+ 5 The Evolution of Bodybuilding: Have We Crossed a Line?
After spending a lot of time reading questions here lately, I’ve noticed something fascinating. The questions people ask today are very different from the ones they asked 10–20 years ago.
Here are three posts I came across just today as examples:
“What’s everyone’s HGH protocol? How many IU per day? How do you reconstitute it?” “Does anybody else stay on year-round? I keep thinking I’ll take a couple months off, but it never happens.” “My HDL is 25 on cycle. Everything else looks great. Any suggestions to improve it?”
At first glance, these seem like unrelated questions. But I think they reveal something much bigger about where bodybuilding is today.
Years ago, the conversation was mostly about how to build more muscle.
Today, the conversation seems to be about how to stay enhanced indefinitely while minimizing the health consequences.
Think about it.
The HGH question isn’t really asking about growth hormone. It’s asking, “What’s considered normal now?”
The blast-and-cruise question isn’t really asking whether people cruise. It’s asking, “Has permanent enhancement become the new standard?”
The HDL question isn’t asking whether the cycle is worth it. It’s asking, “How do I keep doing exactly what I’m doing while reducing the damage?”
What’s interesting is how educated today’s bodybuilders have become. Many of us understand ApoB, hematocrit, GGT, fasting glucose, IGF-1, SHBG, CAC scans, echocardiograms, and insulin sensitivity better than the average person walking into a primary care office.
That’s a positive evolution.
But there’s also a paradox.
We’ve become incredibly good at managing the side effects of enhancement while perhaps becoming less willing to question the underlying exposure itself.
Social media has probably played a role. Twenty years ago, most competitors accepted having an offseason where they looked like… well… a guy who lifted weights. Today there’s constant pressure to stay lean, full, vascular, and “post-worthy” 365 days a year.
Maybe that’s why blast-and-cruise has become so common.
Maybe that’s why recovery phases have become shorter or disappeared altogether.
Maybe that’s why conversations have shifted from “How do I get bigger?” to “How do I stay this way forever?”
I’m genuinely curious what others think.
Has bodybuilding culture fundamentally changed?
Has social media eliminated the traditional offseason?
Are today’s bodybuilders healthier because they’re monitoring blood work so closely or are we simply getting better at managing the consequences? Is the goal still to build the best physique possible, or has it become maintaining a peak physique year-round?
I’d love to hear perspectives from both the old-school crowd and the newer generation. I have a feeling the answers will be very different.
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Interesting take on the entire bodybuilding space, to be fair I never really thought about it, but when I see the kinds of posts you mentioned above I cant help to roll my eyes at them sometimes lol
Seems like someone is finally woke when Noone wants to look...
I've said this time and time again on here, and its also relevant to this forum post.
The reason you have so many people just asking endless gear questions rather than actual training questions is because many people who run Steroids these days are NOT people who live for going to the gym and busting ass, who have spent many years building to basic strength and size levels that should be hit before jumping on AAS, have not studied all different styles of training styles and how to sleep and eat optimally before running gear - they are instead people who like most of the rest of todays society are obsessed with how they look and their image, and have decided that lifting weights and running steroids is the fastest way to looking better. They have not spent 3 years training, studying and conversing with others in gyms and have very limited knowledge on the area as a whole - let alone steroids.
This might sound ruthless but its the truth - How many fuckin pictures of guys on here have we seen who look like ABSOLUTE DOGSHIT and resemble a McDonalds garbage bin that have just jumped on a cycle of 3 compounds and don't look like they have EVER lifted a weight before????!! This would of NEVER happened 15 to 20 years ago.
Therefore FAR more emphasis is placed on compounds, doses and protocols than it is on actual lifting and the raw basics of the sport/hobby.
I think you’d need to start with a definition of a bodybuilder. Is a guy who trains hard, eats like a bodybuilder, and runs gear a bodybuilder if he doesn’t ever compete? I think the number of people with access to gear has expanded so much that a majority of people asking these questions are not bodybuilders. I’m not a bodybuilder. I had a lot of these questions before I started running gear and I researched forums and YouTube with occasional perusal of available scientific literature before I took the leap. I had raloxifene in my drawer before I ever pinned more than 150 mg of test per week. I then jumped in conservatively and started experimenting to see what does and doesn’t work for me. I would have been embarrassed to ask some of the questions I see on here. The goal is to grow more muscle and reduce body fat over time while remaining as healthy as possible using these substances. There are definitely more people who want to stay leaner and are willing to sacrifice size which seems ok to me. There are also people who are effectively drug addicts and don’t have clear goals that they are trying to achieve with these tools. As for competitive bodybuilders, although there is more information and people do things differently, I believe the real deal guys still have real off-seasons and get shredded during prep.