Bodybuilding: the pursuit of vanity

Now, as soon as you read that term bodybuilding what image popped into your mind? A gargantuan, steroid fueled, overly vascular man in a speedo? That's most of our schemas for the term bodybuilding. In my mind a bodybuilder is anyone who bases their training around isolation movements performed in sets eight or more. With that training modality also comes with the technique of using tempo during lifts. This simply means taking your time during the exercise.

Now what I just described is the basis of a bodybuilding program. By tweaking minor points in your training and lifestyle you can use that to become either a massive muscle-bound behemoth or your typical fitness model that you see in magazines.
However this form of training isn't the most effective way to develop coördination, strength, or athleticism.

The reason these athletes muscle change is because of something called sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, or in lay-mans terms water retention. These athletes muscles increase in size due to an increase of sarcoplasm, the fluid that fills your muscle. While a traditional strength athletes muscle will grow due to mostly an increase in the number of muscle fibers making up the cell. This is akin to increasing the size of the glass of a light bulb, but not the size of the filament.

Bodybuilding does indeed involve a level of coördination. However this type of coördination we generally think of. Bodybuilders lift their weights in a controled drawn out way, so a bodybuilder fires their muscles slowly. True athletic coördination come from training your nervous system in a way that you can fire as much of your muscle fibers as quickly as possible; this is what you or I would call being explosive. That is how football players train themselves so change speed quickly or how basketball players train themselves to jump higher, feats we generally classify as athletic.

Now this isn't to say someone performing hypertrophy training won't have any increase in muscle fibers and functional strength, but what they do gain won't up to their true potential. With that it's safe to say that bodybuilding doesn't have much to do with developing true strength, athleticism, or coördination. Bodybuilding is really about what you look like; while this maybe perfectly acceptable for some, it is not for me. I believe the purest form of training is to increase performance, not in pursuit of vanity. What you are capable of is infinity more important than what you look like.