There are no Fat Hero’s
Chris Hemsworth as Thor
So I’m waiting at a stop light and I notice what appears to be a big guy walking down the sidewalk. There are a bunch of cars in the way so I can only make out his calves, and his hands. Calves are pretty big, and hands and forearms also appear to be a good size.
I can catch the rough tempo and style of his gait, and then it hits me. I can’t tell if this guy is overly fat, or overly muscular. As the cars start to move forward it is revealed to me that the man walking down the street was probably in his mid 50′s, hadn’t seen the inside of a gym in 30 years and was approximately 100 lbs overweight.
The troubling part is that he walks and moves exactly the same way as the powerlifters and bodybuilders from our gym. I wonder if I walked the same way when I was chemically enhanced and weighed 250lbs pounds…possibly, but I can’t remember and nobody ever mentioned anything to me…I certainly hope not.
It’s taken me a long time to get over my need to be bigger and now it just looks silly when I see normal guys eating and training their way up to be as big as this overweight man and ending up looking and walking just like him too.
The new wave of hollywood comic book action hero’s also helps with this point. Ryan Reynolds, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Hugh Jackman etc. The key to the look each guy has is that they’re muscular but also very lean.
During is prep for his role as Thor, Chris Hemsworths trainer explained that the marvel people wanted him to get his shoulders as wide as possible to give him that heroic looking shoulder to waist taper…sounds like the Adonis Index…
Chris Evans as Captain America
All the muscle in the world won’t do a thing for your look if it’s covered in fat. In fact, the more muscle you have mixed with a high bodyfat level the bulkier and fatter you’ll end up looking. Unfortunately many guys will be so afraid to ‘lose muscle’ they’ll let the best years of their life go by being fat in a desperate and futile attempt to build more and more muscle for some non existent day in the future when they think they’ll finally be ‘big enough’ to start stripping away the fat.
It’s sorta like buying a ferrari and then leaving it in a garage for the entire time you own it, never getting in it or every letting it see the light of day. This to me is the similar to spending countless hours in the gym trying to build muscle but all the while concealing it under a thick layer of fat. What is the point?
Excessive bodyfat will always obscure and cloud your ability to tell how much muscle you really have and how well your effort in the gym is paying off.
John
10 Responses to “There are no Fat Hero’s”
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July 4th, 2011 at 7:23 pm
People still think they can eat their way into getting bigger. You hear it all the time with comments about how they need to eat more. I think this just goes to show how backwards the public understanding is.
Contrary to public opinion, when someone is skinny, they shouldn’t be eating more (and I think this only adds to the obesity epidemic) – rather, they should be lifting weights. And that’s assuming they aren’t skinny fat. Your diet affects your body fat levels whereas your TRUE BODY SHAPE is determined by your resistance training program.
July 4th, 2011 at 8:05 pm
Great blog post John! It quite nicely sums up the Adonis approach to fat loss and muscle building.
July 5th, 2011 at 6:35 am
Sadly, this is reality. Guys try to eat their way to be big, which they think is attractive. They don’t care if they are fat or not and as you said they don’t want to even lose that fat, because they are scared to death of losing some muscle mass underneath it. They don’t know that from an attraction stand point it doesn’t really matter, because their muscles aren’t visible anyway.
Good example of this approach is that when somebody asks me what do I do that I look the way I do, they always want to know what food I eat and what supplements do I take. It even doesn’t occur to them, that logically gym is responsible for the muscle mass on my body. As you once said people have it completely wrong, they thing that they need to go to the gym to lose fat and eat a lot to build muscles. There are lots of disbeliefs in today’s fitness community, it’s good that we have guys like you who make it clear and explain how it really works.
Greg
July 5th, 2011 at 9:30 am
“I put on a lot of weight — I put on about 20 pounds at one point. It was purely eating, eating, eating, working out and working out, trying to sleep as much as you can — that’s the other third of the equation. The eating was the biggest thing; since stopping shooting I probably work out the same but don’t eat as much, and I’ve probably lost 15 pounds or something. Chicken breasts and protein shakes, boiled chicken . . . clean meats, the right carbs. Sickly stuff” – maybe I misunderstand something, but from this quote it seems, that the shape of Chris (Thor) was mostly food driven…. So it seems here is another proof, that abs and muscles is made in the kitchen and you have to eat to be muscular
July 5th, 2011 at 11:47 am
Hey John- Great post and sound logic as always. Question for you about the AI systems in general: If i am looking to get stronger, don’t want to spend more than 45 mins in the gym and want to keep things as basic as possible, is there an AI module for that? To be honest all the separate pieces of the AI System seem/look like they might be a little complicated.
Thanks-Chris
July 5th, 2011 at 2:05 pm
Wood:
Chris commits the logical fallacy of assuming that correlation is causation. It wasn’t the food that gave him his physique but rather his workout combined with burning more calories than he takes in. As an professional actor, he was probably exercising and working out non-stop everyday to get into shape, hence why he is able to eat so much and still lose fat.
———————————————————–
It really is no exaggeration to say that the public has it all backwards:
Public:
Diet = gain muscle
Gym = lose fat
Reality:
Diet = lose fat
Gym = gain muscle
July 5th, 2011 at 4:46 pm
yes and everyone is stupid in the fitness and bb community. even the bluestar guys. Every muscular guy/girl follow the same eating routine. I bet John and Pilon followed too.
July 5th, 2011 at 5:36 pm
“yes and everyone is stupid in the fitness and bb community.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
I would also call them an “industry” rather a “community” as their interest is in making money. It’s much different when you look at the scientific and medical community though.
“Every muscular guy/girl follow the same eating routine.”
Correlations is not causation.
And in this case, the correlation would actually suggest otherwise because there are far more people who follow the same eating routine and aren’t muscular and lean. Even if this weren’t true, correlation is only cause for investigation, not conclusion.
July 5th, 2011 at 5:40 pm
“yes and everyone is stupid in the fitness and bb community.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
I would also call them an “industry” rather a “community” as their interest is in making money. It’s much different when you look at the scientific and medical community though.
“Every muscular guy/girl follow the same eating routine.”
Correlation is not causation.
And in this case, the correlation would actually suggest otherwise because there are far more people who follow the same eating routine and aren’t muscular and lean. Even if this weren’t true, correlation is only cause for investigation, not conclusion.
January 30th, 2012 at 11:00 am
[...] along as the years passed. This journey and being 5’7” lead to the conventional “wanna get big” guy [...]