Look, I’m all for pushing yourself and striving to be your best. Setting ambitious goals, working your ass off, making sacrifices to achieve them – that’s admirable stuff. But there’s a line between dedicating yourself to a challenging pursuit, and straight up abusing your body. And when it comes to professional bodybuilding, that line isn’t just crossed, it’s obliterated.
Let’s be real here. You don’t get to be a top level competitive bodybuilder by practicing healthy, balanced habits. We’re talking about guys who are 5’9″ and 280 lbs in the off-season. That’s not accomplished by eating a sensible diet and training hard a few times per week. It requires consuming a ridiculous 8,000+ calories per day and injecting obscene amounts of anabolic steroids and other drugs.
But the off-season is just the beginning. Leading up to a competition, they’ll radically cut calories and amp up the workouts to shed 30-40 lbs in a matter of months. The drug stack shifts to hardcore cutting agents like trenbolone and clenbuterol. Diuretics are added at the end to achieve that totally peeled, dehydrated look on stage. It’s an incredibly grueling and unnatural process to put a body through.
Sure, from the outside it may look impressive – I mean, these physiques are otherworldly. You can’t help but be in awe of that degree of muscularity and definition. But the reality is that it’s just not healthy. You’re forcing your body to crazy extremes, first bulking it up far beyond normal capacity, then starving and dehydrating it down to skin and sinew. And you’re doing it over and over, year after year.
I don’t care what the pro bodybuilders say – all that stuff about how they’re perfectly healthy and do it the “right way.” Give me a break. Your organs don’t care that the drugs are pharmaceutical grade or that your 9,000 calorie diet is “clean.” Abuse is abuse. And the toll this takes long-term on the body is severe. You don’t get to be 300 lbs with 4% body fat without paying a steep price.
Look, if an extreme physique is really someone’s dream and they feel it’s worth the sacrifices, I can’t stop them from pursuing that. But I sure as hell am not going to play along with the convenient fiction that it’s a healthy endeavor. Let’s at least be honest that it’s self-destructive on a fundamental physiological level.
Ultimately, I think a lot of it comes down to self-acceptance. If you can’t be satisfied without turning yourself into a sideshow freak, you’ve got some deeper issues to confront. There’s more to life than being a mass monster. You can build an awesome physique while still treating your body with respect. Work hard, but be kind to yourself. Push yourself, but not at the expense of your health. That’s the sustainable path.
But what do I know? I’m just a guy who believes in moderation and not doing stupid shit. If you want to chase glory on the bodybuilding stage, by all means, go for it. Just don’t expect me to pretend it’s anything other than a profoundly unhealthy pursuit. The human body was not meant to endure that kind of self-inflicted abuse. But I guess that’s not as catchy of a slogan for the supplement companies to put on a t-shirt.