[bradarner]

A castle built on sand. The only way to take the premise of this claim seriously is to ignore data for the past 100 years.

When I was in the US military, we all complained about the Body Mass Index standards. They were based on the WWII era "normal". Men were smaller. Less muscle mass. Shorter. If the average fit American young man tried to fit into a pilot's cockpit from the 1950's, it would feel quite cramped. Like it was built for much small people. It was.

We have certainly climbed the Kardashev scale since the 1950's. To what degree is a matter of contention. But, all would agree that we have moved up the scale.

Muscle atrophy has not been correlated with the growth. The opposite seems true. The average American, both male and female, has more muscle mass than in 1924. A 2024 person spends significantly more time on average in a gym pushing their muscles to hypertrophy than in 1924.

In addition, it is likely that the romantic picture of the average laborer "bodybuilding" is fictive and ignores how muscle atrophy and hypertrophy works. Most laborers are NOT doing activity that leads to hypertrophy. They are staying well within cardiovascular zones of muscle activation. Hence, bodybuilders as we know them are largely a modern phenomenon. And they are certainly WAY more muscular.

Seems the model that underlies this claim is built on seemingly demonstrably false premises.

[loeg]

> The average American, both male and female, has more muscle mass than in 1924.

This is true, but sort of a sleight of hand -- obese people that don't exercise have more muscle mass than non-obese people who don't exercise, just to carry around all of the fat. And obviously the average American, both male and female, is more overweight/obese than in 1924.

(I agree with basically everything else you say, though.)

[bradarner]

Agreed, I was debating whether or not this was relevant to mention.

What I could have added was a caveat that sample non-obese people from each time would indicate that 2024 people have greater average muscle mass.

Personally, a more interesting question is whether growth along the Kardashev scale leads to a greater disparity in muscle mass vs body fat. The past 100 years would seem to indicate that it is possible. That being said, it could also be a uniquely American phenomenon. My hypothesis would be that avg muscle mass among French men has still grown over the past 100 years but I don't think obesity has grown to the extreme that it has in the USA.

[ido]

While the US is extrem, the “obesity epidemic” affects pretty much all countries as they become richer. I wonder if recent developments in obesity drugs like ozempic will have a significant impact there in the coming decades.

[loeg]

These obesity drugs are already having a huge effect -- obesity is down in the US for the first time in a long time (2023).

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullartic...

[amanaplanacanal]

I'm not gonna go try to find the numbers right now, but the Anglo speaking world is just ahead of the others. They are all trending the same way.

[pino999]

Obese people don't have more muscle, especially if you look into the more extreme cases. Muscle atrophy seems to happen due to low insuline sensitivity.

And relative they are weaker in the sense that the ratio between strength and body mass is smaller than that of normal people.

And then we have the powerlifting community.

[idiotsecant]

Have you never seen a fat guys calves?

[loeg]

So: extreme cases (both obesity and powerlifting) are not relevant when we're talking about population-wide averages. And relative weakness is also irrelevant (the original claim was solely about muscle mass -- if you want to talk about that being a bad metric, you're responding to the wrong comment).

You make one specific relevant claim: "obese people don't have more muscle." (Which belies everything I've read on the subject.) So, uh, why do you think that?

[danielbln]

40%[0] of the US population is considered obese. Pretty relevant to population wide averages.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db508.htm

[loeg]

This is not responsive to my comment.

[oefnak]

It is. Read your own comment again.

[naveen99]

by that logic, women would have more muscle mass then men, because they carry around more fat. Average american by definition is average. Overweight by definition is above average. BMI normal is outdated, just needs to move up.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Overweight by definition is above average

Not true. Overweight and obese are defined on fixed scales. You can have a population that is 100% obese.

[loeg]

> by that logic, women would have more muscle mass then men, because they carry around more fat.

No? You have to compare like for like. Sedentary obese women have more muscle mass than sedentary normal-weight women, and sedentary obese men have more muscle mass than sedentary normal-weight men. (And the ratio of women to men hasn't moved very much since 1924, and both sexes are heavier than they were in 1924.)

The rest of your comment is not responsive to mine.

[strken]

Why would BMI need to move up? Because it doesn't represent the average, or because it doesn't represent health?

I think the former is uncontroversial but boring, and the later is wrong. I also think that people conflate the two because they want to pretend that being average is the same thing as being healthy.

[voldacar]

It's worth noting that the anatomic accuracy of classical statues like Laocoon, the Farnese Hercules, etc. indicates that there were at least some men walking around in antiquity with an amount of muscle mass that could only be developed by deliberate hypertrophy training of the whole body, as opposed to just getting muscle as a side effect of specific athletic training. It seems like these people were doing something quite similar to modern bodybuilding, goal-wise.

[pitpatagain]

Milo of Croton is often cited as the earliest recorded examples of a progressive resistance training program: "He would train in the off years by carrying a newborn calf on his back every day until the Olympics took place. By the time the events were to take place, he was carrying a four-year-old cow on his back. He carried the full-grown cow the length of the stadium, then proceeded to kill, roast, and eat it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_of_Croton

[grogenaut]

Full grown cow gemini says 1,400lbs. World squat record 1,311.8. Panathenaic Stadium, Athens was 850 feet long, further than a single squat. Either we've gotten weaker, or cows have gotten bigger.

[inglor_cz]

Cows and other animals have been intentionally bred to become bigger.

If you look at medieval illustrations of shepherds and farmers [0], one thing that strikes you is just how small all the animals are. Even in relation to the medieval humans who were significantly shorter than us.

It had its advantages - for example, a leaner, smaller animal can walk long distances and won't get stuck in swampy ground. But it doesn't give you a lot of anything - hide, meat, milk... Nowadays, we have huge animals, which nevertheless have to be transported by trucks. No longer capable of walking 50 miles from the lowland to the mountains to graze.

[0] https://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/.a/6a00d8341c464853ef01...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3d/Me...

https://imgcdn.stablediffusionweb.com/2024/11/21/ce988f0d-9e... - note how the cow barely reaches Villon's waist!

[oktoberpaard]

FYI: the third url links to an AI generated image.

[__coaxialcabal]

From 4o…

In ancient times, such as during the period of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, full-grown cows were significantly smaller than modern cattle. Based on archaeological evidence (bones and remains), historians and archaeozoologists estimate the following sizes: • Height: Approximately 100–120 cm (3.3–4 feet) at the shoulder. • Weight: Between 200–400 kg (440–880 lbs), depending on the breed, sex, and regional conditions.

For comparison: • Modern cattle like Holsteins (dairy cows) stand around 140–150 cm at the shoulder and weigh 700–900 kg. • Some smaller modern breeds, like Dexter cattle, resemble ancient cattle in stature, with a height of 90–120 cm and weight of 300–450 kg.

Factors Influencing Smaller Size in Ancient Cattle 1. Nutritional Limitations: Grazing conditions were less controlled, and fodder quality was inconsistent. 2. Genetics: Ancient cattle were not selectively bred for size like modern cattle. 3. Purpose: Cattle were primarily used for labor (draught animals) and small-scale milk production, rather than for meat.

Ancient cattle were functional animals suited to the agricultural practices and available resources of their time, so their size reflected these limitations.

[kragen]

Please don't post LLM output as comments here. It is helpful for commenters to apply at least a modicum of effort to ensuring that the factual statements they make are correct rather than just authoritatively phrased bullshit.

Of course, plenty of us are capable of producing authoritatively phrased bullshit without any artificial aids! But we should try to minimize that phenomenon rather than maximizing it.

[pitpatagain]

Cows have gotten a lot bigger. That specific legend about Milo may be embellished, but his existence as an exceptional athlete is attested by multiple authors.

The point is really: Classical Greek athletes were doing a lot of recognizable strength training. "Halteres" are basically stone dumbbells (in Spanish the derived word "halterofilia" is the modern name for Olympic weightlifting).

You have other examples like Bybon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bybon) where we have an inscribed rock with a handle carved into it explicitly to use as a weightlifting feat.

This was definitely part of the culture and people knew what trained athletes looked like.

[octokatt]

If you miss Chuck Norris jokes and want to know the Ancient Grecian equivalent, I highly suggest reading more quotes about Milo of Croton.

The dude won six Olympic wrestling events in a row. The seventh Olympics, he came in second. A twenty-eight year rein in one of the most practiced sports in the ancient world.

Eat your heart out, Tom Brady.

[tom_]

It's also worth noting that the anatomic accuracy of the art of Tom of Finland, depicting men with penises in an anatomically accurate position, indicates that there were men with enormous bulging dicks in the early 1960s, enormous bulging dicks of a size and heft typically unequalled by the average man today. Could he have imagined a penis larger than he had ever actually seen? Impossible, of course. The human brain is incapable of bringing to mind anything that it has not seen actually put in its eyes' field of vision.

[MichaelDickens]

A large penis looks the same as a small penis, only larger. Hypertrophied muscles do not look like bigger versions of normal muscles; they have a significantly different shape. A muscular person with normal-to-high body fat also looks very different than a muscular person with low body fat (look at heavyweight or superheavyweight powerlifters compared to bodybuilders). Classical sculptures of Greek heroes display high muscle mass and very low body fat.

[NikkiA]

> A large penis looks the same as a small penis, only larger.

If you truly believe that, you cannot have seen many penises at all.

[Terr_]

Indeed, all humans must have been as big as Michaelangelo's David: 17 feet tall, since anyone who acquires the skill of accurate detailed sculpting automatically loses their ability to do anything but a 1:1 scale. :p

[grogenaut]

Just imagine how big goliath was then! Surely at least 7 hectares!

[voldacar]

Are you kidding? Even if you're a very skilled sculptor, you don't get an extremely accurate sculpture of a human body without a living reference in front of you. A muscular person doesn't look like a non-muscular person with various regions puffed up

[tom_]

Well, my response was slightly tongue in cheek. I was just struck by the implied theory that because works of art depict something, that automatically means that thing actually existed.

Regarding your specific example, I'd actually say that "a non-muscular person with various regions puffed up" is a fairly good description of what a muscular person looks like! And, further, I would be fairly confident that an ancient Greek sculptor, having observed numerous models, would be able to ramp the dials up to 12, producing a figure with a degree of outlandish magnificence never actually quite seen in real life, while still appearing anatomically accurate enough not to look weird.

As to how buff the Greeks really were, I admit we'd need a time machine.

[stavros]

I can imagine big dicks all I want, if I've never seen one, it's hard to sculpt it accurately. Indeed, me sculpting a perfectly accurate huge dick, veins and all, almost certainly means I've seen at least one.

[tartoran]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(ancient_Greece)

[mhb]

Wendy, the bully whippet, would like a word:

https://www.timescolonist.com/local-news/wendy-the-whippet-f...

[antonygonsalves]

There is another, and in my opinion, a much greater flaw with the base argument - most predictions about the future are very, very wrong. The future is not only built on technological and scientific progress, but also on the generation and evolution of social mores and expectations. We are already seeing a scientific and cultural shift that celebrates being healthier, including working out to have more muscle mass and investing heavily in optimising this, and there is no way on how this will evolve in the future.

And for another argument, from a psychological perspective, we know that a healthy body in a vital component of a healthy mind - even with the development of excellent mind-silicon interfaces, we are probably a very, very long way from keeping minds healthy without a correspondingly healthy body (including muscle mass).

[nradov]

The major federal government food assistance programs came out of findings in WW2 that many potential recruits were literally malnourished and underweight. They had grown up poor and starving during the Great Depression. Beyond the human tragedy this was a national security issue. Some men were too small and weak to meet military standards.

[bradarner]

Indeed. Which would seem to indicate that positive growth along the Kardashev scale will lead to hypertrophy not atrophy, as conjectured by the OP. One could hypothesize that growing control of energy is highly correlated with the ability to empower a population to increase in muscle mass. Of course, history would seem to indicate that there can also be a correlation to increased obesity.

[kiba]

Doubtful that the energy spent on building muscles is significant as there are also compensating factors that stabilize our metabolic expenditure.

[RankingMember]

> The average American, both male and female, has more muscle mass than in 1924.

I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis, but I'd be genuinely interested in reading the source on this, unless you just mean because people are bigger overall they have more muscle as a function of weight.

[bradarner]

No, I do mean precisely the average muscle mass is higher. Granted we are dealing with statistics. There is inevitably a lot more context than just a myopic focus on this single fact.

Dated but still relevant: https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/evolution-bmi-values-us-adult...

This is particular relevant in the military because your fitness level is graded relative to you BMI. Hence, it is common trope one hears in the military. It is a practical question in the military. If the BMI is based on 1950's pilots and today's soldiers have a higher average BMI, then it can have an impact on promotions, fitness scores, health assessments, etc.

[johnyzee]

They keep lowering the standards for acceptance into the military, because young people are becoming less and less fit.

Just one link out of many (this is well known): https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/09/28/new-pentagon-...

[grogenaut]

Without a Waiver due to:

* obesity (the topic) (11%)

* drug use (marajuana in a country where it's legal in 24 of 50 states) (8%)

* mental / physical health (7%)

how much of that was just previously hidden or lied about? also it doesn't show any previous stats. So can't really draw any conclusions. also doesn't cover where the deltas were from.

[dragonwriter]

> drug use (marajuana in a country where it’s legal in 24 of 50 states)

Marijuana is illegal everywhere in the US under federal law. 47 states, the District of Colombia, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands have restructured their own marijuana laws to except from them use of marijuana, generally or in specific forms, for medical use. 24 of those states, D.C., Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands have (also, except in the last case) done the same for adult (over 21) recreational marijuana use [0], as well. The federal government has an official (in the form of a restriction in appropriations laws since 2015) policy of non-enforcement for now (without waiving the possibility of future enforcement within the statute of limitations should that funding restriction lapse) of certain federal criminal prohibitions against state-authorized medical use. (However, for example, all financial institutions are required to file Suspicious Activity Reports with Treasury’s FinCEN for all marijuana-related businesses they discover to be clients, even if the businesses are exclusively involved in activities covered by that enforcement deferment.)

[0] For those interested in inverting this, marijuana use has neither medical nor adult-use exceptions under state/territorial law in only 3 states (Idaho, Kansas, and Nebraska) plus American Samoa.

[StanislavPetrov]

Obesity rates have roughly tripled in the last 60 years.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity-adult-17-18/Est...

The data isn't hidden or lied about. If you think the data is fudged, go pick up a high school year book or photo album from the 1950s or 1960s and take a look at the young people.

[grogenaut]

I didn't say it was fudged.... mmmm fudge... I was pointing out that the article is pretty useless for determining if it's obesity or other for seeing why they're changing the requirements.

Also as the gpgp was talking about... in many places obseity is purely based on weight / height ratio... which doesn't bring muscle into account. So all I can say is I can't really say what factors are involved.

[sn9]

Even at the high school level, coaches for sports like football have noticed in the past 10-20 years that the fitness of incoming students has precipitously declined because so much of how children spend their time is less playing outside (e.g., running around, jumping, climbing, etc.) but playing inside (e.g., video games, doomscrolling, watching Youtube, etc.).

Suburbs around the country are quiet after school as all the kids are inside physically atrophying.

[karaterobot]

Sorry, what am I missing here? Your link talks about average weight and BMI increasing, not muscle mass. You couldn't safely draw a conclusion about muscle mass from BMI.

[karaterobot]

> A 2024 person spends significantly more time on average in a gym pushing their muscles to hypertrophy than in 1924.

What is this focus on hypertrophy? The article isn't about having prominent muscles, it's clearly about being physically fit in the sense that farmers and manual laborers are fit, not in the sense that actors are fit.

[brodouevencode]

Agreed.

Anecdotal: I helped my dad a few years ago do a lot of genealogy. He had pictures going back to the late 1800s for one branch of the family that just arrived from Ireland. Most of the men were shirtless and you could count every rib. There was very little muscle.

[lmm]

People who fled a famine so severe that it lead over 100% of that country's population to emigrate are surely a representative sample of a normal physique from that era, especially immediately after a week-long ocean crossing.

[brodouevencode]

Name a span of time in which there wasn't war, starvation, or economic reasons that would have produced any emaciated set of people.

[lmm]

Of course most eras have famine victims, once-in-a-century famines happen more or less every century after all. But treating those famine victims as representatives of a normal physique for that era would be foolish, in any era.

[maxerickson]

Y'all are talking about noise inside of stage 2 from the link. A lot of it just being due to economics.

[bradarner]

Agreed, there is an economic factor here but I would see that is highly correlated with the Kardashev grade of a civilization. The conjecture of the OP is that higher Kardashev grade will result in higher atrophy. My claim is that we seem to find precisely the opposite to be true.

I'm not making a counter-argument to the OP's position. I'm only making a refutation of the conjecture.

[samus]

People not having time to train their bodies higher up the scale is also just due to economics.

[kragen]

People do have time.

Over the last year I've roughly doubled my pushup strength, with very visible resulting muscular hypertrophy in my triceps, back, and shoulders (even though I was optimizing for strength rather than hypertrophy). The total time taken over that year has been about 6 hours: three 40-second sets of pushups every two days, with 2⅓ minute breaks between sets, which I'm not counting because I can post to HN and drink yerba mate during that time. This works out to one minute per day.

There is literally nobody in the world who has less than 6 hours of free time per year. This is not a matter of economics; no economic system is so all-pervading as to sell every single minute of your day.

I started out doing three sets of knee pushups to failure, and once I reached ten reps I switched to real pushups; once I reach failure on the real pushups (3–5 reps in the first set, sometimes as little as 2 in the last) I continue with knee pushups until failure. This takes about 40 seconds and seems to be a good balance of intensity and safety. The only equipment it requires is a reasonably clean floor or patch of grass, so you don't have to buy equipment, pay a gym membership, or even walk to a different part of the house. You can do it on the train while commuting to work, at the bus stop while awaiting the bus, in the break room at the office, outside your car in the parking lot, in the park when you walk the dog, or in your bedroom after getting up, unless your hoarding problem is even worse than mine.

I'm slightly obese (109kg) like most of the population in rich countries, and I think my state of muscular development was about average in that context. Calisthenics permits increasing resistance to almost arbitrarily high levels, so you can keep the intensity high and the workouts short even as you get stronger. Stronger people would presumably need to invest more time than one minute per day to make further progress, perhaps as much as ten minutes or even more, but those aren't the people we're talking about.

So what's missing? It might be inspiration, discipline, executive function, hope, knowledge, wisdom, or some combination of these. But it's not time or money.

[samus]

I fully agree that these simple exercises can get you quite far. I have made similarly good experiences by aiming for 50 cleanly executed push-ups per day. But you will soon have to diversify them, though that requires simple equipment only: a high horizontal bar for pull-ups and dead hangs is surprisingly hard to find outside of a gym.

Aerobic exercise, which should really also be part of a workout routine, is significantly more time-consuming though, and requires proper equipment. Most importantly a new pair of good running shoes every year or so to reduce wear on the joints.

So yes, even with kids or similarly demanding circumstances it should be possible to accommodate moderate exercise in most peoples lives. But the result probably won't be body-builder levels of muscular development.

[kragen]

I pretty much agree, though I do have a few thoughts to add.

One is that if you're doing 50 pushups you're probably doing endurance training rather than strength training, unless you're talking about doing 10 sets in a day. And if you're doing them every day you're going to build strength very slowly or actually decline in strength. You need recovery time to build muscle. If that's what you're after, do however many pushups every other day. You can work on your legs in between if you want. My legs are still pretty decent from when I used to commute by bicycle in San Francisco.

Another thought is that diversifying from extensor exercises into flexor exercises isn't even as hard as you make it out to be. It doesn't even require simple equipment.

You can bicep-curl the groceries.

You can do a pullup on a doorframe, if you can find a doorframe that won't break.

You can do one-arm inclined rows with a clothesline pole in your crotch. If you don't have clotheslines in your country, use a telephone pole.

Guys in prison deadlift the bed, or each other.

Kids climb trees and hang from horizontal tree branches. You can do that too.

If you lie down on your back under the kitchen table, you can grab opposite sides of the table with your two hands and lift yourself up with your biceps that way. If this isn't enough resistance, you can do archer rows that way. Putting both hands on the same side of the table may destabilize it, depending on the table.

I have a metal-framed transom over my kitchen door that's tall enough that I can dead-hang from it.

Fences and walls are commonly high enough that you can dead-hang from your hands on them too, though they may not be ideal for a pullup.

If you have a door, even a hollow-core wooden door, you can open the door, support its distal side with a wedge of wood (or newspaper) to take the load off the hinges, and then you can safely hang from the top of the door. This will not work with an aluminum screen door or a car door, but otherwise you're good.

Unless you live in the Gobi, you can tie a rope around a telephone pole or a tree, then climb the rope.

You can pull up to a ladder rung from underneath the ladder.

Playgrounds have jungle gyms.

Finding objects strong enough to hang from is a little harder than finding a floor, but still not a category that requires exercise equipment specifically built for it.

As for aerobics, for me the best aerobic exercise is dance, because running is boring and I don't care for the social dynamics of team sports, and running shoes are generally not helpful for dance. Many forms of dance are done barefoot; others usually use flat-soled shoes with no cushioning, on purpose, because cushioning dramatically impairs your balance. (I agree that cushioning is very important not just for running on concrete but even for extended walking on it.)

(Actually, swimming is even better, but I live too far from the river.)

Many, perhaps most, people in rich countries are experiencing levels of physical disability due to muscular atrophy that could be corrected by exercise averaging on the order of one minute per day. It's true that, to get body-builder levels of muscular development, you have to treat it as not just a full-time job but also a weird cult that fanatically controls your diet. In between the literally crippling levels of sedentarism so many people suffer, and eating kilograms of meat three times a day except when you're cutting, there is an enormous spectrum.

[maxerickson]

Maybe? I feel like an awful lot of people today, especially in wealthy countries, have at least 7 hours a week of time that they do not carefully allocate. Many have much more than that.

[brodouevencode]

Wealthier people (presumably the ones who have more free time) in first world countries tend to be the healthier ones.

[maxerickson]

Right, and that effect is comparably enormous when you look at the period when the steam engine was taking hold and today. We are unimaginably wealthy compared to then.

[brodouevencode]

Economics, famine, religious upheaval, war - all factors that have kept people starving and pushed down the scale.

[baranul]

"And I still have a hard time beating him in arm wrestling despite the 40 years of age gap."

Another example, from the article, that backs up what you are saying. Arm wrestling, is not a clear overall indicator of total strength or fitness. It's as much about technique, rules, psychology (through sh*t talking or facial expressions), and very specific muscle development than anything else. Doesn't show how much a person could lift or squat. Strength in one area, doesn't mean strength in another or if people in the past were "stronger".

[h0l0cube]

The faulty premise I see here is that squishy bodies will even be relevant as we climb the scale. Exo-suits are already a thing that can make us stronger in spite of muscle atrophy. And further up the scale, in-silico intelligence will replace the need for a highly inefficient body to power our highly inefficient brains. We could even down-throttle our consciousness to make journeys to distant stars. The future will be so abstract to us that we can’t even fathom what humanity will have become.

[HPsquared]

We already kind of have exoskeletons anyway: cars.

[h0l0cube]

I did say exo suits are already a thing, not sure how that negates the argument

[begueradj]

Well, a popular French army soldier who trains the soldiers of the Foreign Legion said multiple times on his YouTube channel that a good soldier is "un chat soldat" (cat soldier): his weight must be between 60 and 70 kg only.

A cat soldier is the only one who can overcome all type of obstacles and is operational under all circumstances with high efficiency.

Spartan soldiers were too efficient are were known for eating little (not until they felt full).

[portaouflop]

The efficiency of the Spartan army is a myth, in fact there were quite insignificant; they basically won a battle once and after that were wiped out

[potato3732842]

>Most laborers are NOT doing activity that leads to hypertrophy.

Modern laborers aren't even allowed to. Just because you're jacked and can install semi truck tires by hand doesn't mean your boss wants to risk the insurance or OSHA dumpster fire that could arise if you throw out your back doing so.

[datadeft]

Having growth hormones in your ultra processed food helps