I’ve seen pix of weightlifters with bulgy veins in their arms, and the other day I saw a fellow in the grocery store with similar bulgy veins, so I assumed he was a weightlifter.
How come? Why do their veins get so bulgy?
In the body building world, “vascularity” is seen as desirable. I don’t know if there’s an actual correlation between the two, but body builders believe that visually bulging blood vessels means extremely low body fat.
When your arms are soft and squishy, there’s plenty of room for the veins in with all the other squishiness. But when your arms are full of rock-hard biceps, the veins need to go somewhere.
Yep. Not to be confused with “healthy,” necessarily.
There are a lot of unhealthy practices in the body building world.
Visible vessels are a combination of two things.
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Growing muscle requires more blood to provide oxygen and remove wastes. Blood vessels may increase in size and number.
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Low levels of below skin (subcutaneous) fat and body fat are needed to get the stereotypical bodybuilder look. You can be strong with moderate levels of body fat. Natural bodybuilding is almost as much about diet as it is about gym work. Some bodybuilders would consider taking diuretics before a competition to be natural.
It’s interesting that my son has been a competitive weightlifter for more than 20 years. He has certainly has a more muscular build than I do, but no “vascularity” or excessively bulging biceps, pecs, quads, etc.
Which illustrates a distinction between weightlifting and bodybuilding.
Bodybuilders aren’t looking for performance, they’re looking for appearance.
An i the only one who finds that appearance incredibly unappealing? The bulging veins in particular. That just looks creepy to me.
Weight lifters, as distinct from body builders, get bulgy veins from high blood pressure. It sometimes causes brain haemorrage. It’s a side effect of the muscle tightening they do to avoid bursting muscles – the reason they wear the gut belt.
Me too. As a heterosexual male I don’t care about the men, but I have seen a few pictures of female bodybuilders who look like that, and I find it very unattractive.
As a straight woman, i like looking at certain men. But body builders look disgusting, and i am clearly not their target audience.
Vascularity in bodybuilders is a function of having low body fat.
It is enhanced temporarily during and immediately after a workout, since lifting weights will engorge the targeted muscles with blood. Additionally, during contests, bodybuilders will become dehydrated to increase definition
When you see a bodybuilder in a picture with “freaky” vascularity, it’s a temporary look; that person doesn’t usually look like that all the time.
To show a prominent example of the difference between being “cut” and vascular, versus looking more normal, see these pictures of Chris Bumstead, one of the top bodybuilders in the world (who just recently retired)
Well, the right hand picture looks more like someone has been bred to produce lots of meat than like a desirable figure, but it’s not as creepy and off-putting as the one on the left.
I work with a couple guys who spend a lot of time in the gym. I am not sure if they’re on anabolic steroids or not, but for each, their muscles look disproportionally large compared to the rest of the body, and especially the head. It just looks so unnatural, and is off-putting to me.
You may be amused to know that “C Bum” has said in interviews that 90% of the comments he gets are from men (“You’re huge!” “Big man!”), not women.
Not sure this is quite an FQ answer, but “prominent veins = heavy steroid use” has been a well-known rule of thumb in body building since forever.
Whether the steroids directly cause bulgy veins or the bulging is a side effect of whatever else the steroids do, such as reducing subcutaneous fat, is beyond me.
Note that in @Moriarty’s excellent comparison pictures, even the right = bulking version has prominent veins in his arms where not obscured by the tattoo sleeve.
When I see veins I see steroid (ab)use.
I think that, to say that definitively, you’d need to have a control sample of bodybuilders who don’t use steroids. And while I don’t doubt that some such exist, I would imagine that there’s considerable uncertainty in who those individuals are.
A prescient comment there @Chronos. I was editing that info into my prior post when I lost it to an errant keystroke. I hate it when that happens. Anyhow …
The body building competition world has a division called “naturals”. Which are (supposedly) drug-free. Just extreme diet and extreme exercise on top of favorable genetics. The main drugs are regularly tested for, and cheaters disqualified pretty much for life. For sure some people cheat some. Humans are like that. But they are a pretty decent control group versus the unlimited steroid use crowd like e.g. CBum cited above.
Here’s natural body builders - Google Image Search. If you follow some of those results to take a good look, you’ll notice more prominent veins than on you or me, but you’ll also notice they’re significantly less prominent and qualitatively different than what we see on the 'roid monsters.