Eugene Sandow 's Bodybuilding And The Bodybuilding Industry

I have always been very obsessed with body image. When I was young, baseball was my sport. Soon after, I joined the swim team. During these years I’ve never looked the way that pleased me. When the age of fourteen came around, I decided to join the gym with a personal trainer. At this time, being overweight and unhappy. Never did I think the gym would mean so much to me in the future. Just before the age of sixteen, bodybuilding made a drastic impression on me. The art of building a well symmetrical body. Everything about this sport fascinated me because it gave a chance to create a new me.

Today’s modern bodybuilders opposed to the bodybuilders of the sixties and seventies look like they have evolved from some enormous inhuman creature with amazing genes. Looking at the average size and body fat percentages of old school bodybuilders they weighed somewhere between one hundred and eighty to two hundred and twenty pounds. Now if you compare that to today’s bodybuilders weighing in at somewhere between two hundred fifty and three hundred pounds it makes you think what the heck

Purpose: After listening to my speech my audience will be familiar with the three American muscles of the 60’s.

I developed a character to be a representative of the main audience for my essay by taking the characteristics of individuals observed in McComas’ weight room and combining them into one persona. Based off of this, the persona is a male Virginia Tech college student who is familiar with the weight room and the concepts of body building. He is in good physical shape, and wears typical gym clothing, such as gym shorts, sweatpants, t-shirts, or wife-beaters. He has long-term experience with the majority of the weight and machines found in McComas’ weight room, and falls into the category of “serious lifters,” rather than just an occasional gym-goer. He is very perseverant in his work out regiment, and has a focused mindset.

In “Feeding Hard Bodies: Food and Masculinities in Men’s Fitness Magazines” Fabio Parasecoli addresses the increasing popularity of men’s health and body image. Many magazines, including Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, and Muscle and Fitness, are targeted toward men of all ages who wish to improve their physical appearance. The particular body ideal they reinforce is one of high muscle and low fat, a body that can be hard to achieve for the average man. Therefore, specific nutrition is the key in obtaining the ideal body. Men are now becoming more aware of their appearance, body image and body health. With the standards, dedications and effort put into obtaining the ideal body type, food industry is giving men easier ways to get and maintain

article, he tries to emphasize that bodybuilders are regular people, yet the public sees them as

Many of these individuals, also face the challenges of these pointless standards. Lorber states, “These differences are socially meaningless until social practices transform them into social facts.” Lorber is talking mostly about the standards set on gender in today’s society. Any gendered person is as equal as another, until society decides that they are not. Humans, especially weightlifters, are always trying to fit in with society's standards. Weightlifting men ”grew up idolizing Arnold [Schwarzenegger, former body champion and Governor of California]” Arnold set the standards to many of these modern day steroid users. These social standards, seem to be a major factor in the steroid use by middle aged men. These steroid users, are abusing their bodies to get a feeling of self accomplishment by society’s

The rhetorical imagery that is used to portray a man's body is spread throughout the fitness industry and health advertisements. These images are on the cover of well-known magazines such as “FITNESSRX”, distribute worldwide targeting men, ages 18-30. These magazines give a visual rhetoric as a method of persuading beauty, body image, and the pursuit of “perfection”. These companies target young adults because they believe they have the money to buy their products to obtain the body they want or the body portrayed on the cover of the magazine.

It is important for us to understand the subculture that we are to cover. By bodybuilding, I mean the drive that individuals have so as to maintain the perfect physique as well as ensuring that they have low fat levels in their bodies. It is true that all that is involved in bodybuilding is hardcore. Most people often enroll for the bodybuilding so that they could have an appealing physical outlook. Bodybuilding makes the muscles to expand and as such those involved with the

The group is easily identifiable in larger society. The very nature of bodybuilding is to stand out from everyone else (Sinicki). That being said, bodybuilders are generally accepted in society, aside from a few strange looks and comments; unless steroids or other banned drugs are used (which increase aggression) they fit peacefully into society (Sinicki).

Women are empowered, encouraged and even pressured into being involved in a sport or some type of fitness activities today; however, it hasn’t always been that way (Cahn 278). In the 1920s, also known as the “golden age” of sports, women and young girls faced obstacles such as rejection, gender discrimination, and stereotypes when showing interest in sports or fitness activities. One famous author named Susan Cahn, wrote a book called Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sports, and focuses on the decades between the 1920s and the 1960s. For most of the 19th century, females were accused of causing a great deal of danger to the moral and physical areas of masculinity. Through the research of multiple different aspects, such as media, appearance, and gender roles, Cahn puts together an idea and theme that athleticism is seen as a masculine trait because it was once constructed by society itself; which fortunately for the women, that idea can be changed. In the later centuries, Cahn writes about the progress of woman 's appearance in sports, however then describes the difference in respect, attention throughout media, opportunities and wages between men and women. Through both primary sources such as newspapers, interviews, and journals, as well as secondary sources like relevant literature, Cahn writes her book in a historical non-fiction genre. After reading Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sports by Susan

Today 's society is constantly presented with misrepresentations of the ideal body image through the advertising of diet plans and supplements. Companies in the fitness industry scam people into buying useless products or services by advertising with individuals that have, what the mass media sees as, the 'perfect ' body composition. In addition to getting consumers to buy into a product or service, these companies also aid society with the spreading of this fake idea of what classifies as the perfect body. They portray a body image that is unattainable for most individuals in society, despite how many of those supplements being advertised they buy. The models used in these advertisements, are in most cases, starving themselves, enhanced via illegal substances, or are photo-shopped to the point where even they do not look like the model displayed in the ad. All this has led to many people wanting to strive for that perfect body, that in reality, is impossible to achieve. In order to show the affect these advertisements play in our society, I will be deconstructing multiple ads in the fitness industry, as well as multiple peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles centered around the impact media has on an individual 's self-image.

Weight training originated in the Egyptian-Greek era. Since war was common in those days, weight training was a tool to gain muscle and stamina. It wasn’t until the early 1900’s did a man named Eugene Sandow change the way people viewed bodybuilding. In those days, weightlifters were called “strongmen”. These “strongmen” entertained people with their displays of great strengths by lifting animals and pulling carts. Many “strongmen” were overweight with meaty limbs, in which today’s society would view as “overweight”. It wasn’t until Sandow came along that the concept of weightlifting changed. Sandow was able to display great acts of strength, but unlike the “strongmen”, had an appealing physique to the public. His physique drew people in by the masses. People became intrigued with weightlifting and many researchers began to study the sport. Through their research, they

There are many existing literatures on women and weightlifting. This research will be focusing on how hegemonic masculinity has set ideas of gender roles and how these women challenge the social discourse that they face being a muscular or look ‘manly’.

Although, athletes are the role models the boys grow up playing sports but when they do not perform in an excellent or right way they are chided as girls in a away to help them perform better. The language that is in the media attributes and reinforces the dominant discourse that males are stronger than females. (Public research group, 2010). In addition, men are expected to have healthy strong bodies and simultaneously on the other hand isolate and seclude themselves from females as to not care how they look. Men that are obese are subjected through oppression as a result of the factor that they do not fit in the masculine stereotype of a muscle built body. Furthermore, young boys are taught this early and consequently reproduce this discourse to discriminate others in school that do not fit in to Western culture's ideology of masculinity. This discrimination of the obese instills a fear on the youth that to be fat is not ideal and is therefore seen in revulsion and hatred. Nevertheless, the discourse implies that genetics do not play a role and that every male can get this perfect body of masculinity in a sense. Therefore, a man would need to endure the journey for how ever long it takes to achieve this. In contrary, this is not the truth a man may go the gym everyday for a number of years and never achieve this form of masculinity because for their body type and genetics is impossible. Moreover, the stereotypes against overweight men at a first glance