a lot more people within that range. They are therefore less rare in a twofold way, and seeing a lot more people with them, however they are attained, should not be surprising.
Ok, I may have spoken too generally before but it doesn’t affect my point. There have always been a segment of the population that is considered “extremely fit”. My point is that the degree of fitness for those people has increased over time. “Extremely fit” people 30 years ago pale in comparison to “extremely fit” people of today.
There are multiple reasons for this; PEDs certainly play a role. The science behind them has increased exponentially over the past few decades. Just as our knowledge of nutrition, exercise and the human body has increased. Extremely fit people (some of them) 30 years ago also used steroids, they just had fewer tools at their disposal.
My thought is that “fitness” wasn’t a thing back in say… 1990. People worked out, but it was almost entirely in a health related context, or for losing weight.
There wasn’t a concept of being a healthy weight, but not “fit” like there is today. I was actually commenting to my wife about a Target commercial with some impossibly fit muscular Latina in it, who was clearly intended to look sexy in her tight workout clothing. My comment was that back when I was in college(1991-1996), we’d have been more or less disgusted because muscle definition like that wasn’t considered attractive on women, and that level of low body fat pretty much equaled no breasts to speak of.
But nowadays, the “fit” look that’s considered most attractive is very lean and defined, and requires a lot of time to accomplish, so in some sense, it’s the province of professional attractive people like actors/actresses, models, strippers, and… hobbyists. By that I mean people who’s main out of work activity is exercising and eating right in order to look fit.
That’s why I believe that the muscle tone and definition is so much greater- it’s either people whose professional success depends on it, or they’re nutty hobbyists who are as nutty about being fit as any other hobbyists are nutty about their various hobbies.
Well again, I think our op is way overgeneralizing seeing bodies in his So Cal location near a bunch of MMA training facilities. I just plain don’t see it IRL in general.
But let us be clear, big muscles have been around for a long time but is not what the op is noting in his MMA dense neighborhood. It’s the chiseled look that only shows at very low body fat percents, the percents that previously pretty much only male models competitive bodybuilders (in competition season only) achieved. That is not the result of advances in science or greater levels of fitness. It is the result of greater dissatisfaction with how their bodies look at more reasonably low, very healthy, and consistent with extremely high fitness levels, body fat percents.
Could it be true that there are more males fixated on (and for some obsessed with) achieving and maintaining those very low body fat percents while maintaining muscle mass? Could be, and certainly “muscle dysmorphia” is a very trendy label of late … but no good data on if it is actually increasing or not.
Could it be that the fitness trend balance has switched from marathons to more strength related fitness activities? Probably to some degree.
But please do not perpetuate a falsehood that body fat percents of 8% are somehow greater “fitness” than say 14% is. Getting that low has nothing to do with fitness by any reasonable definition of the term.
Seriously I think y’all way oversell the advances made and most of the bro science that gets passed around is pretty sketchy stuff.
**Textual Innuendo **, seriously cite please that large numbers of High School athletes are routinely exceeding Olympic level performance of decades ago in multiple sports. Just checking the first I could think of - 100m dash. US record in the age group of 15 to 16 (reasonable High School age) is an impressive 10.51 seconds. That was a world record level performance … in the 1920s, but not since. The top seven times in the 2012 Olympics were old sub 10 seconds (and then there was another under 10s time … but disqualified for doping).
Ive been careful to use quote marks when using the term “extremely fit” in this thread because it’s not necessarily a pursuit of better health as much as it is a pursuit of a certain look.
Why? PED use among high school kids is in the high single digits to low teens:
It stands to reason that it’s not the math club using all of these PEDs. The reality is that steroids are cheap, easy to obtain, and difficult for test for. Heck, most high schools don’t even perform any tests at all. With a scholarship and potentially a professional future, what high school kid isn’t going to take PEDs?
It honestly doesn’t matter if you use steroids or other enhancements, you still have to do the work. At lay-person levels of dedication (3x a week, or ya know, whenever ya feel like it) steroids would be a complete waste of time and money. If you wanted to pack on a shit-ton of muscle, you still need to work out properly, often, consistently, and eat appropriately.
Enhancements are enhancements; there are no shortcuts. Compare genetic twins doing the exact same routine and diet, but one with steroids and one without, and you’ll find probably single-digit percentage differences between them.
If there are actually more people around you with “killer” bodies, and it’s not just a perception bias or population cluster in your specific area, then there are more people around exercising and eating optimally. It’s a very safe bet that the majority of them are not gearing-up. Elite athletes and idiots are the two groups who are willing to trade the substantial downsides of dealing with performance enhancing drugs for the minimal gain in effectiveness. The Pareto principle is just as demonstrable in fitness as in other fields.
This isn’t true. According to this study the use of steroids resulted in approximately twice as much strength gain and about three times as much muscle growth. Even more interesting than that, simply using steroids was as effective as working out three times a work. By that, I mean the participants that took steroids with no exercise saw about the same gains as those that took the placebo and exercised.
Is there any evidence to seriously suggest that casual users (i.e. non-athletes, non-bodybuilders) are using steroids for cosmetic purposes?
I still maintain that it’s a combination of changing standards of attractiveness (i.e. muscular and fit is now attractive, where it wasn’t 25 years ago), and a couple of groups of people who make it a primary aim of their lives (professionally “attractive” people and fitness hobbyists).