The Evolution of Muscularity

[quote]SLAINGE wrote:
Yeh’ thats what I am getting at’ where was the transition from big ribcage to big pecs?[/quote]

[quote]Chris Colucci wrote:
It sounds like you won’t be satisfied until you get a date and time the switch flipped. Dude, it’s like asking when apple pie and hamburgers became traditional American fare.

It’s been a gradual change, from the '30s and '40s to today. Arnold wasn’t solely responsible for bringing bodybuilding to the mainstream suddenly in the '70s or '80s, he was just the most successful at it and went the farthest with it. Steve Reeves, Reg Park, and even Dave Draper were on TV and in movies (as bodybuilders, Greek heroes, etc.) long before Arnold showed up.

[/quote]

Oh dont get me wrong and confuse me with some delusional eejit who cant comprehend the idea that a lot of things change in a gradual manner or that I cant see the wood for the trees in respect to changes in aesthetic. I was more referring to the perception of strength in relation to pec development in physique enhancement / bodybuilding and the discussion that may have flowed out of that idea

Btw I never mentioned Arnie…

Yeh’ Muscle, Smoke & Mirrors is great!

I agree with the Zane statement … the bodies of the 70’s body builders were perfect. It a little to much of a freek show now. Just my 2 cents

And as for the sculptures …anyone ever figured that Greeks were “man/boy lovers” and maybe some of/or most of the artists were gay. Also the renaissance(Ancient Greek revival) artists, lots were gay and so they tend to exaggerated what attracted them. Same as most men that are straight amplify sexual features on women (hip to waste ratio …breast size). And everything was curved slightly to what was acceptable for that time period.

[quote]SLAINGE wrote:
Anyone interested in the origins of bodybuilding check out this book ‘Muscle Smoke and Mirrors’ it comes in three volumes, def worth a read…

http://prfit.com/[/quote]
Not available on Kindle!

[quote]Chris Colucci wrote:
Noone wants a streamlined, well tapered, beautiful physique on stage anymore… So not only did the vacuum represent a sense of aesthetics which was lost on stage, with the mass game came guys that can’t even hold in their gut to be flat with their chests[/quote]
It really would be great if the guy with the streamlined, well-tapered, beautiful physique won that contest pictured above. … Oh.
(I do get what you’re saying though, kinda. But I think it’s not really accounting for changes that already are taking place in pro bodybuilding, and have been for the last couple of years.)
[/quote]

Agreed, Phil’s victory was a nice change of pace

But still, look at everyone else on stage… AND I liked Phil better a few years ago

Look at how TINY that waist is… like Zane tiny, with much more meat on him. The mass game is just ruining his shape… Sure he still looks better than someone like Kai Greene, but at that point they all look like belgian blue cows

But that’s my opinion… These days, me and the average joe are not what’s pushing bodybuilding… it’s the bottle glassed muscle worship fetishists and the freaks with fanny packs and tupperware meat…

[quote]roybot wrote:
This is an art historian’s take on the Greek Ideal, which may not be as ‘ideal’ as it appears:

It’s from a series called How Art Made The World (there’s also a book of the same name). I’d recommend watching the whole thing. Excellent stuff. You won’t look at the figurehead on a coin in the same way again.[/quote]

This video makes no sense. Skip to the 8:30 mark and you’ll hear the narrator claim that the ab, pec, and back muscles are developed so well that it is impossible for any human to emulate it.
Has this guy never seen someone with a decent physique?

What I dont understand is how these ancient sculptors even knew what a muscular physique looked like. People can barely figure out how to build muscle now a days. I can’t imagine that anyone actually looked like those Greek statues unless they were a complete genetic freak.

[quote]Professor X wrote:

[quote]hastalles wrote:
ON the contrary, they did “bench press.”

http://ditillo2.blogspot.com/2008/11/ancient-greeks-benton-pride.html[/quote]

Using a blog as a resource for history facts is fascinating.[/quote]

Do I have to provide you with a bibliography for every extracted article or book segment or can you handle that much yourself? The internet can degrade into funny forms of communication at times.

Give gold, get grief, if you know what I mean.

That article is a chapter from a book sent to me by a fellow lifter in Italy in exchange for shipping on a very rare Steve Reeves text. I believe there were a few hundred of each printed. The name of it can be found with some digging, something I don’t really want to do right now. Maybe you can help us out here and provide some enlightenment on that.

[quote]ditillo2 wrote:

[quote]Professor X wrote:

[quote]hastalles wrote:
ON the contrary, they did “bench press.”

http://ditillo2.blogspot.com/2008/11/ancient-greeks-benton-pride.html[/quote]

Using a blog as a resource for history facts is fascinating.[/quote]

Do I have to provide you with a bibliography for every extracted article or book segment or can you handle that much yourself? The internet can degrade into funny forms of communication at times.

Give gold, get grief, if you know what I mean.

That article is a chapter from a book sent to me by a fellow lifter in Italy in exchange for shipping on a very rare Steve Reeves text. I believe there were a few hundred of each printed. The name of it can be found with some digging, something I don’t really want to do right now. Maybe you can help us out here and provide some enlightenment on that.
[/quote]

What I provided enlightenment into is that there is nothing backing up what was written or what you wrote here. Just a heads up…but if in college, you may want to avoid using a blog as a resource for any written projects that require you to list your resources.

[quote]Chris Colucci wrote:

[quote]want2getlean wrote:
Noone wants a streamlined, well tapered, beautiful physique on stage anymore… So not only did the vacuum represent a sense of aesthetics which was lost on stage, with the mass game came guys that can’t even hold in their gut to be flat with their chests[/quote]
It really would be great if the guy with the streamlined, well-tapered, beautiful physique won that contest pictured above. … Oh.
(I do get what you’re saying though, kinda. But I think it’s not really accounting for changes that already are taking place in pro bodybuilding, and have been for the last couple of years.)
[/quote]

I agree with this. Phil Heath is not coming up short on taper or balance. Tony Freeman is another who comes to mind who may have one of the smaller waists on pro stages today.

Good point, Prof X.
I don’t go to college but do work as a librarian in a university here in Canada. And stayed last night at a Holiday Inn? Anyhowssssssssssss, take what you want from my blog and do whatever suits your specific needs. Sorry for the anal first post here. I like fun!

This pic might not show up, who knows.

These Greek guys and their marbles, I think that was an ideal they were portraying. Or sculpting. Or thinking of endlessly through the long night while their wives lie next to them snoring like pack animals. A historic check might be in order. But no blogs, please. ancientgaygreekguys.blogspot.com?

The pecs and arms ballooned over time, no doubt, and our current physique ideal is tempered by our current champions. I mean, how many teenage males walk by a museum and say to themselves, “I wanna look just like that guy made outta rock, but no chips or cracks!” It used to be the magazine rack, Dave Draper’s image seen through the window of a cigar shop, followed by a 110-lb. set of blue plastic weights and a weak-kneed bench that squeaked out your rep count.

I guess now it’s the internet, and I figure most 15-year old wannabe-biggers don’t know all that much how the bodybuilding physique ideal has changed over even just the last hundred years. Sandow they might know thanks the Mr. Olympia statuette. The hundreds of other one-time owners of the ideal physique in their own day are pretty much forgotten when it comes to forming a bodybuilding target and getting your body to hit it.

All subjective. The whole thing is decided by the individual and he seeks to realize it in the reality of his own material world. An awesome thing, something that few sports or hobbies can ever dream of coming close to. And you get chicks, too!

Of course, the old farts in the 1950’s thought the “Weider bunch” had pussy bodies. All lats and pecs and pointy biceps. I mean, how much can they Snatch? And the old farts in 2012 think top level competitors are horrifying to the eye. Personally, I don’t give a crap. I know my own ideal of a male physique and that’s what I aim for. The other opinions aren’t even a factor in my decision.

But there’s one thing that really worries me still.
Whatever happened to all those fig-leaf manufacturers and salesmen?

[quote]SLAINGE wrote:
Have you ever noticed that ancient statues (lets use the Greek ideal as these are the inspiration for the sculptures that followed) of athletes or mythological hero’s do not have the thick bulky pec’s of modern bodybuilders? They did however have rugged, well-etched abs, thick strong midsections, thick strong muscular arms and thighs, naturally long full diamond-shaped calves, round delts, and a wide thickly muscled back. Of course exercises such as bench presses didn’t exist (why would you lie on your back to press a weight anyway?). So where did the fascination with big pecs come from, how did it develop and why has it persisted?

When people exercised in the past it was more than likely with performance in mind, be it for the arena, the military, competition or it was simply just hard labour. Providing nutrition was in order a good physique would have been a by-product of that exercise / work, which leads us on to our fascination with good physiques as it is an indication of good health but why the big tits?

Have we seen the pinnacle of muscular development, will we see a shift in what we perceive as ideal or is it just a matter of what’s in style?

Any thoughts…
[/quote]

Muscular physiques and physical strength were beneficial to our survival as hunters, that much should be common sense by now.

But when talking about Greeks, you are already moving beyond “pure evolution” where everything was about survival and mixing culture to the picture. In the evolution time scale, there is virtually no difference between the Greeks time period and ours. You see a little bit of culture variation in play (a litttttllle bigger pecks is prefer nowadays), but overall, none of the statues in the ancient Greeks and none of the bodybuilders today look exactly like what a “useful” male physique “should” look like during most of our existence. They were both ideals to their particular culture, an ideal that is based off of the fact that muscular men have more offspring. attract more mates, and etc.

In fact, if Arnold goes back in time to spend all that time, calorie, energy, maintaining a 5 percent bodyfat and perfectly symmetrical bodies in the Stone Age, he wouldn’t make it pass a week.

[quote]Iron Dwarf wrote:
As an artist, of course I noticed this. My interest in bodybuilding is tightly connected to my love of viewing and making art. [/quote]

metoo man, metoooo

[quote]SLAINGE wrote:
Have you ever noticed that ancient statues (lets use the Greek ideal as these are the inspiration for the sculptures that followed) of athletes or mythological hero’s do not have the thick bulky pec’s of modern bodybuilders? They did however have rugged, well-etched abs, thick strong midsections, thick strong muscular arms and thighs, naturally long full diamond-shaped calves, round delts, and a wide thickly muscled back. Of course exercises such as bench presses didn’t exist (why would you lie on your back to press a weight anyway?). So where did the fascination with big pecs come from, how did it develop and why has it persisted?

When people exercised in the past it was more than likely with performance in mind, be it for the arena, the military, competition or it was simply just hard labour. Providing nutrition was in order a good physique would have been a by-product of that exercise / work, which leads us on to our fascination with good physiques as it is an indication of good health but why the big tits?

Have we seen the pinnacle of muscular development, will we see a shift in what we perceive as ideal or is it just a matter of what’s in style?

Any thoughts…
[/quote]

Or u can think of it like art as well, where when artists ran out of ideas over the generations, where aesthetics, beauty and symmetry is “played out” (peaked long ago), artists abandoned what’s pleasing naturally to the senses and went for the shock values, the grotesque, and etc. When the 70s bodybuilders achieved what most considered to be the ideal physique, where can the bodybuilders in the future go? Bigger, freakier, and more shocking.

But then like art history, people go back to the originals from time to time when the new ceased to shock, with a little bit of a twist. But unlike art where it’s the manifestation of mind and emotion, where creativity and imaginationary products are boundless in ideas, shape, function, and desire, you can only go so far and make so much variation with the body. So as long as drugs and exercise stradegies keep on improving, bodybuilders will always try to get bigger, or go back to focusing on aesthetic like Zyzz did…but yea, you get my point.

Either way, no matter how big we get though, the bodies of the future are still going to be more or less the extention of the natural, functional body. What I mean is that you are probably not going to see bodybuilders in the future train only one leg or one side of the body or chest only, and etc.

[quote]Professor X wrote:

[quote]Chris Colucci wrote:

[quote]want2getlean wrote:
Noone wants a streamlined, well tapered, beautiful physique on stage anymore… So not only did the vacuum represent a sense of aesthetics which was lost on stage, with the mass game came guys that can’t even hold in their gut to be flat with their chests[/quote]
It really would be great if the guy with the streamlined, well-tapered, beautiful physique won that contest pictured above. … Oh.
(I do get what you’re saying though, kinda. But I think it’s not really accounting for changes that already are taking place in pro bodybuilding, and have been for the last couple of years.)
[/quote]

I agree with this. Phil Heath is not coming up short on taper or balance. Tony Freeman is another who comes to mind who may have one of the smaller waists on pro stages today.[/quote]

Yeah Toney looks good. Better than practically everyone he’s on stage with.
And here’s his compensation for it:

2006 IFBB Mr Olympia, 7th
2007 IFBB Mr Olympia, 14th
2008 IFBB Mr Olympia, 5th
2009 IFBB Mr Olympia, 8th
2010 IFBB Mr Olympia, 9th
2011 IFBB Mr Olympia, 7th

[quote]Brian14 wrote:
What I dont understand is how these ancient sculptors even knew what a muscular physique looked like. People can barely figure out how to build muscle now a days. I can’t imagine that anyone actually looked like those Greek statues unless they were a complete genetic freak.[/quote]

there’s load of evidence to suggest that ancient bros liked to workout, and I do not doubt that there were many skilled doctors and researchers who studied skinned corpses like Da vinci did. its not a stretch of the imagination to say that sculptors enlarged muscle groups to achieve the desired effect

[quote]SLAINGE wrote:

[quote]roybot wrote:
This is an art historian’s take on the Greek Ideal, which may not be as ‘ideal’ as it appears:

It’s from a series called How Art Made The World (there’s also a book of the same name). I’d recommend watching the whole thing. Excellent stuff. You won’t look at the figurehead on a coin in the same way again.[/quote]

/thread

That was fascinating!

Professor V.S. Ramachandran explains it so well. I’ve seen some of his docu progs on how humans function on a cerebral level and it is so interesting e.g. how can you drive your car to work and not even remember the journey, brilliant! Anyway that was excellent roybot will definitely follow up on this, thanks![/quote]

The rest is just as fascinating. Really worth checking out. Prof. Ramachandran and Dr. Spivey investigate the influence of sensory deprivation on ancient cave art in an earlier episode, and they show how art was used as a political tool to control vast empires before mass media.

The figurehead on a coin was implemented by Philip of Macedon when Alexander the Great’s empire grew too large for him to be constantly seen in person. His likeness on currency was a daily reminder that he was boss…

[quote]charlotte49er wrote:

[quote]roybot wrote:
This is an art historian’s take on the Greek Ideal, which may not be as ‘ideal’ as it appears:

It’s from a series called How Art Made The World (there’s also a book of the same name). I’d recommend watching the whole thing. Excellent stuff. You won’t look at the figurehead on a coin in the same way again.[/quote]

This video makes no sense. Skip to the 8:30 mark and you’ll hear the narrator claim that the ab, pec, and back muscles are developed so well that it is impossible for any human to emulate it.
Has this guy never seen someone with a decent physique?[/quote]

If you watch the entire episode, Dr. Spivey (not a real Dr.) goes into more detail about Polyclitus’s use of lines in sculpture; if the limbs of the figure were to be straightened out equally on both sides, the proportions would be off. Aesthetics and a sense of movement were created by balancing an ‘active’ side with a ‘passive’ side.

The statue wasn’t made to reproduce symmetry as we see it in a living person, therefore it’s impossible for a human to achieve it. Makes sense when the statues are meant to represent physical perfection. Sort of like the proportions of a Barbie doll are anatomically impossible in a human - even though some women dedicate their lives and spend a fortune on surgery to achieve that ideal.

Certain aspects of the bronze, like the back and the iliac furrow/ Apollo’s belt are disproportionately thick for the overall musculature, so the “impossibly well-developed” observation had more to do with the proportion of each muscle group relative to each other

Also Dr. Spivey points out that the bronzes have no coccyx bone and the legs have been deliberately elongated to match the length of the torso (this is clearer in the attached pic). There’s far more going on than whether the Dr. has ever seen a modern gym rat.

ditillo2… Are you the blogger of The Tight Tan Slacks of Dezso Ban?

I love your blog!

It’s an absolute treasure and my favorite blog on the net.

I always tried to find out who Dezso Ban is but if I google it keeps coming back to your blog…can you tell me who he is?

I call bollox on the limbs being barbie-doll unrealistic. The head-ratio (1/8) is must certainly unrealisitc in most cases, but it can happen.
The dumb, plastic bimbo look, in contrast, is, ratio-wise, achievable only by the Na’vi.

@OP,
Culture changes through what is possible and through complex evolution, both systemic and chaotic.

In case of “why pecs?”, the answer is threefold:

  1. Today, it’s possible to train the pecs better (bench press, chest-day, steroids, 24-hour gyms etc etc).

  2. Through our modern mass media, we have a way higher standard for beauty. That means a more perfectionist approach to every inch of the body.
    The musculus P. has maybe the biggest growth potential, because it is relatively large but not useful in our upright walking society.
    A talented and dedicated bodybuilder can build something that is entirely impossible to achieve without a very dedicated approach.
    That doesn’t apply to arms, the trapecius, calves etc.

A big, finely chiseled pectorial muscle is therefore much akin to a robin presenting its colourful chest.
Or put differently: if a supervirus mutates our dna so all males display cockscombs, we’ll have proper contests and opinions on how to groom & present them the day after.

  1. There is a certain idea the male chest transports.
    Every part of the human anatomy carries a different set of ideas that can affect us immediately, be it feet, arms or even ears.
    Some are elusive, some are apparent.

Arms are, first and foremost, a symbol of male strength, virility and capability.
Hair is primarily beauty & attraction.

I can only speculate with the chest, it certainly has a more sexual undertone then feet or the neck.
But it’s in tune with the Zeitgeist.

p.s.
There was never the idea that small genitalia are more attractive.
Depicition of genitalia have shown to affect our subconscious to the extreme (see 3), above).

So it’s just an artistic necessity to “downplay” the size.
Or has anyone ever wondered why Superman, a guy in tights btw, has never shown a prominent package?
Does that mean that superheroes are perceived as badly endowed?

[quote]digitalairair wrote:
…but overall, none of the statues in the ancient Greeks and none of the bodybuilders today look exactly like what a “useful” male physique “should” look like during most of our existence.

In fact, if Arnold goes back in time to spend all that time, calorie, energy, maintaining a 5 percent bodyfat and perfectly symmetrical bodies in the Stone Age, he wouldn’t make it pass a week.

… they were…ideals to their particular culture.
[/quote]

…or subculture as in the case of modern bodybuilding

This is what the functionalists should understand about bodybuilding

[quote]digitalairair wrote:
When the 70’s bodybuilders achieved what most considered to be the ideal physique, where can the bodybuilders in the future go? Bigger, freakier, and more shocking.
[/quote]

And I’d hasten to add less appealing to the broader public and imo back underground.

Could you imagine the Whitney Museum staging something like this today? Maybe’ but it probably would have a different theme than the one portrayed below.