The definition of a fit and healthy body is everpresent in our society: The action star with the big biceps,
the muscular round shoulders of fitness models on various magazines and the comic book heroes.
Their very physique should resemble strength and health, when it isn´t.
False and unachievable body types have found their way into the mainstream.
How can I be sure, those body types are unobtainable?
There is a rule of thumb, providing an overview of how much muscle mass is possible for a natural Bodybuilder. It is heigth in centimetres minus 100 and you get the weight somebody can achieve with a bodyfat level of roughly 5%.
So for a guy 180 cm tall, it is therefore 180-100 and you end up at 80 kg (+- 2-3kg for body structure). That is, if you are doing everything right.
Not really much. Modern bodybuilders for instance are usually 20-40 kg heavier than this formula allows.
Normally they use PED´s (Performance enhancing drugs) in the gram per week range.
In professional bodybuilding those individuals don´t have to care, since there is no testing done.
This has led to people taking huge quantities of PED´s since the '60´s in those fields.
While bodybuilders should represent healthy individuals, those people are often in a terrible health condition due their substance abuse.
People like Rich Piana, Andreas Münzer and Dallas McCarver sadly underline this position.
Steroids and alike are not only present in bodybuilders these days, but more or less everywhere.
Many actors are completely roided up when displaying action heroes, youngsters trying to impress on instagram with their big muscles and you can find completely unrealistic examples of male bodies in action figures for decades now.
This leads to many problems I want to point out here:
First of all, it is creating fatal images of how a fit body looks like.
People are viewing this as naturally achievable and then expect this to be the rule. It distorts the public image of what an fit individual is and thus leads to some expecting people to look something akin to a modern Arnold Schwarzenegger, not knowing such looks is the result of huge amounts of steroids.
Youngsters going to the gym aim to achieve such looks and then fail. The next step is either to get depressed and give up or to give the needle a try.
Not knowing what they are doing to their bodies.
Youtube videos proclaiming advice for safe use can be found in an instant. The problem is: Many side effects of steroid consumption are only visible if a
doctor explicitly searches for them or even worse: when it´s already too late.
There is no such thing as safe usuage for steroids. Unless a doctor monitors you at any given time, you can´t be sure, it didn´t already damage your body.
Normally I would say it´s the problem of the consument, but not so here.
If somebody destroys his or her body on purpose, there is someone who has to pay for it, in this case all the other health insurance participants. Smoking is an addiction, overweight is also somewhat understandable in our society, but taking steroids is being stupid on purpose.
If I would be a dictator, would I try "law-and-order"? No, but it´s needed to teach our kids in school on this issue. A study in germany found out that 24% of all men going to the gym on a regular basis, admitted having experience with anabolics.
While weightlifting is a nice sport and can easily improve your overall health, the dangers of drugs as well as the danger of false role models in this context, need to be mentioned and thaught, in school, as well as in the gym.
But not only that. It creates potentially harmful ideas of an healthy body, akin to those of skinny or super size models.
Many people aren´t aware of the fact, that a body like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime, is not achievable without steroids and that a healthy body looks more or less like a normal, untrained one, in comparison to a (modern day) bodybuilder.
Creating awareness on what a healthy body look would therefore profit us all.
Paper on steroid abuse (German):
http://d-nb.info/981343554/34
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