Sean makes the trip from his room in Hamilton Village to Gimbel six days a week, without fail, and it shows. At six feet, two inches, and 190 pounds, he looks more like a Men's Fitness cover boy than the average Wharton junior. For some, it might seem that such a perfect physique just isn't worth the early morning rise, but Sean thinks it's a small price to pay to have the gym all to himself.
"You come here at five o'clock, and you spend more time waiting in line than working out. You can't move for the herds of sorority girls waiting to get on the elliptical machines for hours," he explains. Sean is quick to criticize the habits of these "cardio queens" and their arguably obsessive workout habits.
Yet the irony is that Sean, along with many other guys on campus, spend just as much time, if not more, in the weight room next door striving toward the same goal: a perfect physique. Is it fair to compare bodybuilding to the sometimes unhealthy and obsessive cases of extreme dieting and exercise among some females?
For Wendy Shiekman, an executive member of Penn's GUIDE group -- Guidance for Understanding Image, Dieting and Eating -- there is little to distinguish the mindset of a bodybuilder and the mindset of a female obsessed with extreme dieting and exercise. "Can you not see the problem with a 'sport' that encourages a never-ending pursuit of some abstract notion of physical perfection?" the College senior asks.
t's this emphasis on the aesthetic that leads to the controversy surrounding bodybuilding's classification as a sport. Even those involved in other types of gym-based sports are careful to distance themselves from image-driven bodybuilding.
Christy Fleming, a Wharton senior and two-time Pennsylvania Powerlifting Champion, explains, "bodybuilding is a display of how you look. It's not like powerlifting, a display of what you can do. The winner of a bodybuilding contest is not necessarily the strongest or the largest. It's the most toned, ripped and defined." Like figure skating and gymnastics, the winner of a bodybuilding contest is judged subjectively -- there's no impartial benchmark to differentiate competitors.
And unlike other sports, it's hard, almost impossible, to classify bodybuilding participants, to draw the line between the dedicated gym-rat and the fully-fledged bodybuilder.
"Bodybuilding doesn't have just one definition: the distinction is different for every person. It can be understood as an art form, a method of dieting or a method of exercise. It varies from person to person," says Ron Nirenberg, an Annenberg School Master Graduate who wrote his thesis on male bodybuilding. For him, the moment when he started lifting to get himself beyond a "normal" physique is when he became a bodybuilder.
"I started looking at my body as if it were a canvas," he says.
Such is the mentality behind many of the methodical, intense practices that bodybuilders partake in as part of their training. Chris Mayorga, a Wharton senior who took part in the Mr. Penn contest, the University's annual bodybuilding competition, explains that the training is a mechanism to continually improve one's appearance. He asserts, "people who just go the gym are just trying to maintain what they already have. That gets boring. Bodybuilding introduces the idea that there's always a next step, something else that you can improve."
or bodybuilders, including those in the Mr. Penn contest, there are many steps and many sacrifices to be made in striving for their goal of "physical perfection." It's a grueling and gritty regimen that extends far beyond the weightroom.
"Weightlifting is by far the easiest part of bodybuilding -- there's so much more to it than throwing weights around," says Mayorga, who forced himself to lose 23 pounds in the weeks leading up to the contest to compete in the middle-weight class.
"I ran for at least half an hour every day, I cut out all dairy from my diet, along with all meats except for chicken and fish, and I drank only water." Eating vegetables and fruits as one's only carbohydrates, although cautioned against by nutritionists, encourages the all-important lean, defined look for which bodybuilders strive. Mayorga admits that he often went to bed hungry in the day leading up to the competition, but he argues that it was "worth the sacrifice."
For bodybuilders, the few weeks before a competition are always the most demanding. After months of arduous training to build up body mass, contestants spend the last two weeks or so burning as much body fat as is possible to help them achieve maximum body definition -- that quality referred to as "ripped." Right before the contest, bodybuilders also try to rid their bodies of as much water weight as possible, often by drinking next to nothing. In the most extreme cases, professional competitors have even been known to give themselves enemas.
"In professional competitions, some of these guys vary their weight so much over the course of the training period that they have to have multiple separate sets of clothing," says Fleming, the powerlifting champion. "In the days before the competition, you can be talking to the guys in the gym, and they'll just start fading out because they're so weak from dehydration."
But Tony Tenisci, the organizer of the Mr. Penn contest, is quick to distance such excessive practices from the amateur student event. "You have to take those stories with a grain of salt. Anyone's going to embellish. It's really not all that bad," says Tenisci, who is also the head Woman's Track and Field coach and has been running the competition at Penn since 1994. He claims his number one priority is to keep contestants in good health -- both physically and psychologically.
"Competing in a bodybuilding contest, at least at the amateur level, such as the one at Penn, has only positive attributes to it," Tenisci says. For the coach, the individual experience during the training period is more important than the outcome of the final competition. "It's all about embracing the knowledge of physical change, and [the contestants] ability to do so," he says.
The body builders themselves agree. Mayorga, who placed fourth in the contest last year, says the experience gave him "one of the biggest senses of accomplishment ever." Testimonials like this that make it hard for bodybuilders to understand why so many are critical of their sport.
art of the criticism stems from media reports of dangerous and illicit drug use -- especially steroids, reported to be rife in the professional world. Steroids, taken orally or intravenously, help the muscles re-build faster, allowing the bodybuilder to work out more often. These illegal drugs have been reported to have side effects ranging from aggression, known among bodybuilders as "'Roid Rage," to shrinking of the testicles.
Among Penn bodybuilders, though, the preferred substance is creatine. Available as capsules, powder or liquid, at health-food stores, drug stores or on the Internet, these supplements help boost the natural production of creatine in the liver, kidneys and pancreas, helping the bodybuilder increase energy. Though technically a natural compound, side effects from overdoses can be dangerous -- even lethal -- and include kidney failure, diarrhea, muscle and ligament tears and excessive dehydration.
Instances of substance abuse like these, often hyped by the media, contribute to the negative perception of the bodybuilding culture. But the stereotypical view of an obsessive, pill-popping meat-head, blindly striving towards a shallow ideal is strongly contested by those who observe and participate in bodybuilding, even though they may spend hours upon hours in the gym.
"Bodybuilding gets a bad rap, unfairly," says Fleming. "The sport's reputation is vulnerable because it's based on the idea of a certain body image. There's just a misconception that bodybuilders are trying to compensate for some insecurity when in fact, it's just a sport like any other."
Mayorga too is eager to point out the difference between dedication and fixation. "It can become an unhealthy obsession, but that can be said about pretty much anything."
For Mayorga, the minority of bodybuilders who get caught in the spiral of drug-use misrepresent the sport, reinforcing popular, but unwarranted stereotypes: "Using drugs is an indication that bodybuilding has overtaken a person -- and it's no longer about proving to yourself that you can do anything."
Indeed, according to several varsity athletes, steroid use may well be widespread among all athletes, and statistics for creatine use also distance bodybuilding from these harmful practices. In a recent survey of athletes reported in Time magazine, 44 percent of respondents admitted using creatine -- not for bodybuilding per se, but for athletic performance mostly in football, wrestling, hockey, gymnastics and lacrosse. While the media outcry at creatine use has recently been directed at bodybuilding, its origin actually lies in the deaths of three collegiate wrestlers in 1997.
And yet, despite this evidence of widespread abuses in other sports, bodybuilders still feel as though they are fighting a tide of negative public perceptions. The very qualities that are prized in the sphere of bodybuilding -- discipline, focus and a constant pursuit of self-improvement -- are perceived in a negative light because they are applied to the altering of one's body. Is our society's inherent suspicion of bodybuilding a reflection of our hyper-sensitivity to body image? More importantly, is this sensitivity the bigger problem?
Whatever the case, Sean continues to rise with the sun each morning to bench-press, calculate his body fat, stand before the mirror and strike the poses only a bodybuilder can strike. He's not thinking about the drugs others take or the unhealthy diets that some might stick to -- that's their business. For the moment, it's about him and the aspiration to be one step closer to perfection than the morning before.
