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Medical Video: Muscle Soreness Explained (IS IT GOOD?)
For most people, the gym is like a second home where you trim your belly fat and form your chest muscles to get the ideal body shape. But not infrequently also complaining that over time the gym feels like an enemy in a blanket. Long sweat and struggling in the gym, they did not experience any changes in the shape of their body muscles. In fact, the body muscles actually look smaller when reflecting.
If you are familiar with the situation above, you are not alone. And the reason why muscles appear to constrict when you look in the gym might surprise you.
Ideal body standards in the gym affect how you judge your own body
Admittedly or not, the reason for gymnastics for most people is based more on concerns about body fat, shame, and guilt than the desire to live healthy. Likewise with men. Researchers from the UK and Australia found that men who generally consider their body "fatty" will be more frequent and long to exercise.
Meanwhile, you are constantly surrounded by muscular people while exercising in the gym. Not to mention overshadowed by a patch of encouraging posters from bodybuilders known for muscles sticking out here and there. When you are surrounded by people who think that the ideal body type is a lean and muscular body, then over time you will begin to believe the same thing. So it is not surprising that later on you actually think that your "normal" body is a "fat and weak" body, not a body that is considered attractive.
Then it becomes embedded in the determination that, "I have to be lean and muscular just like them", which makes you even more excited about exercising in the gym. But at the same time, the people who become your ideal body benchmark also continue to shape their muscles to become even bigger so that your standards are elevated following the changing currents. Without realizing it, endless efforts to catch up in order to have this ideal body make you feel more pressured and intimidated because it does not succeed in becoming the desired standard.
Hard work forming muscles for the ideal body can trigger anxiety disorders
Ideal body stereotypes that are constantly displayed by the media, including what always welcomes you at the gym, can have a negative impact on your mental health. Having dreams of an unrealistic body shape can lead to psychiatric disorders called body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), excessive anxiety disorder to physical appearance and thinking that their body has abnormalities.
Continuation anxiety then makes you constantly compare your physical with other people ("Why can't I ever be as happy as he is?"), Worried that your body is not "normal" or "perfect" in other people's eyes ("It looks like my gym efforts failed all, my body is not muscular at all! "), and spending a lot of time mirroring in front of a mirror convincing yourself that you have a body that is not good enough. Even though the reflection of the "weak and less muscular" body that you see in the mirror is just an imagination.
This anxiety disorder can ultimately cause you to justify various ways to have a muscular body, such as diet or excessive exercise to use steroid injections, which can actually endanger health. BDD sufferers can also experience depression and can even display suicidal tendencies because they feel they have a dream body shape due to their "defective body".
