diesel gli said:
I refer to myself as a "bodybuilder"... I guess my first concern is not with strength, but with aesthetics... to me, the strength comes hand in hand with your muscles getting larger, albeit not as much as if you are lifting the heavier weights...
What you see here is not so different from your own goals just a reversal of your equation, "the strength comes hand in hand with your muscles getting larger", being applied.
Muscles hypertrophy to compensate for increased training demands. Hypertrophy doesn't happen to make you look bigger, it happens to make you stronger (not meaning pure neural work). The size is the body's method of adaptation and it's way of dealing with increased demands. If there are no increased demands there will be no hypertrophy beyond current status which is why the guy who squated 225x8 last year and did all kinds of fancy exercises and blowout BBing splits in the interim is still squatting 225x8 this year and is consequently the same size.
What people are doing here is simply going about generating as much hypertrophy as possible. Very very few are going to be PLs or OLs here or even competing in a sport - they are just all adding muscle and going about it in a systematic way. In a nutshell, consider the body as a system and work at increasing capacity as fast as possible in large compound lifts that train the entire system. Basically, this is the easiest and most direct way to adding muscle as fast as possible. Now obviously few are peaking in 1RM or only concerned with the PLs, they are using a variety of core lifts that evenly develop the body and a more valid hypertrophy range (whereas very low reps and 1RM lifts tend to be heavily neural).
So that covers what you are seeing on the core resistance side of the equation. People tend to be focused there because BBers have a way of thinking there is some kind of magic and that hypertrophy or bodybuilding is very very different from strength training. Maybe you don't want to be a power hitter and break home run records but only want to look good rounding the bases. You still better learn to hit the ball fairly well and consistently or you'll be sitting on the sidelines.
As far as diet and what people recommend eating, normally it wouldn't be a concern. If you weight X now at reasonable bodyfat and want to weigh X+20 you should get better at the big stimulative lifts and consume enough calories to provide for that +20 part (or enough to get you to +10 and then up it again). Pretty damn simple but it gets horrendously screwed by people who don't seem to get this and spend 10 weeks adding no weight (fat or muscle) and complain that a program didn't work - I mean, if the resistance program was shit, you'd still have gotten fatter and therefore gained weight due to caloric excess. These are usually the ultra-ripped 160lbs guys who count every calorie and micromanage their trace nutrient intake to the tune of $200 a month in supplements thinking that muscle won't accrue without a minimum of 30mg a day of monkey ass oil.
Cutting is just about as simple. Granted you can micromanage all this until the cows come home but most people are screwing up at the base 90% big block level and not at the 0.05% trace level. Caloric excess, caloric deficit. Eating squeeky clean is a lifestyle decision but it won't do crap for your hypertrophy if you aren't eating enough and the guy shoveling down Big Macs will blow you out of the water.
That covers diet. As far as aesthetics - bodyfat level, the amount of muscle you carry - this has been done so after that it's genetics and just a careful eye. Genetics you can't do anything about and as far as remaining in proportion, what almost everyone here as found is that if you train the body with big lifts it tends to grow very very symmetrically (it's actually pretty damn hard to grow your body out of proportion beyond certain limits no matter how hard you work - else we'd have a lot of guys with massive arms from doing bis and arms all day but these are typically the guys with not much arm development either whereas the guy squatting/pulling like a beast gets guns with a few casual sets a week). Most guys here were really stunned that the best rear delt progress they ever made was when they dropped laterals and learned to row corrently. Very few here are wanting for some huge gap in symmetry. The take-away is, if you want to put on muscle, don't waste a lot of energy with isolation work. I'm not saying you never do it, but don't blast a shotgun array trying to pre-empty any possible imbalance from occuring at the expense of actually growing by increasing capacity in the core lifts. If you see something, you address it - don't attempt to address 50 things all at once in advance of them even showing up. It's not like you can't later devote 4-6 weeks to pure aesthetics and maintaining core muscle mass.
So I think that kind of gets at the heart of your poll and explains why you see what you see here. Actually, most if not all of these guys have trained and eaten, probably for years since few here are very young, exactly like what you are used to seeing. The fact that they aren't doing that anymore isn't that they aren't bodybuilders or interested in health or aesthetics, it's that they are doing a lot better now than when they used to do more typical BBer workouts and activities. Most guys here have no trouble adding muscle, dropping fat, keeping their lifts moving, or being pretty satisfied and happy in general. That's pretty rare outside of a newbie board.
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