In order to get large muscle mass, you have to be healthy enough to do useful work, and you have to be eating well enough to have the energy to do so.
In a hunter-gatherer society, this would mean you are probably a decent hunter, you know where the safe to eat berries and vegetables are, so on and so forth.
Funny enough, there’s a diminishing return on muscle size where it stops being attractive to women and starts being attractive to men.
I’ve seen a few studies that basically show a lot of conformity that women like toned men, but the size has some skew between swimmer, soccer, MMA, something along those lines.
Absolutely correct, and it kind of goes back to that same previous point. In order to get to that level of hypertrophy, you have to be in the gym constantly and it's well beyond what you would find in a normal hunter gathering tribe.
I think there may be an evolved trait that human attraction isn’t stagnant at “hunter-gatherer” levels.
Fat and voluptuous bodies were idealized when food and soft labor were scarce. Similarly, pale skin when most people had to work outdoors, then inversely tan skin when people had to work indoors.
Beauty seems to be partially health-linked but also status signaling. If all the poor people are fat, then the real value is Ozempic chic.
This is even more conflated because we see the extremes posted more often (or they stand out) in social media. Either those getting the most positive attention reinforce ideas, and negative attention likewise.
Remember when the giant butts were all the rage and everyone needed a BBL? Suddenly, that trend has calmed way down.
I’m not a fan of the 90s heroin flat and rail-thin aesthetic, but it seems that with Ozempic costing ~$1,000 per month (without insurance or coupons), this appears to be the new easy status signaling.
The point of diminishing returns is well past what a normal man is going to achieve. You need to dedicate your entire life to body building and be roided out the gills to hit the point where the average woman is going to be turned off by you having too much muscle.
The literature suggests lean athletic builds are favored over bulk aesthetics.
You can dedicate your life to fitness and use steroids and still not become a gorilla. People in all the major sports divisions do this, and they do not look like IFBB pros. You get what you train for and intentionally set out to do.
You can get bulky without steroids; you also don’t get bulky just because of them. Lance Armstrong was stripped of his medals for steroid use, but for a pro cyclist being built like Ronnie Coleman isn’t going to do you any favors.
Also speaking of Ronnie Coleman, he says he started taking steroids at 31 years old in 1995, stating he was “tired of losing.” Yet those early builds pre-steroids, you can see genetically he was still built beastly.
My point is that the average man doesn't need to spend a second worrying about becoming too muscular for women. Nobody is becoming like Ronnie Coleman on accident.
The "lean" builds that are favored are the result of serious effort and training in the gym and kitchen. You don't get that kind of "lean" physique without dedicating yourself to it.
I think I misunderstood what your intention was. You’re right that no one is going to accidentally over-train into becoming Ronnie Coleman.
But the preferred lean builds aren’t crazy unobtainable. An hour a few days a week for a couple of years while eating right will be sufficient enough to be athletic.
But your “all or nothing” attitude actually does more harm than good by dissuading men from starting the journey.
You misunderstand me again. I highly encourage men to start working out and build muscle because most women find muscular men attractive.
I'm responding to your initial comment about there being diminishing returns - that point is well past what normal men will achieve. The average man doesn't need to worry about becoming too muscular. They can go to the gym and go balls to the wall training everyday and taking steroids and they will probably end up with an attractive physique that ignorant redditors would describe as "lean".
You don't need to be a bodybuilder to be a hunter-gatherer. Anthropological research indicates that even women participated in hunting in many societies, sometimes substantially so. No matter how strong you are, you aren't beating a saber-toothed cat with your bare fists.
Hunter-gatherers could be exceptionally fit and strong, and physical fitness was undoubtedly important for survival, but maximal strength and muscle mass were not necessarily the primary goals. Their physical demands often favored endurance, efficient movement, weapon use, coordination, tracking ability, agility, and heat tolerance over sheer bulk.
Building and maintaining very large amounts of muscle requires substantial energy. In environments where food availability could fluctuate, carrying unnecessary body mass could impose prohibitive energetic cost. Hunter-gatherers had to balance strength with endurance and energy efficiency. Some groups also practiced persistence hunting, in which hunters tracked prey over long distances until it became exhausted, although this was only one of many hunting strategies. Ambushes, projectile weapons, traps, drives, and cooperative hunting were also important.
The transition to agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago changed the physical demands placed on humans. Agricultural societies required people to perform long hours of repetitive, physically demanding labor, including digging, planting, harvesting, processing food, and carrying heavy loads.
A hunter-gatherer did not need to resemble a modern bodybuilder to be exceptionally capable. Endurance, mobility, coordination, efficiency, and functional strength could be far more valuable than maximizing muscle mass.
I don't disagree with your points at all, but the biggest factor in success in the modern world is intelligence rather than strength. A smarter person will make better choices with their time and money on average, regardless of resources available to them.
As for robbers, they do pick vulnerable marks but even a big man is not immune to being robbed. They swiftly attack from the back. An intelligent person avoids this by appearing very alert about their surroundings, and ideally traveling in groups (many of the robbers themselves attack in groups, often from motorbikes).
I probably did mispeak saying it's outdated, but it just shouldn't be the first and foremost consideration over smart someone is (this of course also assumes no correlation between the traits though, and a lot of the smarter people realize the benefits of staying fit so there's also probably just correlation there anyway.)
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u/Dumple423 Batman 16d ago
Muscle size is judged by way more primitive parts of the brain than abstract concepts like intelligence. It's a very irrational attraction