The Love Language of Bodybuilding

unraveling the aesthetic physique

Gaze-sharpened, core braced, I pull 400 lbs across my hips, the bar snug against me like a seatbelt. With a shape exhale, I hoist the weight towards the heavens, praying to the gods to help me build a bum.

For 18 months, I've been hitting the gym hard, faithfully sticking to four sessions a week.  Incurring a pesky knee injury while training for a marathon gave me enough evidence to blame my “weak glutes.” So, after years of cardio-centric routines, I mustered the guts to confront the dreaded gym scene I'd been avoiding. 

You know the type: bulbous bros, fraternizing around the natural habitat of squat racks, grunting while hurling colossal dumbbells overhead. It was an intimidating jungle. I sought solace in a Discord group of lady lifters, where we lifted each other through the ups and downs with support and rock-solid accountability.

This group was a goldmine of weightlifting wisdom. I learned to fix my form, optimize my recovery, and punch up my protein intake for peak performance. We established our own vernacular, indulging in terms like muscle mommy and juicy delts and mASSing – yup, with a capital A.S.S. Think of it as a femme twist on “bulking,” that male bodybuilders use to describe the process of consuming surplus calories and lifting heavy to gain muscle.

These terms make up a sort of love language that feminizes, albeit sexualizes, bodybuilding. But then again, broadly speaking, isn’t fitness culture often commercialized in this way? It revolves around the pursuit of attaining a conventionally attractive physique.

Admittedly, I aspired to build a desired body, and this pushed me to extremes during my teenage years. I relentlessly criticized my figure through the goggles of what I suppose is the “male gaze” or mainstream beauty standards. Part of my initial approach to fitness was driven by shallow thinking, seeing it merely as a means to an end.  The possibility that one day, when I achieve my outrageous body goals, I’ll never have to think about them again.  I would privately make arbitrary and self-limiting declarations like, "If I reach this specific weight, then I will finally feel confident."

In the past, I labeled weightlifting as a shallow form of fitness compared to activities that I perceived as more communal or cooperative, like group yoga or pickup basketball.  But weightlifting is the very activity that has finally broken through the damaging mindset I had developed around fitness.

Body Image Awareness

I first learned the concept of “body awareness” through meditation, where the focus lies on tuning into physical sensations while detaching from thoughts.  Body image awareness seems like a fixation on how the body looks rather than how it feels. This fixation tends to lead to comparisons with other bodies.  Objectively, the body is simply a vessel made up of skin, blood, and bones. Yet, we have developed subjective perceptions and categories based on physical attributes: tall, short, broad, toned, svelte, curvy, and so on. Unfortunately, modern society is riddled with biases, as people tend to attach these physical categories to aspects like socioeconomic status and education.

I suspect we first sharpen — or distort — our own body image awareness through two experiences: 1) The rapid transformation that occurs during puberty, and 2) The emergence of seeing our bodies through the eyes of others, a common occurrence during puberty.  At its worst, image awareness warps into body dysmorphia. Left unhealed, this dysmorphia can bleed into one’s perception of the self. In his biographical docuseries, Arnold Schwarzenegger confesses to looking in the mirror and telling himself, “‘I don’t know how this shit body can ever win this competition,” despite his remarkable feat of winning consecutive world titles.

By preoccupying my mind with shallow notions of fitness and body image, I set myself up for mental failure. Despite controlling my input (such as running religiously every day), if I didn’t get my desired output (the body of a professional athlete), I’d blame it on some defect in my character. So I’d panic and change my fitness routine every few months.

That's the inherent flaw in holding a shallow relationship with fitness, with anything really – the motivation tends to atrophy quickly.

Mind Muscles

With each passing month of my weight training, I moved my body in ways I hadn’t done before. Pumping out a set of push-ups in proper form, descending into a deep squat with ease, and cranking out my very first unassisted pull-up (finally). These were accomplishments I had never achieved when my sole focus was on slimness or conforming to commercially defined standards of attractiveness.

Progressive overload is a fundamental principle in weight training. It involves systematically increasing the demands placed on your body over time to stimulate muscle growth, known as hypertrophy. You do this by increasing resistance or intensity, adding a rep or set, or improving the overall range of motion in the exercise. By embracing this mindset, I’ve shifted away from shallow thinking and fickled motives. Fitness is not a means to an end; it’s a continuous practice and commitment to my long-term health and well-being.

Mind-muscle connection is a conscious and deliberate muscle contraction performed during lifts, which is a meditative experience for me. When I perform a lift, I’m focusing on how my body feels, not fixating on how it looks. I’ve learned how to stop talking at my body and start thinking with it.

I used to define part of my self-worth by how my body parts looked. And now I’ve built the mind muscles, the invisible virtues, that carry me forward in fitness and in life – ambition, resilience, and self-care.

Seinfeld once remarked, “If we really stuck with the classic Greek priorities, a sound mind in a sound body, the only two places we'd ever go is to a library or a gym.” Would life be simpler if we weren’t pulled by the constant crook of conditioning – the neverending fortification of the body? Something skin-deeper than aesthetics, or whatever euphemism the fitness industry wants to call the beautification of body image, pushes me to show up for my health every day. 

And I think that something is the true love language of fitness. The language that honors the body – this vessel of skin, bones, and blood – that walks the earth. 

---

Thank you for reading Connection Crave. If you enjoyed this, I recommend checking out my post, Quitting a Marathon.

P.S. For the ladies out there interested in strength training, check out Versa Grips. A pair of these will protect your palms ❤️