Why we lift?

[FLEX_NuTz]

I know we all lift for different reasons. Each person has their own story on this board of why they took up body building or AS.

Mine personally, I was just a skinny kid, 5'8 140 pounds for about 4 years, two of which were the first two years of high school. Got tired of being called 'tall' and lengthy' when all the real compliments were going to the kids who were 'ripped' or 'built like a house'. The rest is history...

So what's everyone's personal reasons for training?

[Red5]

I'm the same as you Flex.Tired of being the skinny kid everyone pushes around.I want to be treated with a little respect.
Also doesn't hurt that the ladies love a man with a fit bod.

[Tedmax195]

Started out skinny 5'10 155lbs mid way through high school balloned up to 200lbs and became fat. I workout to stay in shape and i love to challenge myself everyday in the gym. Now i'm 5'10 220lbs 13% BF.

[gettinthere]

I would like to say I lift only for me and I don't care what other people think, but who does that? I think that for everyone who has ever gotten a compliment on how they look that is pure motivation to keep on doing what they're doing. I love to go back home and see people I havent seen in a long time, they are always overwhelmed by how much bigger I got. It's the best. i graduated high school at 6'3" and about 170 lbs, now I'm 6'5" and 230ish.

[Red Ketchup]

I lift simply because I enjoy it... no other reason really. I've never been a small guy, I got a good frame and have always been strong. Lifting only seems to be the natural thing to do.

As for cardio well... I do not enjoy it, but I have to do it as I get fat easily if I am not carefull.

Fun is the name of the game!

[Lattman]

I started lifting because I had bad posture and the kids in high school used to beat me up all the time laughing at me. As I was hurting inside I tried to make my outside look stronger to cover the sensitive insecure kid. I took up AAS after my first long time g/f went to fuck with a friend a week after we broke up. Now I lift because it keeps me busy and I feel superior, no one dares to treat me any less then I deserve!

[Buddha_Red]

I lift for a couple of reasons.

first reason is i grew up fat and i always hated it, just took 32 years to understand it is up to me.

second, i want to be as "sexy" to my wife as i can be. Too many husbands get fat and lazy after the wedding and could care less about looking good. NOT ME, i love the looks i get from the wife and the way im starting to look =)

[majorpecs]

Awesome Buddha, that's admirable!! I have always loved lifting weights, but I suppose the roots of my lifting are tied to high school and football!!

[CrazyRussian]

I started lifting in high school and graduated at 5'10" 180 after 4 years of lifting naturally.... after my first year of colege i seemed peaked.... i was 6'0" 195 with a bench max of 405 and a squat of 500, pretty good naturally, but the fact of feeling maxed out really got to me and because i was doing college athletics i felt like people would be passing me up... so i took a cycle and got up to 205 and 420 bench and 550 squat with a 260 power clean (this is what i kept after my cycle). so i started for sports and it makes you feel and look better

[Jdawg50]

Originally posted by majorpecs
Awesome Buddha, that's admirable!! I have always loved lifting weights, but I suppose the roots of my lifting are tied to high school and football!!

I agree with both u and budda. Football got me started, and my wife motivates me to stick with it. Plus I just plain feel good after working out. I tore the shit out of my leg last year, and sat around on my ass for 6 months, now that I can lift again, I cant get enough!

[BigGreen]

Graduated HS at 170 pounds (6'1") not emaciated, maybe not even really skinny, but small enough to never have been mistaken for a football player or to have been called "big"...something which got to me a bit since my dad was an absolute truck (5'10" and about 240 never having lifted in his life - all physical labor), his father was about 6'5" and 300 lbs with a pretty good build and an uncle was the town giant at about 6'6" and around 300 (sorta small town). Add to that the fact that I grew to my full height of 6'1" by the time i was in sixth or seventh grade, and it became an anomaly of sorts that i never filled out. I was 16 when I graduated, so I guess i just never gave myself the time to fill out naturally, since over the next year, without lifting, I got up to about 180, and that little bit was enough to get me hooked...by the time I got to college (took a year off) i had a tough time convincing most people that I wasn't there to play football or lacrosse.

The rest, as they say, is history

[FLEX_NuTz]

Lattman: awesome to hear, glad you knew where to draw the line and take control
Buddha: very admirable bro, it sounds like you keep your wife very happy

..I also lift for the rush. It's like a natural high for me.

[gettinthere]

does anyone else here have what I have? the opposite of anorexia. I dont think it has a name! I look at myself in the mirror and even though i'm way above average in build I'm almost disappointed. Instead of purging like skinny girls do I go lift the whole gym then eat a house!

[projectsherv]

gettinthere: i got the exam same problem, girls i havent seen in a while always tell me, "how does it feel to be so big?" and im only 5'6 5'7, 148 12%. and when i look in the mirror i am disappointed as well, i have my good days which i feel like i look crucial then i have my bad days where i feel like a blob.

[z28man]

I actually started lifting weights in Middle School. I was tired of being the skinny kid. I didnt get picked on that bad since I was always in sports and athletics, but it happened enough for me to pick up a curling bar in the 6th grade. I wasnt serious about it, but I did develop some little muscles that got me respect by the 7th grade. I really didnt add size though until my jr. year in high school. Once I started getting bigger I was hooked. Now I look forward to working out, its my fun part of the day. Theres nothing like busting through plateus and needing bigger shirts. Cant help but feeling like I need to be the alpha male. Now Im on my first cycle and Ive gained close to 20 lbs in two weeks (been force feeding every two hours or so). Id have to say Im hooked on AAS now and theres no regrets.

[BigGreen]

Reverse anorexia = muscle dysmorphia. I have quite a few interesting books on the subject that i'll post when i'm home from work. Dr. Harisson Pope is widely considered the leading researcher on the topic...i think he's out of harvard, but not sure.

[FLEX_NuTz]

Id be interested in those books when u throw up some resorces about them BigGreen.

[Madmax]

i started lifting because i was a fat kid, always got picked on. people called me all sorts of names. eventually i decided it wasn't gonna be like that anymore. started lifting. i bump into people that used to tease me now and then but they don't say shit to me. all that fat is now muscle. for my age (22)i know i'm ahead of the class. i was 13 years old 5'7 190 of pure fat. now i'm 5'11 204 10%-14% bdy fat(currently on cycle) and i feel good about how i look. i started cycling cause my ex. we dated 6 years cheated on me and i wanted to show her how big i could get. funny thing is, i havn't seen her since the day i caught the slutty bitch cheating.( walked in and saw it)..now i'm married, happy and i get respect from everyone. "SHIT ALL WORKS OUT IN THE END".Madmax..

[BigGreen]

Hey, here a few of the more pertinent ones. Some of them are a bit alarmist (though Pope certainly knows his stuff and is the country's leading authority, he too falls prey to that whole 'may induce men to use steroids !!' manta) but they are all worth examining, particularly (with of course all of the Pope books and articles) Dutton and Klein. Happy reading!

Susan Bordo, The Male Body (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1999).

Kenneth R. Dutton, The Perfectible Body: The Western Ideal of Male Physical Development (Continuum, New York, 1995).

Harrison G. Pope, et al., The Adonis Complex: The Secret Crisis of Male Body Obsession (The Free Press, New York, 2000).

J. Gillet and P.G. White, “Male Bodybuilding and the Reassertion of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critical Feminist Perspective”, Play & Culture 5 (1992): 359.

Samuel W. Fussell, Muscle : Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder (Avon Books, New York, 1991).

Pope, HG Jr, et al, “Evolving Ideals of Male Body Image as Seen Through Action Toys”, International Journal of Eating Disorders 26 (1999): 68.

D.M. Garner, “Body Image Survey”, Psychology Today 30 (January-February, 1997): 1, 30.

Harrison G. Pope, et al., “Muscle Dysmorphia in Male Weightlifters: A Case-Control Study”, American Journal of Psychiatry 157 (August 2000): 1291.

Jeffords, Susan. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Regan Era. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

Alan M. Klein. Little Big Men: Bodybuilding Subculture and Gender. New York: SUNY Press, 1993.

[BigGreen]

Oh, one thing we all might disagree with in the Pope articles and books is an equation he puts forth that supposedly determines the level of muscularity that is naturally attainable as follows:

"Dr. Harrison Pope and his colleagues, having devised a mathematical formula to represent an individual’s muscularity, known as the Fat-Free Mass Index, have determined that, whereas the typical 30-year old man possesses an FFMI of approximately 20, an index of 22 appears as distinctly muscular, and a range of 25-26 represents the natural upper limits of muscularity, many of the bodies publicly upheld as the ideal represent FFMI’s in the upper 20’s and well into the 30’s!"

Here is his and his colleague's formula:

The Fat-Free Mass Index equation: FFMI = (LBM/H squared) + 6.1 x (1.8-H) where LBM is lean body mass in kilograms and H is height in meters.

If you get a chance to look at the Adonis Complex, in which he supports this assertion with pictorials, you'll notice that many of us would probably maintain that 25-26 isn't the extreme upper limit of natural growth Pope would have us believe. Anyway, hope you all get something from this

[chicamahomico]

Now I lift because it keeps me busy and I feel superior, no one dares to treat me any less then I deserve!

This is by far the coolest answer I have heard anywhere to this question!

After quitting school sports in high school I needed something else to do, somehow I wound up at a gym. For years I trained with an speed/strength focus and could have cared less about muscle size. I trained mainly with martial arts and cycling in mind. So I don't really have a defining reason why I came to be a gym rat, I only know that I am one.

[testaprim]

Its not that lifting is all that great, but being small, weak and puney really sucks!

No really i feel i have muscle dysmorphia no matter how many times people say damn you have gotten huge, i look in the mirror and dont see what they are talking about. That and i have been doing it for so long that if i miss a workout i feel like shit and i am an asshole all day!

[wrstlr69sdnl]

I started sophmore year no reason really started off with 185 beanch i weighed 125 i competed against my class mates after a while i like the way i looked so I keeped going with it. It was more like a compitition for me now i just want to get as big as i can cause i like the way it looks better than being skinny i think.
testaprim i feel the same way you do.

[SAMSONN]

i just want to take up more space