If you ask any bodybuilder about his motivation to start lifting, the response that you are going to receive is something along the lines of “I saw Arnold Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron and set a goal to become great like him.” In other words, people see bodybuilding as a way to feed their male pride and ego.

Life is a package that comes with many presets that we cannot change regardless of our actions. You cannot change your height, the natural color of your hair nor your age. Those are genetic qualities that you are born with. The size of your dick shares the same property. It is what it is. This is where bodybuilding comes – it allows you to better yourself, in theory.

Those lines of thinking give birth to an important question – “What’s the problem with wanting to be better?”

Technically, nothing.

Ironically, most people seem to perfectly satisfied with staying at one place without making any actual progress in any direction. Wanting to be better differentiates you from the crowd. People today are happy to live a simple life without asking questions as long as the 4G is connected. Give them a beer, a football game, some sex, some money and they are all set. Why would you want to evolve? Bastard!

However, wanting to better yourself has two sides, like everything. A good one and a bad one. The good side of bodybuilding is that you are trying to develop and reach your full physical potential. Therefore, developing your muscles is not bad at all. The problem comes when you start rejecting yourself.

Many bodybuilders such as Rich Piana are highly uncomfortable with who they are. That’s why they put so much effort into injecting their bodies with chemicals. For example, Rich Piana has fake hair color, plastic surgeries and SEO in his arms. He has also admitted to using steroids, growth hormone (GH) and insulin. If you ask him, he would say that he is trying to better himself, but it’s not the case at all. He just doesn’t love himself and has deep personal issues. He tries to cover his problems with mountains of muscles. Everybody has problems and tries to overcompensate somehow. That’s just his way. However, that’s not an excuse. It doesn’t matter how big your biceps are when you are not comfortable with who you truly are. When you don’t love your core, no muscle mass will ever save you. Sooner or later, you will have to dive in and fight.

In general, muscle athletes suffer from the lack of a strong male figure in their younger years. If you interview 100 bodybuilders, 80 of them will tell you that their fathers were never around. Many bodybuilders are raised by single mothers. That’s why so many of them are trying to overcompensate by acquiring the looks of a tough motherfucker.

Ironically, many bodybuilders have a small male pride in the literal sense of the word. The reason for that is they abuse steroids. When you take large amounts of synthetic testosterone, your body eventually shuts down your natural production. Since testosterone is produced in the balls, they shrink. Most bodybuilders who abuse steroids have testicles smaller than peanuts. However, the penis does not shrink.

Bodybuilders are usually unhappy with the physique that they can achieve naturally and hop on the juice. They don’t want to be normal because normal does not earn you weird looks. When the use turns into an abuse, and your identity as a conscious being is solely measured by your muscle mass, you have a recipe for a permanently damaged male pride once the muscles are gone for whatever reason.