If we are talking about unrealistic physical standards of male fitness given to us by movies, I would like to mention Hugh “Wolverine” Jackman here.
Yeah, he is ripped, isn’t he?
Well, it is true, but to get that kind of definition, he went through 36 hour period of dehydration, which caused him to temporarily lose 10 pounds of “water weight”.
Thus during the fight scene he was filming, he was a hair breadth from blacking out whole time, just to look unrealistically muscular.
As he said during interview with Steven Colbert, “If You go three days without water, You will die. Then, when You are halfway there they shout ‘Roll it!”
It’s the same with professional bodybuilders who get into periods of extreme fasting and dehydration to lower their fat-to-muscle ratio to inhuman levels, all in hopes of making their muscle definition a bit better.
According to experts, healthy body fat percentage for a healthy male ranges from 8% to 20%, depending on height, lifestyle and numerous other variables.
Fitness model and professional bodybuilder Helmut Strebl also known as “World’s Most Shredded Man” as he supposedly managed to get his body fat percentage below 5%…
… But only when he partakes in competitions, since it is not humanly possible to live with such low fat percentage of one’s body for longer periods of time.
I mean, yeah, he keeps a draconian training regime, as well as a very strict diet even off-season, but looks much more human then…
There are documented cases of incredibly fit and muscular bodybuilders fainting on the stage in the middle of their flexing routines, as well as several who outright died, because of cardiac arrest caused by their blood becoming too thick, due to long dehydration…
And let’s not forget about Muscle Dysmorphia, colloquially known as “Megarexia” or “Bigarexia”.
Yeah, it’s a thing, but it’s barely talked about, since it’s apparently not manly to admit to having problems like that, which also creates problems with researching this particular disorder…
