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The Feminine Physique: On Women's Bodybuilding

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Re: The Feminine Physique: On Women's Bodybuilding

#62
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Movie actors, fitness/underwear models, basically everyone on the cover of Men's Health or on a movie poster. Hell, very significant % of not so impressingly looking guys in your local gym are on steroids. Just Google for stats on steroid usage, estimate how many people go to a gym and think what it means. The mystery of Hollywood diet and training to lose 10kg of fat and to put 5kg of muscle in 60 days starts to mak…

Trenbolone is legal to possess in the USA. It's only illegal when you start putting it in yourself instead of cattle.

Trenbolone is Schedule III. It's illegal to possess unless you have a prescription, you can't legally order some without a vet prescribing it for your cow.

Re: The Feminine Physique: On Women's Bodybuilding

#63

Many women choose to do Figure and Bikini competitions over physique. Lots of women use the competitions as focal point to work on their bodies, fitness and get results. I know several women that are generally out of shape frumpy looking, but spent time to get into shape for figure completions. They look amazing with model perfect bodies for competition. Then, right after competition, they celebrate by binge eating j…

> Then, right after competition, they celebrate by binge eating junk food for days and get fat

So do male bodybuilder/fitness competitors. What's your point ?

Re: The Feminine Physique: On Women's Bodybuilding

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Wrestling, Judo, BJJ, MMA, Boxing aren't real sports? Golf isn't a sport? Baseball, Basketball, Football, Volleyball, and Soccer are all won on points not seconds/meters. Power lifting? I can really go on all day. You might not care for the sport but that doesn't make it any less valid as a sport.

Those are all games. Sports are things like running, cycling, rowing, cross country skiing, ski jumping, shot put, etc.

what about shooting?

Re: The Feminine Physique: On Women's Bodybuilding

#65
post #2

Every display sport has a consensus aesthetic that is being optimized for. Don’t expect to be judged well if you’re showing parkour steez at a gymnastics competition. It doesn’t mean the sport is wrong, it just maybe means you should pioneer an alternative sport or category to suit your target aesthetic.

There's a line somewhere where the sport does become wrong IMO. For a different example, dog shows have selected for objectively unhealthy genes (see sloped back & hip dysplasia).

It would be neat to see some sort of blend of function and form scoring. Look ripped, but put those muscles to work as well. Bodybuilding & weightlifting meets gymnastics. The need to perform athletically puts on some guardrails- less starving & dehydrating yourself, for example.

Re: The Feminine Physique: On Women's Bodybuilding

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people are quite aware of how prolific steroid usage in bodybuilding is. It's the movie actor physiques that people aren't as aware of.

Modern actors aren't as willing to sacrifice their health for muscle as their historical counterparts, especially because the lean look is preferred over the muscle-bound appearance of yesteryear. Thus, (with rare exceptions, like Christian Bale between The Machinist and Batman Begins ), what you see on screen today is hard-earned through hours a day in the gym, a very regimented diet, and hydration timing. Generally…

>while Pratt spent nearly 6 hours a day, 6 days a week, for over 6 months on cardio activities to cut weight for the first Guardians movie (as he already had the muscle for the character underneath his excess bulk and just needed to reveal them).

The problem is that they tell these stories, and people believe it. If he had really done six hours of cardio per day he'd likely disappear and have no muscle.

Diet and exercise is, make no mistake, a huge part of it - all of that has to be on point. The reality very much involves manipulating hormones, and that means steroids, growth hormone, etc.

Re: The Feminine Physique: On Women's Bodybuilding

#67

I'm mostly disappointed that there wasn't a single picture in the whole article.

Here you go: https://twitter.com/browne_petra/photo

That does not give much idea of what her bikiny look was like. I was curious about that too, it is very focus of article, but it is described be words only and hard to imagine.

Re: The Feminine Physique: On Women's Bodybuilding

#68
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone is gaming the system, then nobody is.

Yep, this is known as a positional arms race. For other examples, see how everyone now goes to college: when 25% of applicants do it, it's a competitive advantage for them, so everyone else moves towards doing it. https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/23501/1/DP-54.pdf

Sure. The drawback of too many people going to college is more knowledge in the world. What’s the drawback of people taking roids for years on end?

Re: The Feminine Physique: On Women's Bodybuilding

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Wrestling, Judo, BJJ, MMA, Boxing aren't real sports? Golf isn't a sport? Baseball, Basketball, Football, Volleyball, and Soccer are all won on points not seconds/meters. Power lifting? I can really go on all day. You might not care for the sport but that doesn't make it any less valid as a sport.

Those are all games. Sports are things like running, cycling, rowing, cross country skiing, ski jumping, shot put, etc.

Combat SPORTS (MMA, Wrestling, BJJ, Judo, Sambo etc...) aren't games. You don't play Wrestling for example. That is an exceedingly narrow definition of sport and one that I think does a large disservice to Athletes.

Re: The Feminine Physique: On Women's Bodybuilding

#70
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in case of bodybuilding you need very hefty dose of hormones to even start looking like low level competitors. The bodybuilding physique isn't good for any particular activity. It's neither useful nor healthy. It's all organized so you need to grow yourself like cattle (bodybuilders even take steroids designed for making cattle killed for meat muscular). This is already terrible enough for men but for women it'…

Truly. I do not think most people are aware of prolific steroid usage is... It mostly boils down to people pumping themselves full of steroids up until a week or so before the competition so they test clean. With almost zero body fat, most drugs are metabolized and removed from the body really quickly. It was pretty depressing to realize that body-building is totally gamed and drug based. Not because I was ever into…

>It mostly boils down to people pumping themselves full of steroids up until a week or so before the competition so they test clean.

The most common "base" of a steroid cycle is testosterone. If you stopped injecting testosterone a week before a competition, you would still show unusually high levels of testosterone in your blood (even if you were using a shorter ester). But as others have pointed out, they don't test for steroids in most BB competitions.

My personal suspicion is that pro BBers who use steroids but deny it do so to protect product endorsements they have.

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