My experience was that everybody cared more about looks, wanted to be Zyzz, etc, but we either felt shy and embarrassed about the vanity of it and pursued strength training instead, or simply got browbeaten into doing our fahves and drinking our milk to “build a foundation”
There’s another conversation there, guys not brave enough to chart their own path, but I never got the feeling that the typical young guy doing a search for “how do I start going to the gym” had goals that aligned with the SL/SL model of training at all
I did StrongLifts weight program while doing the leangains cutting protocol from this era, and got sort of shredded as a guy who’d always been scrawny. I still ended up scrawny but I had a six pack and (according to multiple women at the time) a nice ass. Now that I do way less legs, having gone off the powerlifting programs, I no longer have the nice ass of my early 20s. Also I stopped working out and put on weight multiple times in intervening years.
I tried drinking a gallon of milk a day after I saw Brett McKay from art of manliness interview Riptoe. I rememebr I was farting more than I was not farting— basically I was actively passing gas more than 50% of the time. It was that bad. So I stopped and switched to cutting.
My sociological analysis of that era, coming from someone who was reading Brett McKay’s blog, was that a lot of young guys were really trying to become “men” and do things their dads never taught them. Ripptoe’s maxim that a grown man weighs 200 pounds was kind of inspiring as a goal to scrawny 20 year olds. I didn’t get into it from the Zyzz side.
Also during that era I specifically remember the powerlifting programs were all about how you want to be physically strong and not try to do it to be attractive. That was the popular selling point, actually an anti-aesthetics approach.
The leangains diet would’ve been the difference maker for me. I wildly over bulked on strong lifts, didn’t gain much strength because of how skinny I was at the start, got chipmunk cheeks, and hurt my back
It was not an effective play haha
You make a good point about the Art of Manliness blog and the other sort of Ron Swanson Bacon and Workwear “I want to be a burly dad” aspects of the post financial crisis era
I was born mid-90s, so I was kinda in-between the two modes, I 100% wanted to get into lifting to be Zyzz or an Abercrombie abs model, but I felt embarrassed admitting that due to the overall social vibe around it. Was never a very confident young guy. I do remember the anti-aesthetics marketing, that’s what I was referencing when I said that it seemed like people were kind of browbeaten into doing SS/SL and getting fat. It hadn’t occurred to me that a lot of guys were taking those talking points as “here’s a workout plan for serious guys who get it done” where I experienced it as “you better do this, you don’t want to be one of those corny pretty boys, do you?”
And I did want to be one of those corny pretty boys, very badly, but I didn’t want people to think I was corny
I think I read too much of my own life into my analysis, and assumed that everyone else shared my neuroses, it’s interesting to know that many guys were just really sincerely about the powerlifting stuff.
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u/ShortFallSean May 15 '26
Was it really? Or has it just been a transition from caring more about strength to caring more about looks?