When I first started lifting weights, I wanted to get stronger and improve my athletic performance, which was around the ages of 14 to 15. However, how did I go from wanting to become a better athlete to using various performance-enhancing drugs over the course of 15 years?
My first weightlifting experience was in the family room of my mother’s house, where I converted it into a makeshift weight room with a squat rack, an adjustable bench, and plate-loaded adjustable dumbbells in the eighth grade. As I transitioned into high school, I lifted in the high school weight room that was off the side of the basketball gymnasium, which, at some point, was also a storage room without mirrors and just plenty of iron and an old-school stereo system where you had to line it up just perfectly to get a clear sound of the radio. These first two years of weightlifting, I genuinely feel I was there to get stronger for football, basketball, and baseball. When did it all change?
I was an above-average baseball player, and prior to my sophomore year of high school, my mother sold her house, and we moved so that I could play baseball at a larger school with the potential to get scouted. This move paid off, as I was able to play baseball in college. However, we moved next to a recently built Gold’s Gym, and this is when it all changed. I had also just turned 16 years of age, which was the minimum age requirement to have a gym membership. I got my first Gold’s Gym membership and trained there for the remaining three years of high school, surrounded by mirrors and physiques much more muscular than mine.
The books I bought initially when I was 14 and 15 years of age shifted from the primary focus of weight lifting for athletes, such as “Nolan Ryan’s Pitcher’s Bible” to “Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding” and Bill Phillip’s “Body for Life” once I started training at Gold’s Gym. At this phase of my life, I had no idea that shifting my focus from strength training as an athlete to building bigger muscles to improve my physique was leading me in a direction of muscle dysmorphia, as I thought the two training approaches went hand in hand. I also frequently scanned the pages of Flex Magazine and Muscle and Fitness for workout tips and nutrition advice that heavily focused energy on eating 5-6 protein focused meals per day as well a strict training regimen of 5-6 days a week with specific muscles to be trained each day, both significant variables that are seen in teen boys leading them in the direction of muscle dysmorphia and eventually to the use the performance enhancing drugs.
Muscle dysmorphia arose in the 90s when a research group led by Pope et al. initially discovered a condition in men that was considered the opposite of anorexia, which was mainly a condition studied in women at the time, and termed it “reverse anorexia” before later renaming it muscle dysmorphia (Mosely, 2008). Muscle dysmorphia is recognized by a pathological preoccupation with the appearance of the body not being large or muscular enough, leading to behaviors such as excessive weight training, dieting, and associated activities, and often these individuals live in a state of distress from others seeing their bodies in public, impaired social and occupational functioning and anabolic steroid use (Pope et al., 1997). Today, at 42, it is easy to reflect back and see my younger self following in this well-defined condition that led to my anabolic steroid use for the years to come after high school.
One other factor that was a significant influence on muscle dysphoria at the time that was unconscious to me was the mirror. Aside from seeing overly muscular physiques in books and magazines (this was pre-social-media era), I would see myself daily in the mirror, leading me to consistently analyze my physique and base my workouts on muscle mass rather than my athletic performance goals. Nolan Ryan’s training program was not based on performing 20 sets of chest and triceps every Monday night, which is not ideal for any athlete involved in throwing a ball. Obsessive-compulsive-like behaviors, such as constant mirror checking, are shown in those with muscle dysmorphia (Olivardia, 2001), as well as individuals who use resistance training with the primary goal of increasing muscle size and improving muscle shape, which is the most common activity leading to AAS use (Zaiser et al., 2024). In the age of social media today as well as having observed thousands of gym goers over the years, many individuals regardless of gender start out in the gym by consistently mirror-checking their appearance.
In 2007, Frederick Grieve constructed a conceptual model for muscle dysmorphia that consisted of the three primary variables, ideal-body internalization, body dissatisfaction, and body distortion, as well as six sub-variables that fell under the main three being: media pressure (today’s social media), perfectionism, low self-esteem, negative affect, sport participation, and body mass. As I reflect, the mirror in the gym, did influence my unconscious mind by shifting my focus from training to improve performance into internalizing my ideal body, being unsatisfied with my musculature and desiring to get obsessively “big,” and seeing a distorted image in the mirror as scrawny even though I was naturally a bigger, stronger more muscular teen which eventually paved the way for performance enhancing drug use as a college athlete, as well as post college as a strength athlete and ten plus years of bodybuilding. I also have perfectionist tendencies and anyone who has competed in bodybuilding and probably relate to the idea of not showing their physique in public unless they are in “perfect” condition in which perfectionism and body dissatisfaction has shown to be a common cooccurrence to muscle dysmorphia (Mosely, 2008). Muscle dysmorphia can be characterized by attitudes such as a dislike for one’s current body shape and a strong desire to change it through behaviors that include excessive weight lifting, eating large amounts of protein, the use of weight-gaining supplements, and the use of anabolic steroids (Grieve, 2007). I have not mentioned it yet, but I did buy a lot of weight gainer shakes in high school.
How has this experience changed me today as a father to my own daughters? As my daughters become older and are a few years away from entering their puberty years, I removed all my client bodybuilding competition photos from my gym walls, which were hundreds. Multiple clients have recently asked why, and while it may not seem logical at first glance, these photos are often viewed by others in the gym as inspirational and motivational. However, I noticed my youngest daughter, looking at the photos in a way that I knew she was observing the images opening the gate to unconscious memory connections influencing her future body image and I knew this was not okay. I did not want her or her sister to walk into a gym and begin to associate the iron and the machines with how their body looked. One thing that most adults do not think about is that the prefrontal cortex takes about 25 years to develop fully; therefore, at the age of 6-10, what children see goes straight into their unconscious memory storage with an immature prefrontal cortex to give them the executive function they need to understand what these photos on the wall mean. In the book “The Body Keeps the Score,” it was referenced that ancient philosophers referred to the age of seven as the age of reason, and Van Der Kolk referred to modern times as the first grade, being about the time when life began to organize around the frontal lobe. I knew instantly, with all my studies of the brain and emotional development over the past years, that my daughter, simply seeing these photos in my gym, was developing an unregulated emotional connection between body image and the gym that will come to the surface in the years to come. Therefore, I removed the photos from the wall. While I still do have mirrors in the gym, my goal is that not having images of bodies on the walls will help them go into the gym one day, just as I initially did, and see the iron and the machines as a way to make their body strong and athletic, unattached to body shape and size. While muscle dysmorphia is more generalized towards men, though it is seen in women to a lesser extent, the drive for thinness is also a concern that is more prevalent in women. It is impossible in our society to avoid the connection between body image and the gym; however, my goal is to delay the connection between body image and the gym for as long as possible, and if necessary, I will black out the mirrors.
References
Grieve, F. G. (2007). A conceptual model of factors contributing to the development of muscle dysmorphia. Eating disorders, 15(1), 63-80. https://doi.org/10.1080/10640260601044535
Mosley, P. E. (2009). Bigorexia: bodybuilding and muscle dysmorphia. European Eating Disorders Review: The Professional Journal of the Eating Disorders Association, 17(3), 191-198. https://doi.org/10.1002/erv.897
Olivardia, R. (2001). Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the largest of them all? The features and phenomenology of muscle dysmorphia. Harvard review of psychiatry, 9(5), 254-259. https://doi.org/10.1080/hrp.9.5.254.259
Pope Jr, H. G., Gruber, A. J., Choi, P., Olivardia, R., & Phillips, K. A. (1997). Muscle dysmorphia: An underrecognized form of body dysmorphic disorder. Psychosomatics, 38(6), 548-557. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0033-3182(97)71400-2
Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
AVAILABLE ON
