When musculation becomes unhealthy

Every inch of muscle we win should turn one additional year old, but is it so?

 

By Estany Tineo Alvarado

 

    Any muscled body catches our eye. The only fact it’s over the average is an enough motivation to awake our curiosity, admiration, or even envy. The muscular development is linked to health. The logics says us is a person is capable to reach some aesthetics, is because he has followed up a so-healthy physical activity and feeding regime that other result couldn’t be expected.

 

A century ago, that reasoning was totally valid. But, since the synthetization of food specialized in stimulating muscular development began by manipulating part or our whole metabolism, things don’t frame too healthy. “The bodybuilders are actually ill persons,” the musculation specialist Ramos Puig underscored .

 

“A guy who develops his muscles takes so many synthetic stuff that makes his body to stop producing the same substances that are formed naturally inside him,” he said before an audience joined mainly by gym trainers. “Then, as this one doesn’t produce its hormones yet, that athlete turns to depend on the synthetic if he wants to keep the shape,” he added on March 25^th, 2011, in Piura City, Peru.

 

This brings on another problem overflowing the sport land – stress. “Rhis athlete is too worried about winning or losing mass that ends to add psychological pressure, that disminishes his performance,” Mr Puig explained. This decreases the muscular mass and the problems of administered substances abuse start right there, uncontrolled, so it compensates what he lost, in some cases with marked dose of anxiety and panic.

 

After the seminarium wwhat I attended to, I decided to drink an ice juice while the rest of trainers looked scare at me because they consider it a forbidden beverage. But this is Piura, it’s hot, and I need something cold and tasty… and it wouldn’t be a bad idea they follow my example.

 

    The spinaches of Popeye

The food synthetized for athletes, sold openly or clandestinely, are particularly available in the places where the gyms have flourished stronger. Many of them provide extra energy for holding the training on, reduce the body fat index by eliminating retained liquids, and promise to increase muscular mass. There are also those suddenly increasing energy and mass – steroids.

 

Like almost everywhere, these substances are gotten through trainers or fellas linked to gyms. Some trainers deny its use but recognize its existence. Many of those products have no legal restrictions in several countries and flow among them by smuggling.

 

In the U.S., the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) got to thwart steroids trafficking networks that introduced pills and injectables from Tijuana/San Diego border pass, and distributed them along the West Coast including Venice Beach, Calif., home of the actual bodybuilding. The FBI found that many of those substances ended in hands of famous baseball or football players who ultimately revealed their victories came cheating.

 

Not only the steroids themselves are dangerous. Many supplements, when become addictive, create secondary effects that end in renal insufficiency or coronary thrombosis. Ramos Puig himself said the synthetic support is good only when is necessary (before the amazed look of many trainers) and in small doses.

 

The first one you must try is switching to a routine that highlights the weakest muscles so getting harmony. If that doesn’t work, the supplement can be considered. “If training for competition, the results may be seen in one year… or two, depending on the guy,” he stated. Despite that, many trainers insist they can get achievement in less than six months, but this is only possible with steroids.

 

The problem of its using comes as the time goes by – sudden cancer, liver diseases, congenital difficulties, morbid obesity just to mention the case of Piura, Peru, that has not been researched in-depth yet. “That’s why many bodybuilders, instead of being symbols of health, end to be the unhealthiest people in the world,” he concluded.

 

    The Complex of Hercules

Since Greece, the male musculation had to do with a public health policy that led to create an aesthetic canon. As the time went by, muscle was related to strength, and this one to power. Then, amid a marking patriarcal society, it finished as the symbol of manhood.

 

Specialists like the psychologist Marisa Bobadilla, with Radio Cutivalú’s Gender Programme (Piura, Peru), underlined that the muscle doesn’t determine if a male is so, upgrading or downgrading. In fact, she proposes that the masculinity –and the feminity, as well—has to do with developing skills and talents, and the way how the individual empowers them as an active subject for the development of a community, something completely extra-sport but which basis is the sport.

 

Still, there are amateurs who continue doing the relation muscle=manhood, although many end to look like Johnny Bravo, that means well-developed from waist to up but worse in the rest. This is caused by a generalized prejudge among pupils –and many trainers—who cross out as homosexual to the males who work out legs.

 

Most experienced trainers, like the emblematic Sullana, Peru-based Lucho Bulnes, insist that the musculation must be integral because every muscle has a work to do. And regarding to legs (and gluteus), if they are not developed as the rest of the body, they couldn’t hold on the weight of the chest efficiently. About the prejudge, Mr Bulnes had said that’s it – a prejudge.

 

How many trainers know about physiology? That’s why it’s also controversial the easeness they recommend synthetic substances –or steroids, even—not having conscience and not warning the pupil of the contraindications, or the short-term and long-term risks. Fortunately, this most reliable information is actually available like it occurred in the conference what I attended to, or websites.

 

The problem is on how what you learned is replicated, and what way is possible to control that the gyms, not taking the business aside, to be health shrines where the people win life, and not the whole opposite.

 

Produced and edited by Estany Tineo and Nelson Peñaherrera, with contributions by Luis Correa and Juan Carlos Torres. NOTICE: We don’t recommend the use of any supplement nor hormonal additive if a reliable medical doctor doesn’t prescribe it. © 2011 Asociación Civil Factor Tierra. All Rights Reserved.