rawlife’s BodyBlog

  So I’m going to be honest about it when I am and hopefully, before long, I will see the error in my ways.  I was looking through a popular muscle magazine the other day and I seriously almost laughed out loud when I saw the characters in it.  It’s funny how everyone talks about how they want to popularize bodybuilding and bring it into the mainstream, and yet, they use the exact same techniques to do so that they used back in the 80s-fake grimaces, fake weights, fake workouts, strange clothes, and an almost comically primped and pruned face.  All of it, fake.  Including the bodies.  Now I’m going to be totally honest but I’m going to use a disclaimer before I do so: I did feel bad about saying this, even though I just said it to myself.  Here’s the honesty: I looked at one guy in particular who shall remain nameless and for the first time in I don’t even know how long, I uttered an outright insult.  I said to myself, ‘I’ve honestly almost never come across a bigger tool in my life.’  That’s how goofy this guy looked and how goofy most of them look.  The time of the shaved and tanned, primped and pruned all year around bodybuilder has long since past, in my eyes.  I can’t connect with him.  And I don’t think I’m the only one.  Want to sell magazines?  Want to popularize the sport?  Give the public someone or something they can connect to.  Someone to look up to, but someone who shares enough in common with them that they don’t feel like they are looking at an alien.  I shouldn’t even have to say this, but to look up to someone, the reader has to be able to first respect the person.  I looked through this particular magazine and felt like I was looking at pictures of the mentally handicapped-people who let their own evolution come to a grinding halt looong ago.  I understand that the magazine asks certain things of them, but they are ultimately responsible for their own actions and their own actions look real goofy to me.  It’s becoming more and more clear to me that there is a real problem with a group of people who try to protray a hyper male image by building excessively muscular bodies all the while voluntarily separating themselves from everything that actually makes them male-body hair, testicles, a deep voice…etc.  Strange how that is….hyper male physique, hypo male everything else. 

   I flipped through a few more pages and saw a picture of a great strongman pulling a heavy deadlift.  That got me going.  Right then I wanted to go crush it in the gym.   The grimace on his face was real.  The weights were damn heavy.  His body, although assisted, still had enough of it’s natural/innate qualities for me to connect with and most importantly…the energy came through in the picture, it was brutal, every last ounce of it.  How about more photoshoots of actual workouts.  Think that people don’t notice when a bber is making a face versus actually grimacing from the pain?  I do.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 11:23 am and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.