In 2019, if you’re a young male and don’t have washboard abs as well as a perfect V-tapered back, then you are pretty much rocking a ‘dad bod’.
There is a lot of pressure on young men to chase this perfect chiselled Greek god body. Oh and let’s not forget it’s not just women now who feel pressured to get rid of their body hair, it’s young men too.
Though it is very common now, it is important to see where this has stemmed from. While advertisements are a definite factor, the main driving force behind this body obscurement is social media. Have you ever glanced on your social media feed and seen some seriously jacked dudes?
A simple search on YouTube and particularly Instagram shows how large this community of people using their body as a selling point is.
The phenomenon of Instagram fitness models has made having freakish amounts of muscle while be extremely lean the norm, and after speaking to a few young people it’s quite apparent they will go to extremes to achieve these looks.
I had a chat with a local gym club manager who told me in his gym about 45% of people will have used SARMs, which is a performance enhancing drug – and FYI is illegal. The drug itself has such limited research on the long-term side effects, along with many other complications, that you practically don’t know what you are putting in yourself.
That just goes to show how many young men are willing to jeopardise their own wellbeing to achieve a certain look, which completely goes against the whole point of lifting weights, for our mental and physical health.
Other than risking their health in pursuit for their ideal body, it’s common for young men to spend on average in their lifetime a grand total of $40,286.71 on supplements.
Creatine, protein, pre-workout, amino acids, beta-alanine and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Though they are helpful for recovery and growth, the average gym-goer does not need to break their bank just to put on some muscle.
The biggest bummer of it all is that most young men fall into the trap of believing that the bodies of these fitness models are achievable naturally and drug free.
Take Gym Shark for example, a well-known brand that sells workout apparel. It’s easy to look at the models and get caught up in trying to look like them. But did you know that one of their models, Ryan Casey, was dropped from the brand for admitting SARMs use? And if you look enough you’ll notice that most of the models are of similar size and proportions to Ryan.
When unrealistic images are engrained in brands, social media and advertising, it’s no surprise that more men are getting body dysmorphia and bigorexia (AKA never muscular enough).
We should all feel more confident in our body. Learn to workout to stay fit and for longevity because let’s be real, those models get paid to look like that and last time I checked my bank statement, it didn’t include money for my looks.