now i understand this might come off as a simple question, but the more i thought about it, it really didn’t make sense. yes theyre eating +6k calories a day, so then why wouldnt it turn into something more useful like dense muscle with all the training their doing?
In: 1990
Muscles need energy, the harder the muscle needs to work, the more energy it needs. Fat is able to provide muscles with that energy.
Strong men often look fat, but it’s because they have a lot of muscle with a healthy amount of fat over it. Body builders focus solely on lean muscle, making it less efficient but more prominent.
Note, body builders are still strong, just less strong than a strong man with the same amount of muscle.
They are full of muscle- under a layer of fat. Look at sumo wrestler, they’re packing a hell lot of muscle as well.
The muscular body builders you see 1) specifically train for large muscles and 2) work to reduce their body fat to make muscles more pronounced.
In body building, there are two phases that body builders will subject themselves to:
* “Bulking”, where they put on weight (both muscle and fat)
* “Cutting”, where they go into a caloric deficit while trying to selectively lose fat (and by doing a lot of resistance exercise to maintain muscle)
The first is to get big and strong, the second is to get lean and to improve muscle definition. But during cutting, there is always the risk of losing some muscle. The guys in strong-man competitions who are not in it for aesthetics simply do not care about the second phase because the only thing that wins strongman competitions is sheer strength. (Not even relative strength for their weight, just as much strength as possible for the competition challenges. Many of the strongest strong men [actually struggle to do bodyweight exercises such as pullups](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdicwabHtbc). Hafthor Bjornsson weighs about 400 pounds, and in the video, you can see that [he struggles to do a clean pull-up](https://youtu.be/MdicwabHtbc?si=iBGvlIPFRGYUKOJK&t=272) with his massive bodyweight, unable to get his chin over the bar.) So they just bulk and bulk and don’t do a cut phase. As a result of this, they put on a considerable amount of fat.
As for why they are putting on fat and not just straight muscle, it’s because they are getting themselves into an anabolic state, and in that state, their bodies are responding to growth hormones that trigger both muscle growth and fat storage. But another reason is that muscle consists of protein, and a lot of their surplus calories are also from fat and carbs. Your body can’t just turn fats and carbs into muscle. If you have a large caloric excess of fats and carbs in your diet, the fats get stored as adipose tissue, and the carbs first get stored as glycogen in the muscles, but then you hit a point where your body stores anything beyond that as newly created fat (de novo lipogenesis).
The body can’t store excess protein that isn’t used to build muscle, excess protein doesn’t automatically get turned into muscle; the proteins that get metabolized for energy end up shedding the nitrogen content as urea in the form of urine.
>so then why wouldnt it turn into something more useful like dense muscle with all the training their doing?
It does, these guys are absolutely packed with dense muscle. If you ever see a strongman after they lose weight (Thor and Eddie Hall are good recent examples) they’re absolute units.
There are a couple of reasons for the “gut”. It’s normally not that large a layer of fat, their cores are absolutely packed with muscle to stabilise them through the lifts they do, with a healthy layer of fat over the top. It makes their midsections disproportionate.
They’re also training usually for 4+ hours a day, it makes sense for them to keep a calorie surplus, which can lead to fat gains. Bodybuilders “bulk” too when they’re training, then they go through quite a severe cut and dehydration to reduce their body fat % for competition, strongmen and powerlifters (specifically in the higher classes with no weight limit) don’t.
There’s also a bit of a scaling issue, most of these guys are *huge* – they’re giants. They’re massive even after they cut down, it’s not all fat, they’re just big blokes. They’re always going to look bigger than a normal reference human, especially given their unusual proportions.
Everyone should know that when a Mr. Universe style bodybuilder is at an event, he is starving and dehydrated and is physically weaker than he’d ever be. (edit: compared to the exact same guy a week later who’s been eating and hydrating like normal.)
Henry Cavill all hot and shirtless in The Witcher? Same thing. He hates it. He looks so good because he hasn’t eaten or drank anything for like a day or even two just for this one scene.
Real strength doesn’t look like Schwarzenegger in the 80s.
It’s hard to maximize muscle building without eating a surplus of calories. So whatever amount of energy they burn in training, they make sure to eat more than that.
And in sports where overall weight is not a penalty (or at least not a large penalty) the incentive is to eat more.
Also, although they may be training very intensely, it is not aerobic / cardiovascular training (which burns a lot of calories).
Weight lifting may be tiring and make your muscles sore, but it requires intense effort only for very short periods of time (seconds, not hours), and your average heart rate stays low – so you’re not burning very many calories.
So powerlifters end up with a lot of muscle, large bellies, and generally higher body fat % than other types of athletes.
Your body is very lazy. It will only build and keep muscles if they’re needed and there is energy to support it. In order to be the strongest you need to make sure your body gets more food it needs, so it’s free to build muscles. Some of that food will be used to build and maintain your muscles, but the rest will go into fat on your body.
Mass moves mass, the bigger you are the more weight you have as a counter balance.
Also the best way to gain muscle is to eat and eating means you will also gain fat
Basically, getting strong and getting fat have the same dietary requirement, which is to eat a lot of food. You can not be as strong as possible without also gaining fat. The excess calories also help with hormones that support strength, hydration, vitamin and mineral intake and things like that. Eat more = stronger and fatter. Eat less = weaker and leaner.
But really they are not as fat as they look. They have a ton of muscle, strong thick midsections, and usually hold a lot of water from eating so much.
It is near impossible to gain muscle without also gaining some fat onto your body, you need to be in a calorie surplus to gain muscle and even with steroids which chemically convince your body to produce MORE muscle you’re still going to gain fat too
Your body thinks fat is amazingly useful, and its right. Its far more useful than muscles, fat has probably saved many more human lives over millennia than muscles, plenty of people died of starvation probably not a ton because they couldn’t lift something heavy
if you want to look lean you then have to cut food, lose the fat, you’ll lose some muscle too but you’ll lose more fat and get down to that perfectly cut lean look, but you’ll likely be less strong than you were before the cut
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