It's for the simple reason that what "looks good" isn't what's going to get you the best results in a sport. Take "strong men" and compare them to bodybuilders. When you see a bodybuilder on stage, they look like they can pick up a car but in reality they are typically at their weakest point, as most have to get massively dehydrated before the event so they can showoff their veins in their muscles. Compare those guys to "strong men" who aren't training for looks but rather to see how much they can lift. Most of those guys look out of shape and overweight and you can't really appreciate that physique until they go off and bench 700+lbs or squat over 1,000 pounds.
I think this is all 100% true. But I would add that what looks good is, for many sports, also what does get you the best results. Most of all combat athletes in sports with weight limits do look like fitness influencers, because they're incentivized to pack as much muscle and cardio into as small a mass as possible. Of course there are plenty of exceptions, but they are exceptions.
The same also seems true in football/soccer for reasons that I don't quite understand. It wasn't ever really my sport, and I don't get why those guys are so shredded everywhere. I'd expect to see more 'runner builds' than there seem to be. I guess the necessity for short bursts of intense strength/speed, and rolling 40 feet on the ground after somebody grazes you, changes the optimal body comp.
The same also seems true in football/soccer for
reasons that I don't quite understand. It wasn't
ever really my sport, and I don't get why those guys
are so shredded everywhere.
They're not just running in straight lines. They're making all kinds of lateral cuts and contorting their body in various ways as they jockey for position with other players for contested balls, on set pieces, etc. Those things rely heavily on core abdominal strength. They also use their arms quite a bit, which is why they are not just withered vestigal appendages.
>The same also seems true in football/soccer for reasons that I don't quite understand.
Soccer players are constantly making maximum-effort sprints with very limited recovery, and they have to contort themselves into weird positions to weave around their opponents and get or keep the ball. They need leanness and power for pure acceleration, but they also need balanced muscularity to protect them against injury. They're part sprinter, part distance runner and part gymnast.
There’s also a measure of, well combat is not the right word but a mix of toughness and finesse in order to trap and control the ball, and not fall over when you eat a penalty shot.
Maradona was at his prime in the 80s, that was a very different time for sports in general, and very much football in particular. You can look at team pictures from back then and now and bodies have been way refined.
An other component is that natural talent and skill can compensate for a lot of hard work. Not all, but a lot.
In my experience training in BJJ, Muay Thai, and Judo, the ones at the tippy top look very fit and healthy, but aren't packed muscles of Adonis or washboard abs.
And these are people who have significant win records at Lumpinee, IBJJF, Olympics, etc. Even the fighters at the qualifier UFCs matches (the ones that start 5-6 hours before the main fight) tend to look more "normal".
Though, then again, I guess it depends what your definition of "fitness influencer aesthetic" is - is it someone who concentrates on washboard abs and aesthetics or someone who's conventionally attractive but also competitive in some sport.
That said, towards the very top of the UFC and OneFC pole, some amount of aesthetic training is included due to the whole marketing "schtick".
Also, according to some of my friends and trainers who have competed in UFC, OneFC, etc - there is a bit of an issue around PEDs towards the higher end of the spectrum that has a become a bit of a problem. The USADA and the UFC's new doping agency has become very lax on testing the past few years. McGregor wasn't the only fighter who has had issues surrounding doping - he's just more prominent and inculcating a "bad boy" image.
Good answers already one thing to add is that a runner build wouldn't prepare you for kicking power. Technique goes a long way but at the top level every tiny difference adds up and so not only are footballers doing a tonne of sprints, jumping for headers etc but they also need to generate power for shooting which benefits from mass.
In more physical leagues like the EPL having some mass is also beneficial (unless you are Messi)
> runner build wouldn't prepare you for kicking power
Visit Lumpinee sometime ;).
You'll be very surprised by the body types of winning fighters. Most of the Thai fighters have a runner bod, because of early childhood nutrition issues (most fighters come from Isaan, the poorest region of TH and started fighting as a way to make money in the very large illicit gambling scene)
And the best fighters I've trained with are all avid runners. At Woodenman, the fight team would always run 6-7 miles every morning before multiple training sessions.
Ha I train with Lumpinee winners! Point taken they do hit plenty hard and traditionally were pretty scrawny. I would argue though that their power is attained in spite of their weight and strength disadvantage. Panpayak comes to mind as a current scrawny yet powerful kicker.
Nong O told a friend he was frustrated that he only got access to modern training habits and nutrition so late into his career - he spent most his training just doing press ups for S&C
Compare that with fighters like Superbon who now do all kinds of explosive training.
The Saenchai kick off with Wonderboy was interesting - Saenchai's kick was beautiful there was almost no telegraph and it didn't look like he gave it his all but he was "only" kicking at about 47k whereas Wonderboy was maxed around 93k and Sensei Seth hit over 100k.
And that belies the physics of power - that its both technique and mass. I doubt Wonderboy or Seth's technique can hold a candle to Saenchai's.
Put it this way - would you rather eat a leg kick from Saenchai or Rico Verhoeven? Would you rather get punched by Naoya Inoue or Anthony Joshua?
Anyway comparing physiques - look at 100m sprinters vs 10k sprinters.
Justin Gatlin and Usain Bolt vs Mo Farah. That fast twitch explosive muscle tends to be bulkier... And footballers def run more like a sprinter than a long distance runner
Distances run in football are pretty short. Field is at most 120x90m. So there is lot of running during game, but distances at single time are not that long. Sprinters also look rather jagged.
I would say that it's obvious to anyone that works out or is familiar with athletics. But take someone who may not be well versed in this space and it's easy to fool someone
> I think your body tends to get strong where it needs to.
It’s more that the human body is very good at shedding the non required. The result is the same, but the logic is different, human physiology will actively and quickly cannibalise under-utilised muscle mass as muscle mass is expensive.
Because athletes need their body to actually do stuff, not just look good. The main thing fitness influencers do with their body is pose for the camera.
Edit: Excess muscle is a liability in many sports. Off the top of my head, neither running and climbing benefit from being "big" like what most fitness influencers aim for. Muscle is both heavy and requires additional energy/oxygen input to keep fed.
Also, only part of of being a top athlete is being fit. It's typically their skill at the pursuit that separates them from all the rest.
I would guess a majority of fitness influencers are somewhat genetically gifted in being fit. Whereas a quarterback might be genetically gifted at passing a football.
It's not just amount of muscle either, but also the kinds of muscle. Each sport has particular muscles that benefit that sport more. Influencers focus on the muscles that are visibly attractive.
… because influencers also don’t “look like influencers” if you don’t do proper lighting and posing plus a bit of photo/video shop... additionally, only take pictures and video footage after hungering periods, then use the picture material over the next few month..
Yeah this was a pretty stupid article. I mean I go to the gym regularly and see some amazingly good looking people, some of whom are no doubt fitness influencers, and guess what... none of them look like fitness influencers on Instagram.
Because it's all fake. It's all doctored. It's lighting, airbrushing, filters, and whatever other increasingly advanced AI-augmented techniques are being used to make digital images look hyper-real and impossibly good.
If anything amazes me it's how many people fail to understand this. I guess the millions doomscrolling on the couch in their underwear have not seen what an actual great body looks like, so they believe the fitness "photos" on IG are real. Thus the scrolls continue and the money flows...
> I guess the millions doomscrolling on the couch in their underwear have not seen what an actual great body looks like, so they believe the fitness "photos" on IG are real.
perception is reality, and most people are bombarded by these images in TV, movies, video games, and social media. that is their normal, and they've been getting those images since they were kids, when He-Man and Barbie were their role models.
Getting a pump, having good downlighting, and being picky about what you eat that day are all things that will make a lot of people who appear soft in other conditions look freaky.
I’ve seen it for myself. Downlighting and a pump is your real body.
It’s very interesting to see how what is considered a fit healthy body has changed over time. Just take a look at the original Star Trek series - William Shatner was often wrestling with various aliens with his top off - at the time he would have been considered a prime specimen.
This started changing back in the 80s with the popularity of Schwarzenegger and later Stallone.
In many ways, the unrealistic body expectations that used to be applied mostly to women are now applied across the board.
what was the dave berry line, something to the effect of: in the 1950s you could be a manly man simply by having a scrotum and wearing aftershave. By the 1970s you had to have chest hair and a chin. by the 90s you needed to be He-Man, and by 2008 you needed to be a metro-sexual
Bodybuilders are going to be freaking strong compared to the vast majority of the bell curve of people. And speaking from experience, that weight training can really increase cardio health too (I can't do much lower-body cardio because of disability, but get a lot out of upper-body workouts). It's just that they're doing what they do primarily for aesthetic reasons; the strength is more of a side-effect (and the drugs can be problematic as the article alludes to). There's also no correlation with martial arts skill really; that's an entirely other thing.
I'm 60+, spent most of my time outdoors (a few million+ SLOC of exploration geophysics sensing | analysis | GIS code written in field ) and have yet to meet a bodybuilder that can put in an 8 hour shift on a long handle shovel day in day out.
Wirey station hands can, skinny and|or fat farmers can, I still can and my father (still alive, born 1935) still can.
Sustained steady physical work is a thing that seems largely orthoganal to gym fit.
A lot of this is because being overly string is a disadvantage. Body builders can lift more weight, but that's a lot of extra muscle to move when lifting relatively light things hundreds or thousands of times. A body builder could literally be working twice as hard as a wiry person, by having to lift their own muscles.
The physiological property that is used as a proxy for cardiovascular fitness is usually the bodys maximum oxygen consumption.
Strength training apparently has only very very little effect on that. [1] [2] [3]
Generally, to increase the maximum oxygen consumption, one has to exercise at about 90% of the maximum heart rate. This usually doesn't happen during strength training.
From what I gather, you achieve a base level of VO2max with strength training that is better than sedentary people but worse than people who do regular cardio. So if your VO2max is initially low, strength training does have a significant effect on it. But if you want to increase it yet more, you have to do cardio (which you can do with weightlifting too btw!).
spec ops types often have to take steroids to keep their lean muscle mass up because operational tempo and training take such a heavy toll. most of them are fairly unimpressive looking -- met a few navy SEALs and they were shorter and goofier looking than you'd think. then you see them run a CQB course....
But in summary I'd say, exercise is great, getting lean isn't necessarily great. In this picture three years ago I was the leanest I ever was, which like the article says, looks great, but doesn't always feel great. I wasn't even body builder lean which would have been a new level of suffering.
Since then I've put on fat again, not as much as before, but enough to be a point where I'm happy with where I look, I don't need to track macros etc.
My suggestion is use the influencers as motivation, but unless you really want to sacrifice a lot don't try to be them. But no matter how you look, exercising has a number of positive effects and I'm very happy to have reversed the trend in my late 20's. Even though I don't get paid to look good at my job, feeling great both inside and outside of my job has changed my life
I feel like for decades we have talked and warned about "impossible" body standards for women in professional modelling world, where they were all so skinny, but nobody is raising much warnings about how much worse male body standards have become.
Look at the insane difference of superheroes from the 60s/70s and in the 2000s.
What's worse is how those "role physique roles" are blatant lies. People genuinely believe that Dwayne Johnson or Hugh Jackman (when preparing for his wolverine role) aren't under all kind of meds and steroids, and those actors lie about it as well.
Obtaining a physique even vaguely similar in size and body fat % as what you see on TV and social media naturally is just not possible.
But whereas society refused the ridiculous standards of female modelling and modelling itself moved from those 90s extremes family Disney movies are getting filled with drug filled actors setting impossible and ridiculous standards.
> People genuinely believe that Dwayne Johnson or Hugh Jackman (when preparing for his wolverine role) aren't under all kind of meds and steroids, and those actors lie about it as well.
Even if they aren't on gear, looking shredded on screen is literally their full-time job. It's much easier to get shredded when you have a chef prepare all your meals according to your dietician's meal plan and you train with your personal trainer as often as your body can recover, with all three taxed as business expenses.
It's very different from having a day job that expects you to sit in a chair for 40+ hours a day. All your training and nutrition happens on top of that.
Look at the physiques of Philip Ricardo Jr. or Ron Williams, even though that's their full time job to be body builders, even though they have the best combination of genetics, training, etc, even at their peak in competition mode they are still smaller than the likes of these actors and they are only that lean for few few weeks.
I was on a self improvement discord server that had a large amount of teenage boys a few years back. The conversations they had about diet and fitness reminded me of horrifying conversations I heard from teenage girls over a decade ago when I was a younger teen. Stuff like boys freaking out because they ate cake on their birthday and others telling them to restrict to repair the damage. It made me suddenly very very concerned about male body image.
I'll probably be downloaded or flagged just for saying this but they never will care. Men are considered expendable in our society. Men's issues are constantly downgraded in importance and the only time its ever really taken seriously in the public consciousness is when it affects women or society at large. ie: domestic violence or mass shootings.
I mean, athletes don't even look like other athletes, usually.
Would you expect a champion shot putter, a champion marathon runner, a champion cycle sprinter, a champion gymnast, a champion table tennis player, a champion boxer and a champion jockey to look the same?
Of course you wouldn't. Oh, they'll all look athletic - but the shot putter will be a tower of strength, the marathon runner lean and weather-beaten, the cycle sprinter will be about 50% thighs by volume, and so on.
For some reason, fitness influencers and Hollywood superhero actors all seem to go for the same look, though. And both jobs have absolutely no steroid testing. What a coincidence!
Some people can be good at their sport of choice and not have an aesthetically pleasing physique while others can be good and have an admirable physique. Anyways, it seems silly to focus on Kelce and not all the players who received or ran for touchdowns that game and, coincidentally, have great physiques such as: Hardman, Scantling, Jennings, and most notably, McCaffery.
This is just a body positivity spiel. The main point of the article is also inherently ridiculous, comparing bodybuilding fitness influencers to people of an entirely different sport makes no sense. How GQ has fallen, from spreading self improvement tips, to shaming people for having six packs.
