What we get wrong about athleticism
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
If you're in sport, you know that highly performant bodies don't look like that almost ever. They're too specialized to have the physique that prioritizes aesthetics. Road cyclists with their lanky frames, powerlifters have fat over their absurdly strong cores. High level marathoners look like they might blow over in a stiff wind.
The most interesting thing about the article to me was the mention of kinesthetic skill. This is a huge differentiating factor IME in mountain biking. Some people do not have the meta visualization to understand why what they did worked or didn't, why they cleared that rock, why their weight transfer caused the front to wash out. The feedback loop doesn't exist, and they can't progress.
The same way, a "highly athletic" / bodybuilder body demonstrates that a man can spend resources on building all these impressive-looking muscles and can strictly ration carbs. (I don't even try to mention what women have to do to look "like a model".)
So it's the same demonstrative behavior, only the results are harder to buy directly than a supercar or a yacht. It's about as practical: not completely useless, but the point is not in the utility but in the hard-to-achieve aesthetics.
Much like a real able flyer looks much less impressive than a peacock (look at a goose or a crow), a real high-achieving athlete looks much less impressive than an athlete for show. But looks sometimes play a critical role, e.g. for an actor, or during dating, so it's not irrational behavior.
Also, an underappreciated role of muscle mass is as a giant store of emergency amino acids.
Stronger in the non-important (for the activity) parts of the body makes it harder to be stronger in the important parts. And also there are many ways to be strong, as in not all muscles are the same and also your neurological ability to control your muscles may also very widely .
Also powerlifters have much less impressive bodies than bodybuilders, and without pump and proper lighting you will generally might not even recognize that a person is top powerlifter.
Powerlifters have incredible muscle mass, they just aren’t picky about covering it with body fat because it doesn’t make sense for the sport. The main reason bodybuilders are weaker is that their caloric intake is much lesser (especially at meet prep when they sometimes are practically starving themselves to death).
They could easily add a few top sets of higher intensity work with low reps and get much stronger.
OTOH weightlifting is still an activity performed for show, not practical tasks requiring strength. Equally, a Lamborghini is still a pretty nice car, and a Tissot watch is still a precise mechanical watch. But it's not the point.
By contrast, a police car does not look like a super-fast car, even though it's very fast. Equally, most Marines don't look like bodybuilders, even though their job requires exceptional athletic prowess.
There are proven short-term, medium-term, and long-term benefits of resistance training for men and women, both young and old.
I can walk through my office and immediately pick out who lifts or has lifted.
What's puzzling is that bodybuilder physiques aren't even attractive to most people. I don't mean physically fit and showing some muscle, I mean the extremes of Arnold and even more "built" guys. When you talk to normal people, they don't find it attractive. The people who universally find the bodybuilder physique attractive are other bodybuilders! It's a very "niche" look.
And it's well-known it's not a physique that correlates with actual physical strength or agility. It's just for show. Actual physical fitness doesn't look like that, and even bodybuilders admit this.
Now, anyone actually on stage and the true mass monsters? Sure, nobody finds that attractive, but Hollywood actors don't look like that, either. Alan Ritchson and Joe Manganiello and what not are plenty attractive.
100% disagree. The last I checked, muscle size is the strongest correlating physical characteristic with force production. Also, have you not seen videos of Ronnie Coleman lifting weights?
Most bodybuilders will tell you this, it's not a secret.
Stop trying to nitpick and engage with the actual argument.
Furthermore, this physique is mostly attractive and desirable to other bodybuilders, and not to regular people. Therefore, it's puzzling that Hollywood used to push this as the "ideal" body shape.
There. Happier? Almost everybody else in this thread understood what I meant.
I agree. When I read "The Martian", I wasn't picturing Mark Watney as Jason Bourne.
https://www.justjared.com/photo-gallery/4473115/matt-damon-s...
I recently watched A Small Light with Bel Powley playing Miep Gies, the Dutch woman who hid Anne Frank.
It was solid miniseries, I recommend it. Not extraordinary, lots of tv melodrama but still worth it. Otto Frank doesn't get nearly enough attention for his prescience in trying to keep his family safe.
That said, the actor who plays Jan Gies, her husband, while playing the role very well, at some point takes his shirt off and reveals an absolutely incredibly bulked physique. A social worker in Nazi occupied 1940's Netherlands where people were treating ration cards like gold bullion and eating tulip soup because nothing else was left looked like he was consuming 4500 calories a day and possibly on a steroid stack that didn't exist yet.
He might as well have whipped out an iPhone, it took me out that much. I understand every actor is waiting for a call from Marvel these days, but I wish actors didn't feel so pressured to be ripped for every role. If I was the director I would have at least never put him in a shirtless scene and kept him in oversized suits.
In other words: "if you are extremely tall and/or extremely strong, you don't need be shredded to still be athletic". Who would have thought?
It's more than that. Being shredded is actively anti-athletic.
This isn't exactly a secret - pretty much anyone casually into bodybuilding or strength training knows that you lower body fat to look stronger, but raise body fat to actually be stronger, at least to some extent.
I suppose some argument could be made that he's probably more in the 90s for everything rather than 99, but he's a full-time professionally trained athlete in the most dominant NFL team currently active, so I don't think calling 99% absent any formal data is too crazy.
The current best basketball player in the world who looks like this: https://imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/645d93...
Edit: for instance 4:45 in this video https://youtu.be/ljxrqutpUTo
Linebackers, in contrast, usually look like bodybuilders. They are the cliche athlete, having to use speed and strength to excel. Linesmen on both sides of the ball are usually heavy guys -- "fat" -- yet with massive strength. DBs are again low body fat and "ripped" by any common measure. The cliche "athlete".
So athletes cover the gamut, and it depends on what you do. A dart player is an athlete but clearly a dart player doesn't have the same physical requirements as a gymnast.
As an aside, it is amazing how low people's expectations of the human form have dropped. If someone posts a picture of a man with low body fat and any inkling of a form, many comments will be about steroids. Steroids are a shortcut, but even a small amount of effort and almost anyone can be top 1%. The bar is incredibly low, and it's bizarre when someone has a bit of biceps or isn't overweight and people need to comfort themselves by telling everyone that they're augmenting.
“Just because you look the part, doesn’t mean you can play, ask Manute Bol.” - Sage Francis
I'm not sure Manute is actually a great example but it's still a good line.
When I was playing sports back 25 years ago, I heard the expression "looks like Tarzan, plays like Jane" more than once.
Bol was also a fantastic human being. Incredibly active politically and donated much of his money towards his poverty-stricken home country of Sudan. He was not perfect, but his charitable acts affected millions, and that should be commended.
Now does that actually make patrick mahomes more athletic than some random person that can run faster and lift more? I would say no, but he's definitely a better QB.
There was a neat play in the last superbowl where Mahomes made a pass after being twisted 360 by the defender. It was almost a mirror image of a video of Mahomes doing an exercise utilizing the same movement with his trainer Stroupe.
Didn't they actually mean "combining conventional body types with otherworldly athleticism"? I mean, I'm pretty sure what the examples given are way more present in society than what is often expected...
I think crossfit and decathlon pros are the peak of athleticism.
And more generally, I would take almost no health advice from American footballers, many (most?) of whom will go into old age with ailments and injuries due how they treated their bodies.
American football requires a different skill tree than world football. So of course if you only judge by the standards of world football he is not great. But why would you do that?
And athleticism as different from health. In fact, beyond a threshold I believe it is detrimental to it.
That is likely to wind up true when it's all said & done but Tom Brady still holds that title.
Isn't it exactly the point of the article though that this doesn't necessarily mean elite across-the-board athleticism?
Your statement would also have described Tom Brady for most of his career, and I don't think anyone would seriously claim he was a 99%ile athlete (certainly not for sprinting, agility, etc.)
It sounds like for you, being a top athlete simply means being very good at a sport.
I've always generally understood athleticism to be about raw physical traits, like speed, strength and agility (and is therefore only part of the range of attributes that makes up the overall profile of a sportsperson).
Out of interest would you consider people performing at an elite level in high-skill, relatively low-physicality sports like golf to be top athletes?
We have our own kind of "American Football" in the Netherlands, it is called ice skating. But.. every Dutchman understands that being the world champion in ice skating doesn't say much as it is a highly local phenomenon.
But you still can enjoy the athleticism that such a sport requires.
When we do compete in other sports we fair above average to exceptional (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-time_Olympic_Games_medal_t...) with the notable exception of soccer, which we've never broken through despite investment and a decent population of players.
Don't kid yourself, just because other countries don't play American Football doesn't mean the players aren't freak athletes - they are
Otherwise we would look at kick boxing.
i love both sports, but wouldn't call the players universally "athletic"
Although... fine motion control is more natural for hands then for legs. In football, running on full speed, while keeping the ball close to the foot, then evading defenders (still on full speed), making an accurate pass to a team player. Almost any boy on the planet dreams about those skills, some are able learn a few of these skills somewhat. But it requires abnormal leg control.
In football there is a harsh filter of it not only being the global #1 sport, so insanely competitive, but also because it requires an insane fine control where we normally don't have that.
Does not take away from other sports like tennis, or base ball. For most sports the elite level will be unreachable for most humans.
Also your comment about Ronaldo is basically that he can jump high and run fast which makes him one of the greatest athletes? I think he's an amazing athlete but not because of his vertical jump. There were 30+ kids at my high school with a higher vertical jump than him.
The article's point is that there is more to athleticism than run fast, jump high. They are right.
There are closer to a million professional actors… so actors in general are around 4 sd above average.
Also, sorry to say it so directly, but none of these guys would have a remote possibility to (athletically speaking - not talking ability) play in third tier soccer in Italy or Spain, or any actually physically difficult sport (e.g. climbing). It's a rule in these sports that people look at minimum super fit, at maximum godlike, and the few exceptions that exist show extremely visible downsides (and it's clear they'd be better off being athletic).
For context, a picture of a soccer player considered unfit (constantly rated at something around ~70/100 physically in various rankings/video games/etc)
https://64.media.tumblr.com/9a64e77011b24cf2aff656356587de97...
For explosiveness, top speeds of NFL and top 5 leagues in Europe are comparable, but more consistent for soccer players. They of course have to run with a ball next to their legs, rather than in hand, which makes it technically harder. For jumping, tall soccer players are closer to NBA players than to NFL (Tomori, Ronaldo, Lewandowski, etc, jump around 80cm).
In terms of agility, NFL and top 5 leagues is similar, about 3 seconds to 30km/h, but of course the best performing players in soccer are better.
So, with some similar parameters, soccer players do what NFL players do, but 3 times as long. That's the difference between "I can do this with a bit of a belly" and "I need to look like a god to even survive this game without getting a heart attack".
Edit: my point above wasn't that it's not physically difficult altogether, it was that these are not _elite_ sports in terms of physical requirement. Swimming, climbing, sprinting, soccer (mainly by the virtue of how professionalized it is), bicycle racing, that's physically super difficult. Basketball is super technical and relatively chill in physical requirements compared to these sports, and NFL is generally challenging but not nearly as much as the "top" sports, unless you specifically cherry-pick comparison to favor heavy, fast people. I chose rather versatile metrics that focus on input, e.g. how much you need to train to become fit enough.
On the reverse, Mbappe has less strenght, and JJ Watt moves like a tank with 27km/h speed. If you compare them to elite strenght sports, they're both weak. If you compare them to sprinters, Mbappe is an amateur sprinter, and JJ Watt is disabled.
Sportsmen specialize in what they do, but NFL simply doesn't require versatility so they are good in fewer categories, and not very good in any. Soccer players are good in multiple categories, and by the virtue of being the more popular and competitive sport and having insanely bigger selection, occassionally very good in one or two (e.g. Bale, Mbappe, and other freaks of nature who are essentially sprinters).
Also, soccer player does not run 1/20th of marathoner runs. Elite wingers run just under _a third of marathon_ each game, of which 3km can be sprint.
Imagine making a weightlifter run for an hour.
Anyway, I'm currently a resident at a sober living facility after spending time in jail on a ridiculous Terroristic Threat charge and I'm really grateful to have done my time in solitary confinement. Wall push ups and basic stretches to make the best of a low-fiber, high sodium, soy protein diet among the worst in Texas jails. Athleticism is relative to lifestyle. A lot of people are born with everything they need and then they throw it away with bad diet or, as I learned in jail, meth and hey-ron.
In the United States, we get almost everything wrong about the science of the body. It's a for-profit platform here. A lot of the best practices are inexpensive - cypionate, when done right, simply means proper physical exertion and protein intake and then it works magic (went from 300 to 600) but only if you give it a reasonable starting point.
* Lowness of resting pulse rate
* VO2max level
* Speed to run 100m, 800m, 1600m, marathon, 100 miles, 1000 miles
* same with biking, swimming, and mountain climbing
* squat weight limit, deadlift weight limit
* total consecutive reps of sit-ups, 20lbs bicep curl, 40lbs
What’s interesting is the distance between male and female athletic performance, across the board, grows inversely to the duration of continuous effort. For a while the fastest 100 miler in the world, by a significant margin, was female around age 40.
And at the elite levels of running, men have a pretty consistent speed advantage over women at all distances.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarathon
I am seeing a lot of women world record holders. How can that be if males are consistently faster than female runners at all distances?
The ultra marathoning statistics are fine, but they also have significantly smaller viewership and uptake in the general population. Consequently, it’s more of the Wild West, and as a result, I don’t think it accurately reflects the global running scene.