The Illusion of Social Media Transformations

I do wonder if social media has worsened this lack of perspective that people seem to have because we just see photos without context. For example, even in the case of people who don't take performance-enhancing drugs and they have a 16-week transformation, by the nature of physique changes, the illusion is that they're going to look bigger by the end because their muscles put out more. So I'll have clients question that and say, well, how did that person turn into that by the end of the 16-week period when you've told me that it takes so long to build muscle? And because the pictures don't have context, people aren't aware of the fact that the person that had that transformation started out with muscle that they spent five to 10 years building so it does make me wonder if the ephemeral and the ephemeral nature and also the lack of context that social media tends to have has worsened people's perception hundred percent and the things respect which is lie like you can't see things in pictures Um, even if you, even if you had even a, a low to moderately, a low to moderate amount of muscle mass, like nothing like average muscle mass of somebody who had trained a year or something, and you do a transformation, you're going to look bigger in the picture because you can see the muscle and the fats gone. So you can have somebody who say 80 kilos, let's say you had somebody, let's say somebody 80 kilos and 25% body fat. And then 12 weeks later, you see a picture of them at 6% body fat. And you're like, good Lord, look how big they are. But they may only weigh like 65 kilos. Like they're actually way smaller than you think. I remember a friend of mine went to a bodybuilding show in Austin, Texas, which is where I spent most of my early adult life. Once I got, once I turned 18, I left my little tiny poor country town and I moved to Austin. and there's a guy there named Dave Gooden who's known as the Texas Shredder super good dude he's been in the bodybuilding world for multiple decades and uh he he used to be in the magazines like like uh muscle and fitness and iron man magazine you if you go pull an old iron man magazines you will see him in some of the pictures and he looks absolutely enormous so we he was gonna guest pose. And we were at a bodybuilding show, my friend goes, I can't wait to see Dave good. I want to see how big he is. And I went, Look, I don't want I'm gonna just preface this so that you don't surprise. He's a tiny little dude. He looks massive in pictures, but he's tiny. He's like a buck 65. And he was like, What? And he looks like he's 265 pounds in pictures. I'm like, he's not a big dude. He's diced and he has a amazing physique, but he's don't, when he comes out, you're going to be really surprised. And, uh, he came out, he came out, he had hurt his, I think he had hurt his leg, hurt his foot or his ankle or something. So he comes out in like a boot and a cane, and he's got a pimp jacket on and a pimp hat. And they played pimp juice while he walked up the aisle and he threw the thing off, started posing. And he's a fantastic poser. And my friend goes, oh my God, he's way smaller. And I thought, I go, yeah, I told you, this is why you can't trust pictures like I've met guys like I remember meeting Gunther who was like six foot four like 315 I remember meeting that dude and like yeah he was so mad his hands were so big when he shook my hand his fingers were almost at my damn elbows but like you see guys like that and then you see a guy like Dave Gooden they look the same in pictures because they can play with perspective but then you see him in real life and you see one guy six foot four and one guy's like 510 or 5'9 you know But then you can't tell on social media because social media is all smoke and mirrors and lies. It's Photoshop. It's angles. It's cameras. It's lighting. It's all this stuff. But you can make somebody look 10% leaner if you do the right lighting and the right angle of the camera and you have a good photographer. And then, of course, they can touch it up on an iPhone app. And everybody, even without using Photoshop, without trying to dupe people, everybody, even people who are not in the fitness industry, just people who go to the gym because we all post our best angles because why would we post our worst ones? Yeah. Yeah. Nobody posts. You never see that. And you see like in the bodybuilding side, you always know when somebody's gone off the rails because you never see a current picture of them. It's always like it's always photos of a couple of years ago when they competed. and because this is a real a real thing that i think a lot of gym pop people don't understand is like a lot of people they'll do a contest and then they go off the rails and they put on a heap of fat and they look completely different than what you're seeing online so then you're like it's been throwback thursday from 2021 for the last year i wonder what happened and then you see them in person you're like whoa they do not look like that anymore there was a fitness chick that my wife really liked. And I remember we're in Melbourne at the Melbourne Arnold's and I heard a voice, this American voice, and I was like, oh, that's so-and-so. I'm not going to say who it was. That's so-and-so. And Zoe was like, oh my God. And she turns around and she goes, oh, she doesn't look anything like her pictures online. I'm like, yeah, I know. That's the lie of social media.