Most bodybuilders walk around the gym in stringers, tank tops, or shorts. Most of them are more muscular than the regular guys that go to the gym. They are the ones that are always at the gym improving their body, lifting large amounts of weight and doing heavy cardio. They make an intense workout look easy. They are the ones many people look up to and get inspired by. They are people in the bodybuilding subculture.
The people in subculture are very hard working, live a very healthy lifestyle and are proud of what they do. Some do this professionally and make a living out of it. While there is no age limit to this subculture it can go anywhere from 17 year olds to 70 year olds in the subculture who live this lifestyle. Others just enjoy it as a hobby or a way of staying in shape and being fit.
Bodybuilding subculture is a very interesting subculture to me. It originated somewhere around the 1890’s. At first “bodybuilding” was just a way to show strength and power to the people almost as if it was like a show that people would attend to watch these people lift heavy things. Unlike now most of them can lift heavy weight but it doesn’t come with a crowd watching every time they do, although many people, like in the Venice beach gym in California, come to watch famous bodybuilders to work out, and because it is an outdoor gym, a lot of people recognize these faces and stop to watch.
When people see a barbell most of them think of this subculture because it is one of the main items bodybuilders use like in bench press or squats and also deadlifts and shoulder press and other workouts. Being the most commonly used weight among bodybuilding I think that the barbell is the perfect icon for this subculture because anyone would think of th...
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...do. Like any other sports it takes a lot of time and consistency. Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard. Bodybuilders live an active and healthy life style and encourage others to do the same and to gain muscle or “gains” as some of them use to describe gaining muscle. You can always find most of them at them gym lifting weights and improving their body, either for a bodybuilding competition or just to simply look good. At the end of the day they all still work hard for the one thing they love and that’s to work out and be healthy.
Works Cited
"What Is Everyday Life Like for a Bodybuilder?" Slate Magazine. Ed. Dylan Hafertepen. Quora Contributor, 4 July 2013. Web. 23 Feb. 2014.
Robsin, David. "A history lesson in bodybuilding" www.bodybuilding.com. 21 march. 2005. Bodybuilding.com. 15 Feb. 2014 .
The gym is a place where a typical American college student goes to work out their bodies. Based on the fact that I personally could be considered a gym rat, a stereotypical name for someone who spends a lot of time in the work out area. This is partially by choice being on the swim team requires the strength training equipment that is available to our disposal in the gym. While I have been to the gym many times I haven’t really taken the time to take in the other people around me. Within this ethnographic exercise I will explore the college gym norms within Roger Williams University.
Kusinitz Ivan, Fine Morton, 1995. Your guide to getting fit. 3rd ed. Mountain View, Calif: Mayfield Pub. Co.
Isn’t everyone’s goal in life to be able to achieve something amazing? Better yet what about setting great goals as an individual? Wouldn’t you like to better yourself as a person? As Arnold Schwarzenegger once said “you can’t climb the ladder of success with your hands in your pockets”, this simply meaning that a person must be “hungry” and have a great drive to be able to achieve greatness. The feeling of greatness and satisfaction that a person will get from being a healthy, fit individual is unexplainable. Being satisfied with your own body is a very important factor to life itself. People that are healthy are known to live healthy lifestyles as well as to be great in age. There is no negative sides to being healthy, people that are healthy are happy. I plan to take an individual and better them by training them and making them a healthier person. The steps I will go through in order to make this happen are steps such as training the person, making a nutritional plan for them, and being there to support them along the journey. I will be training the person using some fundamentals that have worked for majority of world-class athletes. I plan to use simple bodybuilding tactics as my muscle builder, such as old school techniques that Arnold Schwarzenegger used in the golden ages of the sport itself. As my research has shown, my client and I are both pleased with the “golden era” physiques and we plan to make a healthy/fit body molded like the bodies of that “era”. In this project my client and I have decided to base the “nutritional plan” as a high protein/Low carb diet, which I will release in this paper. Through out this project, it should be well know that this is not an easy sport! And the discipline to stick with it is extre...
The article, “5 Ways Crossfit Differs From Bodybuilding”, talks about bodybuilders importance of training. “A bodybuilder’s training is split up to divide muscle groups, ensuring muscles grow and rest in balance, providing weaker groups the extra attention needed to balance physique.” Bodybuilders focus more on having time for their muscles to grow and rest rather than having cardio workouts and working out every day. Bodybuilders base their workout on what they eat. An example is that they workout less than a crossfitter does, but expects the extreme amount of protein they ingest to build their muscles. Bodybuilders will workout for longer periods of time doing less intense, but more muscle building workouts. They workout individual muscles to ensure they are growing them. The goal of a bodybuilder is to be big and muscular, so they do not incorporate near as much cardio as a crossfitter
At the Gym, written by Mark Doty, dramatizes the conflict within the mind of a bodybuilder and his desire to change who and what he is. The speaker observes the routines of the bodybuilder bench-pressing at a local gym, and attempts to explain the driving force that compels him to change his appearance. The speaker illustrates the physical use of inanimate objects as the tools used for the “desired” transformation: “and hoist nothing that need be lifted” (5,6). However, coupled with “but some burden they’ve chosen this time” (7), the speaker takes the illustration beyond the physical use of the tools of transformation and delves into the bodybuilder’s mental state. The speaker ends by portraying the bodybuilder as an arrogant, muscular being with fragile feelings of insecurity.
She told me her name was Sarah Del Cid and that this was her 2nd year working out and tries to “hit” the gym 5-6 times a week. Curiously, I asked her age she answered 43, impressed with her physique I wondered what she did for a living she said “a nanny and a mother of two, a 18 year-old and a 14 year-old”. Sarah was taken back with the interest I showed her; as a result struck a brief conversation with me about why she liked to work out and said “I like to look nice and for my health... just to be healthy”. She continued stating “my fitness routine focuses more on my health, but I competed in professional figure modeling competitions that were very strict” Consequently; I asked her what she thought about women working out with weights since traditionally it has been marked as a masculine endeavor. Sarah laughed asserting “that’s naïve… everyone thinks you become less feminine and grow large muscles like men... that is not the case…muscles are beautiful on women
Although fitness centers and gyms may appear to be a place to break a sweat and work out with the intention of not being seen without makeup and in grungy clothes, this may not be the case, in particular when it comes to college gyms. Contrary to the findings Tamara L. Black displayed in her dissertation for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology from the University of California in Los Angeles, in which she depicts the situation of the classical fitness center as exercise dominated, after observations made while participating in the Boston College Recreational Complex, fitness centers may be more heavily focused on expressing sexual and social relations than for health related issues. Although she does not elaborate on this view of the gym, she does recognize that “popular media, cultural stereotypes, and some empirical literature depict gyms as places to meet people, where sexualized interactions are likely to take place, where bodies are on display as objects of desire” (pg. 40). This may be the perfect definition of the situation that I found in my observations. Shari L. Dworkin and Faye Linda Wachs, in Body Panic: Gender, Health, and the Selling of Fitness, acknowledge “mainstream media construct men as active and women as inactive. In this view, women are often shown as ‘being visually perfect’ and passive, immobile, and unchanging’” (pg. 40). Perhaps we have media to blame for this hyper-sexualization of a situation that was initially intended for self-fulfillment and health related practices.
I was able to gain knowledge about the different parts of the body which are important in the field of bodybuilding. I discover that there are main muscle groups and each of these muscle groups have different parts. For example, the main muscle groups would be the chest, back, arms, shoulders and legs. Now each of these main muscle groups have more that one part, your arms has biceps, triceps and a forearms. Each of these parts are made up or many more segments that can construct a list that can go on for a while. Gaining such a vast understanding of my body was thrilling. I was able to understand all the parts of my body. I am confident that I know almost every muscle group that is in the known human body. After learning about each individual muscle, I was then able to move on to the next step understanding how to train these individual muscle groups. I figured out that there are different routines that you have to follow in order to train each muscle. For example, your legs can be split into different muscles segments such as the quads, calves, and hamstrings. Once I isolated each muscle segment I was able to find workouts for each of them. For the quadriceps you would do workouts known as a barbell squat, lunges and reverse leg curls. Then after finding this out I had to
The object of the meat diet was to produce the bulk and strength supposed to be necessary for the boxer and the wrestler. In Greece classification by weight was unknown, and in boxing and wrestling the heavyweight has the advantage. Therefore, to produce bulk, the trainer prescribed enormous quantities of meat, which had to be counteracted by excessive exercise. Eating, sleeping, and exercise occupied the athlete's whole time and left little leisure for other pursuits (Wolinsky p.8).
Bodybuilding is a practice where through dieting and strengthening individuals enlarge the muscles of their body. Consequently, there are many health risks associated with bodybuilding. It takes a very big toll on a person’s health, not just physically, but mentally as well. For many years the sport of bodybuilding has been male dominated but in the last few decades, female bodybuilding has been making an appearance within the industry. Many believe that female bodybuilding is an act of feminism because it represents the transgression of the social constructs of gender roles such as what it means to be a woman and how a woman should look. For female bodybuilders, it allows them to take charge of their mental well-being and feel empowered.
Women compose the overwhelming majority of the reported cases of eating disorders. The, desire to be thin consumes many young women who idealize the false and unrealistic model form depicted in popular magazines. Recently, researchers have started to appreciate the role of exercise in the development of eating disorders. This shift has illuminated the striking influence of sports on body image satisfaction in men as well as women. The importance of a fit physique has grown increasingly salient to men in modem society as indicated by the rise of hypermasculine action heroes such as Arnold Schwartzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. One growing sport, bodybuilding, now has the sixth largest sports federation and has come to the attention of researchers. In the last few years, researchers have linked bodybuilding to an overwhelming drive for lean muscle mass coined "reverse anorexia" by Pope, Katz, and Hudson (1993) and "bigameraria" by Taylor(1985). The bodybuilders' obsessional behavior resembles anorexia nervosa with remarkable similarity except that the drive for enormous muscles replaces the drive for thinness. This alarming psychological syndrome may motivate bodybuilders and weightlifters, to a lesser extent, to relinquish friends, to give up responsibilities, to pursue unusual diets, to overtrain and to risk their health by abusing steroids.
I saw a large variety of outfits and shoe choices while observing the weight room. I saw several females in tank tops and tight pants while I also saw several females wearing sweatpants and a loose t-shirt or sweatshirts. I saw some males wearing looser shirts and I saw some males wearing extremely tight or cut-off shirts, these men typically had bigger muscles which I would assume gave them the confidence to wear shirts like that. It was easy to set apart the people who have been in the gym for a while from the people who are new to the gym or just learning how to work with certain items in the weight room. While watching the people in the gym I noticed one of the features of reality for the majority, which was the fragility of realities,
Non-competitive body building is very healthy because the person is training here and there, eats very clean with not many processed foods and is usually taking a number of supplements. You really can’t get much healthier than that. Competitive body building is a whole different story. Lifters usually gain a lot of weight in the offseason and put a lot of stress on the digestive and cardiovascular system. Then, 16 to 20 weeks out, they start on a strict diet with a high ...
A gym’s culture is unique. I remember, when I was a gainless (aka muscle diprived), insecure teenage girl, I hated gym goers. I looked at them as self absorbed, petty and judgemental. I went to the gym anyway, because as an insecure teenage girl I thought I was fat, and the grain of rice that tipped the scale was my father telling me about why I have to eat healthier and exercise. I loved
Schwarzenegger, Arnold, and Bill Dobbins. "Evolution and History". Arnold Schwarzenegger Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding. New York and Schuster,1985. N. Pag. Print.