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On the drawing above you see a short muscle belly from the biceps and triceps compared with long ones.

A short muscle belly means that the muscle attaches high on the tendon, meaning the tendons are somewhat long and the muscle is somewhat short. Take an easy example : your bicep. Say your muscle bellies are attached high on the tendon, which means far from the elbow. That tends to create a gap between your bicep muscle and your forearm as you can see in the graphic.

Not too long ago many bodybuilders relied on certain veterinary steroids only, because substances such as Equipoise (boldone undecylenate) , Trenbolone acetate and injectable Winstrol (stanozolol) were only available as veterinary compounds. The only downside of using these veterinary means was the low dosage. Equipoise at 50 mg/ml, Trenbolone Acetate at 30 mg/ml etc. The same was also true for the Australian vet steroids.

When Harrison Pope published his conclusion on body image and the action dolls becoming much more muscular, many people were shocked. They believed young kids would strive to look like their hero’s, just like little girls took accepted the body-proportions of “Barbie” as normal.

Whenever an actor gets jacked for a movie, many people immediately wonder: is he on steroids? Cavill in Man of Steel, Hemsworth in Thor, Jackman in X-Men, Pitt in Troy, Bale in Batman, Butler in 300.

A Strong Neck Contributes to Overall Power and a Proportional Physique. Every physique that screams raw functional power has one thing in common: a big strong neck.

Baggy shirts can hide arm development on a par with Justin Bieber’s; sweats might camouflage “forgotten” leg days. But a pencil neck, forget it! No running, no hiding, it’s exposed.

Today, the vast majority of athletes does not realize the importance of training the muscles of the neck, and it is not the trapezius muscle, which only partially affects our appearance. We are talking about the real muscles of the neck. Many believe that the basic movements such as squats, dead lift, etc. contribute enough to the development of the neck muscles.

I was talking with a friend about an article I posted about body detransformation (link at the bottom of this blog post). We looked at the picture of Mustafa Mohammed and then he asked me; “What happened to this guy?” To be honest I didn’t know either. But being a curious guy I tried to find out the quick way via the search engine Google.

We all know what happens when you administer exogenous testosterone into your body. Some people are insatiably from there early puberty, these are mostly the people with a (very) high endogenous testosterone level. When these people are famous they are likely to hit front-page articles. Most of us remember one of those celebrities. And one of those guys is Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In 2011 it was all over the news that Mildred Patricia Baena, Arnold Schwarzenegger's mistress, and mother of his child, was his former house keeper. In the same year Gigi Goyette disclosed she was also a mistress from Arnold, starting when she was 16.

Bodybuilding Genetics

You inherited your genes from your parents and grandparents and this determents for up to 80% on how you look. The other 20% are determent by environment , life style and personal choices. If your parents were very tall, you are probably are very tall too. If you want to become a basketball player than you can consider yourself lucky.

Is length favorable for bodybuilding? Fact is that most pro-bodybuilders are rather small. A smaller guy looks blockier much quicker. And most tall bodybuilders have trouble putting on muscle on their legs. But we all know the exceptions. One of them is Lou Ferrigno.

Comparison of two bodybuilders: Flavio Baccianini height 147 cm (4'10") vs Lou Ferrigno height 196 cm( 6' 5"). Flavio weighing 66 kg and Lou 136 kg. Baccianini placed 13th in the 1993 Mr. Olympia which placed him just three spots down from Lou Ferrigno that year.

In August 1995 Quinn et al released a study called “Interleukin-15: a novel cytokine anabolic for skeletal muscle.”

We all know most pro-bodybuilders don’t read all the new studies, but most athletes hire people that make a living by supervising professional bodybuilders and other athletes such a tennisplayers, footballplayers, cyclists etc etc.. In bodybuilding were nutrition and supplementation is very important these people are mostly called “nutritionists.”

As Dr Larkins from Australia said: "There's a whole generation of sports science people coming through who are well trained in sports performance areas and what I call genuine areas but many, many sports and clubs have got these people.”

Well the keywords “anabolic for skeletal muscle” did ring a bell. Of course bodybuilders already worked with other interleukins, like by example IL-6. Soon several studies on Il-15 popped up, also again from Quinn in 2002 “Overexpression of interleukin-15 Induces skeletal muscle hypertrophy in vitro.” Most studies were performed on rodents in high amounts. Thus it was hard to translate results to bodybuilders and athletes dieting and training hard.

People often forget that over the years generations believe that if a beautiful era (mostly in their youth) ended, and that the time thereafter will never be as beautiful as it once was.

People also have the tendency to break time in certain limited periods. Mostly they then refer to a certain period as a closed breaking-point. One of those breaking points was the second world war. You heard older people complain that it would never be the same again. And in a certain way and for some people that will certainly be true.

Bodybuilding during many years changed too. It knew many breaking points and maybe we could say it evolved, for some people for the better and others will certainly disagree.

Surfing the internet you find many people that are yearning for the time they mostly call “Old School.”

Vascularity in bodybuilding is controversial. The term refers to the extent of superficial prominence of blood vessels, or veins, that are just below the skin’s surface. Of course, you don’t have to be a bodybuilder to show prominent vascularity. You can readily see a lot of veins on many thin people.