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Why Top Athletes Don't Look Like Fitness Influencers (Usually)
- rand846633 3y ago… 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..
- safety1st 3y agoYeah 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...
- bradlys 3y agoNot all of it is “fake”. 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.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago> 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. I believe the term is "hypernormalization"
- AlexandrB 3y agoBecause 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.
- xboxnolifes 3y agoIt'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.
- lancesells 3y agoAlso, 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.
- ThinkBeat 3y agoThough some sports will make your body nonsymmetrical since one side does mosf of the work. Being an athlete and optimizing your body for one specific sport may not be the most healthy and wholesome outcome for all of the body.
- josefresco 3y agoTwo more examples of top athletes with so called "dad bods": Tom Brady, Nikola Jokić Granted Tom has becomes a lot more chiseled as of late, but his time as the football GOAT is done and his time as an influencer is now.
- _fat_santa 3y agoIt'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.
- mecsred 3y agoI agree with most of that, but I feel like I can tell the difference between "strongman" and "out of shape and overweight" pretty easily.
- silverquiet 3y agoThere's buff-fat, skinny-fat, and fat-fat, and the lines aren't always super fine.
- tainted_blood 3y agobeing skinny-fat sucks
- Iulioh 3y agoI was fat fat and now extremely skinny Fat, it is bad. I don't even look fat with my clothes on lol
- swat535 3y agoI was skinny fat once, the best way to combat this is to actually put on weight and muscle. Then eventually lose the extra few pounds. Julian wrote a great guide on this: https://www.julian.com/guide/muscle/ https://www.julian.com/guide/muscle/ HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12618223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12618223
- orthoxerox 3y agoThere was an article that complained that the most financially successful college athletes actually looked like fitness influencers.
- djtango 3y agoCompare Anthony Joshua to Tyson Fury and also Usyk. I'm pretty sure the entrenched interests (like Under Armor) were furious when Usyk and before him Ruiz took out AJ. Only one of the three aforementioned boxers are "built like Hercules" as a colleague once put it.
- red-iron-pine 3y agothey ain't making $$$ by scoring touchdowns -- they can't, because college ball rules. but they can flex on endorsements, and that means having a face and body that sell.
- ketchupdebugger 3y agoSoccer players look like fitness influencers though...
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- dappermanneke 3y agopeople who eat clen, tren hard and anavar give up do end up looking like fitness influencers, many of which are also professional athletes
- alberth 3y agoMilitary Special Forces It’s fairly common that “body builder” looking individuals don’t have the physical stamina nor strength to qualify to become special forces. Theres one thing to look strong and another to be strong. Another is Worlds Strongest Man.
- silverquiet 3y agoBodybuilders 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.
- kelipso 3y agoBodybuilding can lift massive amounts of weight a large number of times. Cardio comes with that. Those muscles aren't made of air...
- Lukas_Skywalker 3y agoThe 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. [1] https://eurapa.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s11556-013-0120-1 https://eurapa.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1007/s11556-013... [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7453510/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7453510/ [3] http://www.saskathletics.ca/images/pdfs/concurrent%20endurance%20and%20strength%20training.pdf http://www.saskathletics.ca/images/pdfs/concurrent%20enduran...
- kelipso 3y ago
- michaelt 3y agoI 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!
- canyon289 3y agoWhile not a top athlete I have personal experience with this as "desk worker" at SpaceX, Google etc who went from being chubby to being lean You can read (most) of the story here https://ravinkumar.com/WhyFitness.html#WhyFitness https://ravinkumar.com/WhyFitness.html#WhyFitness 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
- djtango 3y agoI think everyone is made up different. (and our predispositions themselves can change over time) I am at my best when I am at a calorie deficit. I have such clearer focus. It's annoying because I actually want to put on weight (and also happen to love eating) but it directly impacts my ability to work. If only I could eat and train like a professional athlete...
- canyon289 3y agoInteresting! A big or small deficit? > If only I could eat and train like a professional athlete... Sometimes I feel the same!
- spacemadness 3y agoOK HN, but you really should get some exercise.
- bitsage 3y agoSome 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.
- iamflimflam1 3y agoIt’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.
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- red-iron-pine 3y agowhat 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
- epolanski 3y agoI 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.
- helboi4 3y agoI 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.
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- orthoxerox 3y ago> 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.