Note: I know, I know. I’m supposed to write about a day in the life of ruffles, but it’s a pain in the ass loading the pictures on the computer and shit… I have to sort that crap out. Anyway, while you wait I’ll just write another post.

Anorexia, Muscle Dysmorphia, and the Delusional Bastards

From my own personal experience with clients, I see a lot of people fall into these categories. Well, not literally in these categories, but pretty close to the basic principles.

First, you have the people whom I like to call anorexic. I don’t mean people who weight 80 lbs at 6’ tall and think they’re fat. No, I mean people who are thin/flabby and are always afraid of “I don’t want to get too big”. These are people who usually want to look like brad pitt in the movie “fight club”. They fail to realize that they have to be on a strict diet for atleast 6 months, go through rigorous training protocols, and some mild use of hardening agents (anabolic steroids). I’m talking about people who are 5’10 and 140 lbs with no muscle what so ever. Just a flabby waist and thin arms. They’re basic understanding of building an impressive physique is “I’ll do 10 sets of sit ups every other day to get my abs shredded, I want my chest and arms to be bigger so I’ll do bench presses and dumbbell curls every day. Of course they’ll be high rip and low weight cuz I don’t want them to look huge. And I’ll do 15 sets of leg extensions with about 5 lbs for 100 reps every day to get my thighs cut. They’re big now, but they need to be cut. They measure about 15-17 inches, I don’t want them any bigger. Diet? Yeah the diet’s great. I’m eating 3 meals per day, I’ve cut out all the sodas and candy. It’s really healthy and it should build a great physique.” Unfortunately, most of my clients fall under this category. What they don’t understand (and most people don’t understand this) that the body doesn’t work that way. You have to build substantial mass to have a “small” cut physique. Most people who are thin and 15% fat don’t realize that they have about 15 lbs of pure fat to lose before they hit the 5% mark, which is impossible without losing muscle mass. At a good ratio of losing muscle to losing fat of 1:2 lbs, they’ll have to lose a total of 23 lbs of body weight to be cut and extremely thin. 117 lbs on a 5’10 individual is extremely underweight and thin. To look thin and cut, you have to have atleast 2 lbs per inch of height at a bodyfat percentage of 5-7%. Anything under that body weight will look like a starving Ethiopian. For our 5’10 friend, that means he has to be cut at a body weight of 140 lbs to look thin. Let’s see, he started at a bodyweight of 140 lbs at 15% fat. Let’s assume he won’t gain any fat during his lean mass gaining phase, which is impossible even if he’s using all the anabolic steroids in the world. Let’s assume this for fuck’s sake. He has a lean body mass of 119 lbs, and has to go up to 133 lbs of lean mass (we’re talking 0% fat here), that would equate to 140 lbs at 5%. So, he has to gain 14 lbs of muscle. If he just started bodybuilding for the first time in his life, that would be possible to do in 6 months (with some fat gain, but we’re ignoring it here). When he goes up 14 lbs, he’ll be at a body weight of 154 lbs at around 14% body fat. He has to go down to 5% fat, which means he has to lose 14 lbs of pure fat. For hell’s sake, let’s just say he won’t lose any muscle mass during this phase, but will lose around 1 lb of fat per week. This would take him 14 weeks to accomplish. Around 3.5 months. So, as you can see, it would take someone who is 140 lbs at 15% around 10 months to get down to 140 lbs at 5%... looking thin. He won’t look like a bodybuilder, but he’ll have a thin athletic build. 10 months. And most of these people want to do it in 1 month max. Keep in mind, under ideal conditions, this would take that long. Most of the time (99.99999999% of the time) it’s not even close to ideal. It’s usually crappy.

Muscle dysmorphia (bigorexia)

These are people who are the exact opposite of the anorexic trainees. I have 1 client like that, and I have a close friend who is the same. These guys usually feel really small and thin, and when they look at themselves in the mirror, they don’t see any muscle. They get jealous from the 150 lb cut gym rat they see from time to time. What they can’t comprehend is that they are twice the size of normal human beings. Some of my trainees saw my friend and said “man, I don’t want to look like him, he’s too big”. Most successful bodybuilders have muscle dysmorphia. It usually drives them but makes things a lot more difficult. They can’t diet down for fear of losing muscle, and they’re afraid of cheating because they think they’ll look like a whale. Most people in this category don’t train and diet to “impress girls” or “trying to keep healthy”, they do it to get as big as humanly possible. That is why they usually end up with health problems down the road. They just push their bodies way beyond what they’re capable of handling and never lay off. And yes, this is a psychological disorder just like anorexia is.

Delusional Bastards

These guys are the fucking worst. These are the people who give bodybuilding a bad name. People who are 25-30% fat, lift weights, and think they’re huge and cut. They look like fat slobs with no muscles what so ever. They’re always “leaning out” by not eating any food what so ever and lift with high reps and light weights. Why? “because I’m really big now, I don’t want to get bigger while I get leaner, I’ll get too big then. Now I’m just shedding fat and defining my muscles”. And they always say the dumbest things ever, like “I can gain muscle easy. Last year I used creatine and I gained 40 lbs of pure muscle in about a month. I have no problem gaining mass, but I just don’t want to get too big”. I know this guy in the gym and he was talking about his vacation and how he went down to California and he was the biggest dude on the beach: “man, I was ripped like no one’s business. My arms were around 20 inches, my back was so wide I couldn’t keep my hands on my sides. My waist was around 27 inches. All the girls were all over me down there. But I don’t like being that big. I think it’s too much and too many people think I’m on steroids”. He went on vacation in June and came back in July. I saw him a couple of days before he left, and immediately after he came back… the dude is 5’6, weighs around 170 lbs at about 30% fat, his arms are (at most) 13 inches… he went and came back looking exactly the same, maybe a little fatter when he came back… but the guy doesn’t even look like he works out. These guys are the absolute opposite of bigorexic bodybuilders. They look in the mirror and think that they can win the Mr. Olympia, when in reality they look like they can get 1st place in a pie eating contest. I used to have a client like this, but I stopped training him after he wouldn’t listen to a word I said and was bad mouthing me all over the gym. For people who don’t workout and read this, think of people like that as being the guy or girl who has a huge, thick uni-brow and says “it’s a well known fact that a uni-brow is considered one of the sexiest facial features ever”.