#but when you’re purposefully trying to bodybuild and gain muscle it’s good to take things that help your body recover

[oneknightlight]

finally getting back on some branch chain amino acids

[sometimesiwritetoo]

So I talked a little bit on twitter about this, but I thought I’d go in more depth here because I had a big interest in the fitness community for a long time even though I don’t really participate in most parts of it.

Anyway, I’ve seen people complain about Tifa’s muscles. Some of these complaints are pretty blatantly not in good faith, but I’ll try and focus on the ones that are.

So the complaint is that she’s not buff enough. She doesn’t have enough muscle, etc, etc. And I think there is something to be said about Square choosing a more conventionally attractive design when they could have referenced many, many women competing in ufc or judo. Hell it’s not as if Gina Carano was too far off from the final design. People are saying that since she’s been training as a fighter for so long then shouldn’t she have a lot of muscle?

And, imo, I’d say not necessarily.

When these complaints come up I often see her compared to bodybuilders or ufc fighters. The fighters comparison is kinda fair, the bodybuilders are not. Because bodybuilding especially is cosmetic. Their goal is to build muscle. But you can’t perfectly build muscle and not gain a bit of fat. So about a few months before competition they’ll go into what is called a cut where they drastically reduce their carbs in order to drop fat, which often takes a bit of muscle with it as well. Basically the goal is to cycle between a bulk, where you try to gain as much muscle as possible, and a cut, where you try to lose as much fat as possible.

The classes have been rearranged over the years but basically you have a bikini class for women. This is, I guess, the most conventional class. You’re not looking for a lot of muscle in this class. It then goes up to physique and figure competitions. Which are looking for more and more muscle. Technically there isn’t female bodybuilding anymore (at least, not at the arnold which is one of the bigger competitions) but there are classes that get close.

Bikini is considered the “easier” level to enter because you don’t have to build as much muscle. But it’s not really easy. Here’s an article that goes into just how much women have to train to achieve these looks. I bring this up because building muscle is ultimately something that doesn’t really happen on accident. You have to purposefully train to build muscle. Plus in the heavier categories you start seeing a lot of drug use. Building and maintaining muscle is a lot of work. It’s basically a subset of diet culture, but everyone thinks it’s healthier for some reason. So, as much as it would thrill me to have Tifa show up with arms as big as my head, it’s not “realistic”. It’s just as unrealistic as arms that are too skinny. And as someone who’s seen women take a lot of drugs to get these looks it just looks like people are promoting a different, equally unhealthy body type.

Fighting isn’t as bad as bodybuilding. I think bodybuilding is pretty legendary for how normalized drug use is to build muscle. In fighting you don’t necessarily have to build muscle in order to be a good good at the sport. Granted it happens naturally. But there’s still a cycle of bulking and cutting in order to compete. Because the ufc has a lot of weight classes with the lowest, strawweight, going /up/ to 115 pounds. I know less about fighting then I do about the weight lifting sports. But it seems similar to competition weight lifting. You want to be as heavy as possible, but within your weight class. In fighting especially you want to be as heavy as possible because then you hit harder. So fighters also bulk and cut to get as much lean muscle as they can while avoiding accidentally ending up in a higher weight class. They just typically don’t have to cut as much because they’re just looking to stay under a certain number.

And I bring all of this up because while a lot of people who pick up a sport do build muscle it often isn’t obvious. It’s a /lot/ of work to build muscle and Tifa probably doesn’t have the resources to focus on something like that. It takes access to supplements, the money for food, you need to plan your meals out (a lot of bodybuilders eat seven meals), and then you often have to work with a trainer and a nutritionist. Most people only really build about a pound or two of muscle a month. So it can take a long time of constant work to build a decent amount of muscle naturally. It takes a diet with a calorie surplus and a lot of protein. And again I’m not against more buff girls in media, but I think people need to realize that this really is a lot of work. It is, again, a subset of diet culture.

To be frank I don’t think any of these characters necessarily have a “realistic” body type. Barret would need muscle to carry that gun arm (and would likely need reinforcement so the thing doesn’t rip his arm off) but he probably doesn’t have access to any more or less food then Tifa or Aerith would have so at best he probably would look more like Maui. In game he looks more like Shaw who has made grocery haul videos and yes, he did spend over 300 dollars on food at costco for a week of food. Poorer people tend to gain weight, which means that Aerith probably shouldn’t be as skinny as she is. Cloud should probably be significantly skinnier then he is considering he spent five years in a mako bath and hasn’t really had to move. People should have fat or loose skin on their upper arms or blemishes on their skin. And exactly how good is dental care in the slums?

This isn’t to say that people shouldn’t want more buff girls. But it’s not necessarily a “realistic” ask. I think most media makes characters more buff then they would realistically be. And it’s more realistic for people to have a little bit of fat on their stomach, on their thighs, or their upper arms even if they are supposed to be strong. I’m all for more diverse body types for women in media, but I don’t like the framing of certain ones as more realistic for a certain lifestyle. But it takes more then a certain exercise to massively change your body. You probably pass bodybuilders, long distance runners, power lifters, swimmers, etc. every day and you wouldn’t be able to tell what they do just by their body.