Now here we come to the good old discussion by many people (especially guys) in every gym in the fitness industry.
The misconception between two standard practices, weightlifting, and bodybuilding.
Too often are these two terms being mixed and matched, and frankly, it can be very irritating.
But don’t worry, on this small little blog post, I’m going to make sure you understand the difference between the two.
Let’s start our set, shall we?
Dividing the two: Separating weightlifters from bodybuilders
Backstory, shall we?
Weightlifting
A practice still performed today and going strong.
From your beer drunken twenty-two-year-old football fanatic to the chiseled pencil bodied geek who’s in your science class, strength lifters have been around since…. well forever.
We really could start from ages ago but let’s keep it regarding strong man competitions, so we don’t get to lost in the process.
Western strongman competitions were first developed in Europe from 1880 to 1950s, where strongmen showed feats of strength for audiences.
But back in 1977, when people were still dressing in bell-bottom jeans and driving around in cube vans with peace symbols, is when the first strong man competition started.
Competitors who were champions from their own countries came to show their might and strength in this newly internationally organized competition by CBS television.
This is where, and from then on, the term weightlifter was born.
The whole idea behind this is to be able to lift as much weight as you can in a single stroke or repetitively, depending on the current challenge.
For real strong man competitors or even Olympic weightlifters, the goal is not to build your body like a bodybuilder. However, this still occurs to a degree because you initially are lifting weight, to increase the strength regarding how much weight you can lift.
To get even further into it, they don’t care about the tempo of the weight or exercise, meaning how slow you move the weight.
They just care about the lift and make sure it is adequately performed, so there is no injury that occurs.
Yes, technically, your building your body by doing this if you want to get literal, but the idea and foremost idea is to focus on the concentric motion, which is the shortening of the muscle…meaning the lift.
Weightlifters also focus on specific exercises such as deadlifts or bench-press, and some exercises are performed differently than to your standard way of doing it.
In a nutshell, a very small to medium-sized one is weightlifting. There are similarities between each other but well get to that after.
Bodybuilding
NOW here’s every frat boy’s favorite workout…and more!
Just kidding, don’t get too offended.
In the last ten years, bodybuilding has climbed and kept climbing to become a popular sport and practice for a lot of people to be a part of.
Bodybuilding has its muscular hands in everything from nutrition ads to the supplement industry and so on. But it wasn’t always so mainstream and popular.
Bodybuilding started with nothing, but like any magnificent phoenix rising from its ashes, it became a great sensation the world could enjoy.
Initially, in the late 19th century, a man by the name of Eugen Sandow would come to be known as the forefather of building.
Eugene was a strongman competitor who did something his fellow strong men weren’t doing at the time, and that was showing and flexing his muscles for their audience.
His manager would set up a stage, and he would pose to the crowd of people and always have them in awe of his muscles.
Now we have to remember back then the flexing of muscles was inferior to what it would become today, but it was something new to everyone.
Eugene became fascinated with displaying his muscles that he organized the first-ever large-scale bodybuilding competition in September 1901 called the great competition.
It was held in London England and was judged by Mr. Sandow himself along with sir Charles Lawes and sir Arthur Conan Doyle
yes…that’s right…the same Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a famous writer and created sherlock Holmes.
The winner was presented with a golden statue of a Eugene Sandow posing, which would become the traditional Mr. Olympia’s statue we have come to know today.
And well, the rest is history and eventually brings us to what we are today.
Regarding the training styles of bodybuilders, they sometimes do incorporate heavy lifting just like strongmen might do but not always in the same way.
What I mean by this is they might perform a one-rep max and lift very heavy. Still, their primary focus is generally geared towards focusing on the stretch of the muscle with range of motion and significant emphasis on the mind to muscle connection.
Although at times, it is about the weight, especially in regards to building mass, more importantly, focus is structured on the link you have with engaging your muscle properly to cause it to tear and grow AND also on how you perform the exercise.
Creating hypertrophy through a certain amount of reps, and performing the exercise properly is the general goal of what a bodybuilder wants to achieve.
Now besides what I have written here, there are more things surrounding this topic that come into play, but this is a general oversight into what both areas of exercise bring and how people can make sense of the differences between them.
So let me stop you from getting offended if there was any info that was not posted.
If you want to know anything more about fitness and health-related topics, check out my other blogs!
I promise you’ll always learn at least one thing from reading them and hopefully make your fitness and health journey better.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor nor a nutritionist. This is all from the experience I have gained through myself and through schooling I have taken from a health and fitness course. Through my videos, I share my personal and educational experience that I have acquired over the past years of training individuals through fitness and nutrition.
As always, I strive to help as much as I can by bringing you fitness education through means of all my social media platforms. My passion for fitness guides me to give people the help they need in whatever way I can. If you have been able to find the information I release helpful then I’m happy I was able to serve you.
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