Compared to athletes in other sports, bodybuilders tend to be on the short side. The average height of Mr. Olympia winners (the Super Bowl champs of bodybuilding) is 5 feet 7 inches, while the average National Football League player is 6 feet 2 inches, and the average Major League Baseball player is almost the same, at 6 feet 1.78 inches. Basketball players, needless to say, are in a class by themselves at an average height of 6 feet 7.4 inches.
But women definitely evolved an attraction to tall and muscular men.
Of course, there is considerable variance in the heights of athletes in all of these sports, bodybuilding being no exception. The tallest Mr. Olympia winner was the “Austrian Oak” (Arnold), while the shortest was Arnold’s best friend Franco Columbu at 5 feet 5 inches.
It has long been assumed that shorter than average men are attracted to bodybuilding because they see results faster than tall men and, therefore, receive more positive reinforcement early on in their efforts. The thinking goes that a short man, especially one with short limbs, can more quickly fill out the length of his skeleton with muscle mass, encouraging persistence.
It has also been argued that it is easier for shorter men to perform “compound” lifts, or lifts involving multiple muscle groups such as squats or deadlifts. Moving weight over a shorter range requires less energy.
One study found that shorter guys have a higher “surface area to bodyweight ratio,” which seems to mean there is simply less body tissue (skin, bones, organs etc.) compared to bodyweight, ensuring full nutrient metabolism and absorption.
I think these are all reasonable suppositions. I’ve seen more than one or two lanky friends give up lifting due to the apparent lack of progress. It’s just harder for them to see a difference.
The upside for the tall guys, though, is that when they finally do manage to “fill out,” they are almost always more impressive than short men, especially in street clothes. The longer the bone a muscle is attached to, the more mass it can ultimately hold.
As Arnold was fond of saying, to Franco’s great dismay, in competitive bodybuilding “a good tall man will always beat a good short man.”
But we shouldn’t overlook the role of evolution in the attraction of short men to the iron game: building muscle mass is an evolutionary strategy short men utilize to ensure access to mates.
Like all species, we are designed by natural selection to pass on our genes. Women evolved as the more sexually selective sex because they’ve always needed those with whom they mate to have a specific set of attributes.
In evolutionary history, women faced the problem of securing a reliable and replenishable supply of resources to carry them through pregnancy and lactation, especially when food was scarce. At the very least they needed to know that a male partner would be able to help physically defend her and her offspring, and to ensure, through violence if need be, food and shelter.
Female sexual attraction, therefore, developed around visual signs that a man would have the necessary capabilities. Thus the female preference for taller men with high cardiovascular capacity, high bone density, symmetrical skeletal structure, and lean muscle mass. Female selectivity forced men to compete with each other for mates, with the most successful possessed of some or all of these traits.
Not all of the traits women formed an attraction to were physical. Qualities such as high social status, leadership potential, mental stability, and willingness to share were also deemed essential for female and offspring survival.
But women definitely evolved an attraction to tall and muscular men.
Today, a young man on the under side of average knows there is little he can do to obtain the height that makes so many women swoon. During puberty, though, when testosterone starts to flow, he discovers he can increase his muscularity through weight training. He can’t increase his height, but he can pack on muscle.
This is all just a slightly convoluted way of suggesting that men with less than average height lift weights to improve their chances of having sex. This might be a truism, greeted in conversation by an eyeroll and a “Duh!” But how many understand that today’s “gym rat” has deep roots in human history?
While tall men take up weightlifting for any number of reasons, including the possibility of improving their sex life, it is unlikely they feel the same kind of reproductive pressure to do so as short men.
READ MORE from Seth Forman:
