Anyone interested in the origins of bodybuilding check out this book ‘Muscle Smoke and Mirrors’ it comes in three volumes, def worth a read…
I never had liked Liefelds work. All characters have the same looking face/jaw. Muscles always looked out of proportion.
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Ha!
There was a ink with that last pic where someone drew what Captain America would have to look like naked for that shitty drawing to be real.
[quote]Nards wrote:
Ha!
There was a ink with that last pic where someone drew what Captain America would have to look like naked for that shitty drawing to be real.[/quote]
LOL!
I love how people take the time to do stuff like this!
[quote]SLAINGE wrote:
[quote]Steel Nation wrote:
Somebody’s been reading too much Pavel.[/quote]
Me?
Nope! [/quote]
Your entire post was lifted nearly word-for-word from Beyond Bodybuilding.
[quote]Chris Colucci wrote:
Eugen Sandow was 5’7" and a pretty lean 180 pounds. But at that time, he was absolutely other-worldly. Considering how he was perceived in the early 1900’s, do you think anyone at that time would think it physically possible for someone like Kai Greene, who’s 5’8" and a shredded 260-something pounds, to even exist?
[/quote]
Eugen personified strength and by definition health. I would imagine people were in awe of his physique but it was ‘real’ in the sense that people of the time would have identified with it, be it through sculpture or through people they would have seen working in fields, down mines, chopping wood in forests, spearing whales or whatever manly men did back then. Sandow of course would have had the whole package and not just impressive arms or legs or whatever else someone had who was physically imposing at the time, and I suppose thats what made him unique.
I’d wager that Kai Greene looks far more freaky to us than Sandow did to 19th century folk.
But where / when did massive pecs come into play?
When did massive pecs start to personify strength and in turn masculinity?
If we take the idealised view of past cultures it was back, arms, legs and torso (pecs being a kind of amalgamation of abbs, ribs, serratus) that stood out, not pecs alone. So was it when people began benching that the chest began to stand out as an entity in its right and people were like, whoa look at him, I want me some of that!
[quote]SLAINGE wrote:
[quote]Steel Nation wrote:
[quote]SLAINGE wrote:
Somebody’s been reading too much Pavel.[/quote]
Me?
Nope! [/quote]
Your entire post was lifted nearly word-for-word from Beyond Bodybuilding.[/quote]
Well that some sort super coincidence because I have never read anything of Pavels except some excerpts of his stuff on here.
Please point me to this word-for-word account of what I originally posted so I can see for myself because I am really intrigued!
As an artist, of course I noticed this. My interest in bodybuilding is tightly connected to my love of viewing and making art.
[quote]Chris Colucci wrote:
You forgot to mention that small penises and large scrotums used to be “ideal.”
[/quote]
Large balls were probably good to play with back then… a great way to keep women satisfied…
[quote]caveman101 wrote:
Maybe the statues were idealised images of the male body - representations of heroic men such as Herekles for example, and there werent a ton of jacked dudes similar to that statue in ancient greece.[/quote]
I suspect you’re right. There probably were some relatively big dudes in the military or on farms, and the sculptors took them as a starting point and then exaggerated.
You can sort of the same thing going on with the Willendorf Venus. That’s the famous figurine from the stone age that depicts an enormously fat woman. Chances are there were no actual obese women in stone age hunter/gatherer tribes. There was just not enough food and way too much movement for anyone to get that overweight. Someone probably just used a stocky, pregnant woman as the model and multiplied her 10x to depict how they imagined their fertility goddess.
[quote]SLAINGE wrote:
[quote]Chris Colucci wrote:
Eugen Sandow was 5’7" and a pretty lean 180 pounds. But at that time, he was absolutely other-worldly. Considering how he was perceived in the early 1900’s, do you think anyone at that time would think it physically possible for someone like Kai Greene, who’s 5’8" and a shredded 260-something pounds, to even exist?
[/quote]
Eugen personified strength and by definition health. I would imagine people were in awe of his physique but it was ‘real’ in the sense that people of the time would have identified with it, be it through sculpture or through people they would have seen working in fields, down mines, chopping wood in forests, spearing whales or whatever manly men did back then. Sandow of course would have had the whole package and not just impressive arms or legs or whatever else someone had who was physically imposing at the time, and I suppose thats what made him unique.
I’d wager that Kai Greene looks far more freaky to us than Sandow did to 19th century folk.
But where / when did massive pecs come into play?
When did massive pecs start to personify strength and in turn masculinity?
If we take the idealised view of past cultures it was back, arms, legs and torso (pecs being a kind of amalgamation of abbs, ribs, serratus) that stood out, not pecs alone. So was it when people began benching that the chest began to stand out as an entity in its right and people were like, whoa look at him, I want me some of that![/quote]
I think the modern day fascination with pecs(and biceps) has to do with the fact that Arnold, who brought bodybuliding to the mainstream, had overpowering pecs (and biceps).
[quote]SLAINGE wrote:
[quote]Chris Colucci wrote:
Eugen Sandow was 5’7" and a pretty lean 180 pounds. But at that time, he was absolutely other-worldly. Considering how he was perceived in the early 1900’s, do you think anyone at that time would think it physically possible for someone like Kai Greene, who’s 5’8" and a shredded 260-something pounds, to even exist?
[/quote]
Eugen personified strength and by definition health. I would imagine people were in awe of his physique but it was ‘real’ in the sense that people of the time would have identified with it, be it through sculpture or through people they would have seen working in fields, down mines, chopping wood in forests, spearing whales or whatever manly men did back then. Sandow of course would have had the whole package and not just impressive arms or legs or whatever else someone had who was physically imposing at the time, and I suppose thats what made him unique.
I’d wager that Kai Greene looks far more freaky to us than Sandow did to 19th century folk.
But where / when did massive pecs come into play?
When did massive pecs start to personify strength and in turn masculinity?
If we take the idealised view of past cultures it was back, arms, legs and torso (pecs being a kind of amalgamation of abbs, ribs, serratus) that stood out, not pecs alone. So was it when people began benching that the chest began to stand out as an entity in its right and people were like, whoa look at him, I want me some of that![/quote]
Slainge, you could look at more recent art for a possible clue. From the pictures I’ve seen of very early Superman comics, he was depicted as pretty massive – with a big chest – back then (late 1930s). Other popular heroes around at that time (The Shadow, Doc Savage, Zorro, and even the early Batman) were not nearly as muscular.
My guess is the comic book artists were probably familiar with Oly lifters, as O-lifting was more popular in the US back then, when the US was still dominating in that sport. Plus, back then the overhead press was still being done in competition along with the snatch and clean & jerk, and it was typically done with a lot of backward lean. That probably led to some pretty decent upper pec development, as they were practically doing a standing incline press.
No, they based the look and even dress (why Superman wears his underwear outside his pants) on strong men of the day who would dress in the tights for their exhibitions. The bench press was not very popular in the early 1900’s and there were no facilities with a bench set up like that.
If the movement was done, it was usually on the ground laying down which is limited. Also, everything is progressive. Women used to literally faint at the sight of Sandow on stage.
No woman today would do that even if they were impressed.
and superman didnt really have big pecs, more like a ginormous rib cage
[quote]caveman101 wrote:
and superman didnt really have big pecs, more like a ginormous rib cage[/quote]
…which was the norm with strongmen back then and also why when Superman first came to television in black and white, George Reeves was chosen for looking like a strong man with inflated rib cage. Reeves wasn’t exactly “ripped” nor did he have huge pecs.
They would stick their chests out to look bigger…which is also why that vacuum pose in bodybuilding stuck around so long but no one does it today and also why the side chest pose used to involve inflating the rib cage as much as possible.
The standards have changed and now gigantic pecs can be achieved through common direct training in isolation where that couldn’t happen over 100 years ago.
[quote]Professor X wrote:
They would stick their chests out to look bigger…which is also why that vacuum pose in bodybuilding stuck around so long but no one does it today.[/quote]
The vacuum (one of the greatest poses of all time) serves much more purpose than 'making the chest looking bigger, and was dropped for much more reasons than today’s competitors having ‘bigger chests’.
It stopped being done not because today’s competitors have big chests (like we didn’t see guys with barrel chests hitting the vaccum… and it’s not even a ‘chest pose’ but i’ll ignore that)… but because the sense of aesthetics has again changed.
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, much less do a vacuum with their life depended on it.
[quote]caveman101 wrote:
and superman didnt really have big pecs, more like a ginormous rib cage[/quote]
Yeh’ thats what I am getting at’ where was the transition from big ribcage to big pecs?
A big ribcage is suggestive of someone who is strong e.g. we all know some guy shaped like a barrel who is naturally as strong as an ox. You could compensate for a smaller ribcage by increasing the pecs giving the allusion of a big ribcage and this is probably why big pecs equals a perception of strength (not syaing guys with big pecs are weak btw).
The allusion of size is used to great affect by all creatures e.g. a toad inflating in response to danger or the hair on a male chimps body standing on end when aggressive or some pigeon chested tuff guy with ILS walking John Wayne style through a crowd, it’s something we naturally lean towards esp. as males
[quote]DarkNinjaa wrote:
[quote]Chris Colucci wrote:
You forgot to mention that small penises and large scrotums used to be “ideal.”
[/quote]
Large balls were probably good to play with back then… a great way to keep women satisfied…
[/quote]
Don’t women play with balls anymore or are balls not what they used to be or are balls never how they are portrayed in the media mmm…? (scratches balls)
Fuckin artists messin with our balls…
[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]SLAINGE wrote:
Yeh’ thats what I am getting at’ where was the transition from big ribcage to big pecs?[/quote]
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.
Agreed.
(I’m currently about a quarter-way through reading the second volume.)