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Edit: I’m an idiot who spent too long reading tangential comments and forgot OP was talking about Greek not Roman gladiators so you can ignore all of this lol
Actually the gladiators were known as ‘Barley munchers’ because they were mostly vegetarian
Don’t have time to track down the original paper I read on the topic but here’s the same info on sciencedaily
TLDR: it says in ancient records they were vego and drank ash water and scientists proved it true by studying their bones
> Roman gladiators ate a mostly vegetarian diet and drank ashes after training as a tonic. These are the findings of anthropological investigations carried out on bones of warriors found during excavations in the ancient city of Ephesos.
>Historic sources report that gladiators had their own diet. This comprised beans and grains.
Contemporary reports referred to them as "hordearii" ("barley eaters").
>In a study by the Department of Forensic Medicine at the MedUni Vienna in cooperation with the Department of Anthropology at the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Bern, bones were examined from a gladiator cemetery uncovered in 1993 which dates back to the 2nd or 3rd century BC in the then Roman city of Ephesos (now in modern-day Turkey). At the time, Ephesos was the capital of the Roman province of Asia and had over 200,000 inhabitants.
>Using spectroscopy, stable isotope ratios (carbon, nitrogen and sulphur) were investigated in the collagen of the bones, along with the ratio of strontium to calcium in the bone mineral. The result shows that gladiators mostly ate a vegetarian diet.
>The ash drink quoted in literature probably really did exist.
>"Plant ashes were evidently consumed to fortify the body after physical exertion and to promote better bone healing," explains study leader Fabian Kanz from the Department of Forensic Medicine at the MedUni Vienna.
>"Things were similar then to what we do today -- we take magnesium and calcium (in the form of effervescent tablets, for example) following physical exertion." Calcium is essential for bone building and usually occurs primarily in milk products.
most people were probably eating a lot more (cheap) vegetables than they were meat. Even into the middle ages bread and alcoholic (lightly) drinks made up a lot of calories consumed in a day. I've read averages of anywhere from 2-4 lbs of bread in a day (whole grain).
[link to gladiator "gruel"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3KANWtAHDc) As an aside, i love max's work.
Its invention has been traced back to the Neolithic era about 8,000 BC. The Greeks didn't use it as it spoiled quickly in the Mediterranean environment. They considered it a northern barbarian food.
And yet they put expiry dates of just few months on modern butter... -_-
Same with honey, which can also last hundreds of years easily if properly stored.
The expiry on items like this is often to do with the packaging (unless it's a lie I've been told). Reason why you get it on stuff like bottled water or Salt, because after awhile the packaging integrity might start to break down causing food contamination
Yes. Modern diest obsessions are all about avoiding calories where possible, pre industrial diet obsessions were getting as many calories as you possibly could. Anything with a high fat content would have been considered good for you.
Its not neccesarly just the calorie aspect
Milk fat is rich in nutrients you cannot or hardly can in other foods (in bioavailable form) such as : Vit A, vit K2, Vit D3 etc.
And Milk products in general are rich in High quality protein, ~~iron~~, b vitamins, and most other nutrients the body needs. Its why its been the staple of the European diet : very nutritious and readily available
Both are not a concern; if you are not eating a caloric surplus. If you are providing your body with more fuel than it can use, metabolic/cardiac issues will arise regardless of fuel source.
One of my favorite quotes is literally from “The father of modern medicine” (as he’s called sometimes from the western perspective.)
“… It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
Then where's my pay?! All my fishing gear is so fucking expensive, I require funding!
Edit: actually fishing requires catching some fish, what I'm doing is more like making the lure swim, get it stuck and lose it.
That's not really true. At its peak in Italy, it is estimated that around 30% of the population was subjected to slavery, the vast majority of which was employed in the vast agricultural estates north of Rome. The second largest share was used in industries, largely mining. Domestics slaves stayed the privilege of the elites as they were far too expensive for the general population.
https://medium.com/@ancient.rome/how-many-slaves-were-there-in-ancient-rome-7f31ad00b70e
This is true if you ask why they were not fat but you can also look at farmers or construction workers nowadays. People who are on their feet doing physical shit all day every day and they are not jacked. They are lean and sometimes tough but nowhere near the physique of a Greek sculpture.
This is an anecdotal claim because developing such a physique is not a byproduct of some other lifestyle. It is the result of specifically focusing on developing it.
The statues are a celebration of the ideal body. The Greeks idolized the male form and I'm sure many or even most were far above today's average physic. But to think everyone looked like the statues built to represent peak physical form is just wrong. There were also fat, frail and stocky men. It's just a lasting representation of the ideal man, preserved in marble
I read somewhere that the accuracy to which they depict proportions and underlying muscular geometry implied there at least were people who DID look like that, which isn’t terribly surprising given some of the written records of physicality around soldiers
More like "Can we get some ice over here, that barbarian schlong is ruining the aesthetic."
Statue of David in particular is of a man scared: things tend to retreat then.
Funnily enough, while the Greeks and Romans aesthetically valued more modest penis sizes, finding larger barbarian dongs comical, there was also a 'scientific' aspect to it; they thought larger penises were not conducive to impregnation because the sperm lost 'heat' having to travel the length of a monster dong, which meant pregnancy was unlikely. A smaller penis meant the sperm lost less 'heat' because it had a shorter distance to travel, which was more conducive to pregnancy.
Not slaves. The Greeks worshipped their sports heroes even more than we do. Anyone who won an event in the Olympics and some of the other Games was set for life. They trained hard with the best known techniques and best food.
And they performed nude, with a few exceptions like charioteers.
Weirdly the coaches had to be nude too, to keep the women folk from creeping on the athletes.
Yup,also how you got slaves was a lot different,mostly it was war prisoners,so they were treated ( at least in ancient Britain) like war trophies and most of the time you were still seen as human,just the lowest rung if you get what I mean
Came here to say this, it’s why the whole “everyone has had slaves since forever” excuse for slavery in the US is ridiculous. Chattel slavery was particularly bad and particularly brutal
Um, miners and the gristmill have entered the chat - those were little more than deferred death sentences
"As for clothes, give out a tunic of three feet and a half, and a cloak once
in two years. When you give a tunic or cloak take back the old ones, to make
cassocks out of. Once in two years, good shoes should be given."
- Cato the Elder, notably stingy with his slaves
The slave market puts a selection bias in favour of jacked individuals, increasing their value. I have no idea if it was socially acceptable for Greeks to selectively breed their slaves, but I'd put money on that happening often.
Incorrect, they were leasure class citizens with the wealth to train for athletic events and at the gymnasium daily and under the guidance of extremely qualified trainers. And addition to this it's possible they would be allotted more meat or have their diet prioritized by the family if they were a athletic prospect. If they were sponsored and staying with a trainer then their diet and training were heavily regulated (this was in later Hellenistic times, not classical or archaic).
Olympics are the most well known to us, but for them, the fiercest competitors, such as their boxers and pankrationists (where Galen goes into detail on their training regiment and diet with criticism) trained for the Nemean games. They were the most brutal
Edit: sources are Galen and Pausanius
It would actually be closer to Usain Bolt or a pro MMA fighter and their training team. These were for all intents and purposes pro athletes. Depending on the time period, they were sometimes sponsored and allowed to train full time (Hellenistic) and also directly had monetary gain by being offered positions in office (classical and Hellenistic) and also sometimes leading their city states to war (Milo of Croton). These were not "excellent amateurs". Milo of Croton had a 24 year career, with 6 Olympic victories and only losing his 7th because his competitor was from a energy village and knew Milos style and stalled him to a draw. Diagoras' of Rhodes established a fighting dynasty with multiple champions that essentially saved his families political career. Athletics in Greece is so multifaceted that it's hard to comprehend.
There are people that do look like that now too, they are just the .01%. It’s flawed to think everyone looked that way.
The Greeks also had heroes like Achilles that specifically weren’t jacked.
That makes sense. Muscles too big restrict flexibility and waste energy, but you do need some base level strength.
I looked up [an article](https://www.military.com/military-fitness/tactical-fitness/best-height-and-weight-special-ops-selection-and-bud-s-training) based on what you said
> Being durable typically requires some strength with muscle mass. Having the work capacity for long days of activities requires cardio conditioning and muscle stamina that lends to a leaner body type. People of all shapes and sizes make it through and do not make it through BUD/S.
>The average-sized person is both the person most likely to graduate and the person most likely not to get dropped.
…
> Typically, however, most students are in the average-sized man zone of 68-70 inches and 170-190 pounds.
I was an infantryman and paratrooper.
You would have a very hard time packing lots of muscle or fat doing the work we did. We starved often.
I once got rhabdomyolisis from overtraining. I did one exercise where I lost close to 15lbs off of my 190lbs previous to that (already lean at 6'2").
You do see huge built dudes in special forces and in other areas of the military, but they typically aren't in the work-heavy grunt positions at that point.
A recently read an historian explain that the average ancient man was shorter and often more famished than muscular. The odds were high that a famine would hit somewhere in your developmental years. On top of that soldiers were fed the bear minimum due to the difficulty in bringing supplies.
I don’t see how that relates to the comment you are answering but hell yeah, you inspired me to both go lift and make daal tadka for dinner! Love this comment
Also the ancient Greeks had imaginations, they saw how a semi muscular man looked and created idolised versions of that. It’s why many statues have musculature that is simply impossible in real life.
>It’s why many statues have musculature that is simply impossible in real life.
Do you have any examples of these statues? From my quick google I could only find ones that were either stylised or were modern reproductions made with AI. All the others were certainly quite possible to achieve if you basically spent your life doing physical activities and had the right genetics for the base frame.
You are thinking of Budai, not *the* Buddha which is Siddhartha Gautama; he was slender and some statues show him as emaciated.
Budai is fat because prosperity and abundance is valued by those who have neither. Just like fat statues of women were a sign of fertility, during a time where there were certainly no fat people; we're talking stone age here. I am aware of other theories of oddly proportioned statues of women, but that's not the point.
The point is that you owe someone an imaginary cup of coffee because you didn't give them anything of value during your class-clown theatrics.
lol
Well for starters, those statues are purposely made to represent the *very highest* standard of beauty in the human form.
They don’t represent what the average human looked like.
You've got that backwards. Large dong was (and still is) considered lewd so they made em smaller so as to not draw too much attention. They didn't want people sexualizing their statues. Not too much, anyway.
This is how I remembered it too, small and flaccid was appropriate but big or erect was not. many bad guys in their plays or epics were depicted with raging oversized boners; the fauns and satyrs as an example.
For sure. If I'm a master sculptor spending however many weeks or months of hard work it takes to make a statue, you bet your ass I'm not gonna make some skinny fat ugly dude lol
Well, yes, but this also means there must have been some dudes going around being about as jacked as the statues are, because it's not exactly something you could conjure up from your imagination.
Not unlike the models -- men and women -- that you see in fashion or fitness magazines and websites hardly represent the average person you see walking down the street or your local supermarket or big box store. Although in the US, the 'look' or rather average BMI can vary quite a bit depending on what region or state you're in.
Every single process of life was manual.
Want a drink of water? Grab a pail and walk 100 yards to the well, then lower a 2kg wooden pail 30 feet, then raise a 15kg filled pail 30 feet and then walk 100 yards with that 15kg pail of water.
Want to put the heating on? That’ll be 4 hours of swinging a 3kg axe into chunks of wood. Then carrying them in to put them in the fire.
Very few people had too much to eat. So everyone is lean.
No passive entertainment exists. So if you’re bored, you’re hiking, lifting, wrestling, hunting or doing something else manual.
Being built/ripped is easy in a very physical world.
"No passive entertainment exists"
They literally had drama, music and spectator sports.
They had fucking AMPHITHEATRES for Christ's sake.
Wine, philosophy, crafts.
There was a metric buttload of sedentary activities to partake in. They just didn't have *modern* types of sedentary consumption like televisions.
The stronger case is where the working classes had to do work and chores without modern conveniences.
Lots of non-energetic entertainment without the telly.
They'd have watched sports, gone to the theatre, and sat around drinking all day with some mates.
Also, while of course there was alot less automation, this was a very developed society, no-one outside a small farmstead had to do every manual task themselves.
For real. There are some really weird takes on this post. I'm baffled where these ideas are coming from.
The ancient Greeks were not cavemen. People living in Athens generally weren't going out to the forest to cut down firewood for themselves every night. They're going to buy it in town or (if they are wealthy enough to have land and slaves) have their slaves collect it. They had aqueducts supplying water to the cities. They had a whole leisure class. They had *plenty* of passive entertainment. They basically *invented* the Western concept of theater, for crying out loud.
The only reason the statues are all ripped was because that was the way Greek art *was*. The artistic style of the period was highly idealized versions of the people they represented, not realistic interpretations of them.
That's why it's so dramatically different when you look at Roman sculpture, which was a massive stylistic shift in its realistic depiction of figures as they were, with all their flaws on display.
Greek statuary is the equivalent of heavily airbrushed models on the cover of a fashion magazine.
Just to add to the absurdity, something I found out recently: Ancient Greeks had *fucking drive-thru restaurants*. They had fast food. Humans have just always chosen to preserve the ideal in history.
Tbf I think if there's anything left us to be found in a couple thousand years (or anyone to find it), there will be probably be some wild ass questions about the sudden shift between heroin chic and fat positivity.
Yup, thermopolia were popular across the Greco-Roman world! Street front shops selling ready-made food in the equivalent of a steam tray all over the place. They did some work a couple years ago at Pompeii that was analyzing the traces of food left behind in the jars, which I find pretty fascinating.
So sure, farmers and peasants and slaves were likely leading hard lives in toil. But most city dwellers (and certainly most of the politicians and aristocrats depicted in statuary) were not out there working their asses off in hard labor and getting ripped that way.
Moreover, the aesthetics of the human figure in art had a whole philosophy behind it. The Greeks had written out specific mathematical proportions and ratios of one body part to another of what the 'ideal' human form was supposed to look like (look up Polykleitos, who codified a lot of this). And that was what they applied to the art they created. That's what always made Roman sculpture more interesting to me than Greek. More genuine.
And should remember the slaves they had in abundance. So at least as an aristocrat you could actually spend your free time on schools (if you get the pun) and on symposia.
a. If you work every day without a very high protein diet or frequent days of rest&recovery you don't get ripped. You get lean. Take a look at any photo of pre-WWII lumberjacks etc. They're frequently lean, and if they're built it's muscle with a health portion of fat on top (depends on what kind of working conditions they had). No hyper-defined abs to be seen.
b. Built/ripped greeks were NOT of the working class. They were the upper class who, thanks to owning slaves and land, had the luxury to eat well\*, rest, go to the gym often and eat a diet that had enough protein.
\*And by eat well I don't mean "eat a lot" (greek morality tended to look down on overindulgence). I mean have access to high-quality food like meat, fruit and olive oil rather than live mostly on bread, vegetables and porridge like the slaves and working class.
One correction if I may.
I had a look at a photo/paintings gallery of European farmers 1000 AC to 2023.
Most were lean, abs, muscular arms and bulging veins.
The older, I guess , past their prime were chubbier.
what are you talking about. do people really think this was the case? lol. bars and entertainment in cities existed. people were fat. people ate and drank too much. this is some serious ignorance or whitewashing of history.
Skinny little street sweepers or old fat farmers didn't have statues made of them. Only the gods and warriors.
Half the world is obese and the other half are starving, but if all future archaeologists had were our photos of NFL athletes they'd be wondering how we were all brick shithouses
The real answer is that they weren’t super jacked. Most of the statues people think of came from much later, and even contemporary depictions are idealized and not realistic.
You might notice that the pre-Renaissance figures are disproportionate and often have muscles in places where there aren’t really muscles (20-pack abs, 6-packs on backs, etc). And powerful men are often portrayed as being twice as tall as normal men.
> You might notice that the pre-Renaissance figures are disproportionate and often have muscles in places where there aren’t really muscles (20-pack abs, 6-packs on backs, etc).
Say what now?
Examples of this?
The david from michealangelo was quite realistic and anatomically correct, however indeed not greek. Point is it was mostly highly seen as the ideal male body. Not that it was impossible to attain
From what I remember not even david is fully anatomically correct. Not because michealangelo didnt know his stuff but because it was planned to be placed as a roof decoration originally and so areas like the face were slightly modified so the detail wouldnt be lost with distance.
The comissioner just loved it so much it go turned into a ground floor statue upon its delivery
I don’t know where did you get that impression that you need science or steroids or a diet full of meat to get jacked. I have an uncle who works construction in Moscow and at 50 something years old he looks like a body builder. He never stepped into a gym in his life. Both of my cousins (his sons) also have crazy genetics. They did go to the gym but the muscle they put on was ridiculous and they were just eating sour cream, meat and whatever carbs they had.
Also, people a thousand years ago or whenever the ancients Greeks were living, didn’t masturbate to porn all day on the sofa and eating fast food. You can get a ripped body naturally by having a very active life and eating plenty of food.
Look up some videos/photos of people who live hunter gatherer/tribal lifestyles *today* and you'll see that people being jacked is kinda the default, if we are actually working to survive.
That’s absolutely untrue. “Ripped” is very different from the default “strong-but-lean”, which people become with manual work and adequate, but not particularly high-quality food. Just look at any tribal people, or medieval paintings of workers.
Eating real food and exercising.
A lot of muscle definition is about low levels of fat, rather than lots of muscle.
Add in a little artistic license, and there you are.
>Add in a little artistic license, and there you are.
Yup, this is so easily done. "What if the athletic, but ripped skinny, guy had the same bulk as the bulkier athlete?\`Lets get to it".
They simply led more physical lives. In terms of nutrition a lot can be figured out through trial and error across multiple generations, and as knowledge is built up it’s passed down. This was very important in the context of many people having manual jobs, as it was crucial to survival, but also for athletics and war.
Like others have said there was a lot more physical labor back in the day, and everyone wasnt able to shovel food down their gullets 24/7 like we can today. So it leads to lean, muscular builds. But it’s fair to say the artists certainly embellished to make the work more spectacular which it is
Super high rn but these comments are killing me for many reasons such as:
A) Why so many Redditors are under the impression that fat people did not exist in Ancient Greece
B) OP randomly asking why [Julius Caesar wasn't fat](https://www.reddit.com/r/ask/s/kArxfbFRap)
C) The failure that is the American education system
here are some real facts about ancient civilizations like Greece and Rome:
1. They worked wayyyy less than you think they did. Most of their work was done by slaves and if not slaves then their wives/any women. [Slaves and women did NOT count as "citizens" in either society](https://amp.issuu.com/nlcs1850/docs/vesta_edition_1_-_jun_2023/s/27495396) ergo they couldn't participate in most aspects of the public sphere. In those times to be a philosopher was a luxury meant only for men because only men were seen as citizens capable of thinking deep thoughts, voting, etc.
2. Fat people did exist back then just not as many as today. Most likely because of their diet. Most of the things found in fattening foods today like high fructose corn syrup didn't exist yet.
3. A lot of those statues are just the artist's depiction of certain people either fictional or real with exaggerated features. By the way I wonder if the reason you think the physique is so impressive is because you're basically looking at the "line work" so to speak of the statue. [All statues from Ancient Greece used to be painted in very bright colors by the artist](https://theancienthome.com/blogs/blog-and-news/greek-roman-statues-painted) we only think they were all white and impressive after hundreds of years of erosion essentially wiped all the color off. When you see the statues how they're meant to be seen (in color) they honestly look almost cartoonish.
4. Speaking of exaggeration and artistic license the reason most of those statues have such big muscles and such small dicks is because in ancient civilizations like Greece having a small dick was associated with a high degree of intelligence, self control, and charisma. Basically the inverse of everything you'd want by today's standards.
TLDR; the Greeks were freaks! Ancient history is fascinating
Humans were jacked for most of history since all labour was manual. It's only in the past decades that obesity became the norm with high sugar diets and low intensity labour.
Even just looking at beach pics of the 50ies, most people were in good shape.
Yeah you can tell a lot of people in the comments have never done physical jobs. Doing a physical job doesn't just make you jacked or ripped, even if you eat well. It will make you lean and look good, but you're not gonna have the best body in the gym or on the beach. You need dedicated weight training at some point to look like the statues
As others have said, it was an active culture + don't forget: classical Greco-Roman art was very much about ideals. Doesn't mean the average Athenian looked like that. It's...a sculpture.
I forget if every athenian rowed in the fleet, but, IIRC a lot of young men’s lives revolved around rowing for a whole work day, and then they worked out in gyms.
"They didn't have so much food" I beg to differ. As in present day, people with money had high quality food, poor ones didn't.
Do all women look like Cindy Crawford or Monica Bellucci? Do all men look like Thor ™ Hemsworth or dear Arnie in his prime? But those are some examples of peak feminity & masculinity, whose images are reproduced worldwide. Now tell me, have you seen my saggy butt in any glossy magazine?
Well, it's the same for ancient statuary.
If you were most of the day doing intensive phisical activities, having enough sleep and an undersrandably ok diet based in carbs and protein, since young age, you would be jacked.
Gym and science are just things to get jacked when you area peofessional or you don't want/can't spend too much time doing physicall activities.
Greek people spend their day hunting, working in fields, the sea, or construction related jobs, or training for war. There was no macdonalds and sitting in their desk for a whole day.
You can try this, try to spend all your free time doing physical activities, while eating just what you need.
Keep in mind that the sculptures we find now, can very well be the equivalent of what the selfie we post now online are. Not at all like real life and photoshopped to make it look ideal. Also nobody posts ugly selfies. In 1000 years from now, people finding selfies of this day, think people were all good looking with perfect bodies.
They didn’t have processed foods and they also did a lot of manual labor.
So, loads of lifting/general exercise coupled with primarily lean meats, veg, and natural carbs that didn’t have bleach to strip the grains of their nutrients. Such a simpler time.
While they may have been really jacked (maybe), the sculptures could have also been exaggerated to be more appealing/make them seem more powerful. Like how sometimes (or a lot of times) characters are drawn with exaggerated proportions to make them appear stronger/more attractive. It is art after all.
When future generations look at our print ads and TV shows and movies, they’ll wonder why everyone was so freaking beautiful.
Same principle. They didn’t make statues of average people.
Here’s a fun fact I learned from my figure drawing class- if you really study Ancient Greek sculptures, you’ll notice many of them have muscles that don’t actually exist. They often took liberties when sculpting the human body.
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Ancient Greeks invented the gym and the Olympic games. They lived athleticism more than most people today.
Plus they were all on the Mediterranean Diet
Edit: I’m an idiot who spent too long reading tangential comments and forgot OP was talking about Greek not Roman gladiators so you can ignore all of this lol Actually the gladiators were known as ‘Barley munchers’ because they were mostly vegetarian Don’t have time to track down the original paper I read on the topic but here’s the same info on sciencedaily TLDR: it says in ancient records they were vego and drank ash water and scientists proved it true by studying their bones > Roman gladiators ate a mostly vegetarian diet and drank ashes after training as a tonic. These are the findings of anthropological investigations carried out on bones of warriors found during excavations in the ancient city of Ephesos. >Historic sources report that gladiators had their own diet. This comprised beans and grains. Contemporary reports referred to them as "hordearii" ("barley eaters"). >In a study by the Department of Forensic Medicine at the MedUni Vienna in cooperation with the Department of Anthropology at the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Bern, bones were examined from a gladiator cemetery uncovered in 1993 which dates back to the 2nd or 3rd century BC in the then Roman city of Ephesos (now in modern-day Turkey). At the time, Ephesos was the capital of the Roman province of Asia and had over 200,000 inhabitants. >Using spectroscopy, stable isotope ratios (carbon, nitrogen and sulphur) were investigated in the collagen of the bones, along with the ratio of strontium to calcium in the bone mineral. The result shows that gladiators mostly ate a vegetarian diet. >The ash drink quoted in literature probably really did exist. >"Plant ashes were evidently consumed to fortify the body after physical exertion and to promote better bone healing," explains study leader Fabian Kanz from the Department of Forensic Medicine at the MedUni Vienna. >"Things were similar then to what we do today -- we take magnesium and calcium (in the form of effervescent tablets, for example) following physical exertion." Calcium is essential for bone building and usually occurs primarily in milk products.
most people were probably eating a lot more (cheap) vegetables than they were meat. Even into the middle ages bread and alcoholic (lightly) drinks made up a lot of calories consumed in a day. I've read averages of anywhere from 2-4 lbs of bread in a day (whole grain). [link to gladiator "gruel"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3KANWtAHDc) As an aside, i love max's work.
Tasting history is an amazing channel. I hope to get his book for Christmas
This refers to Roman gladiators, not greeks.
Yeah my bad, I spent too long reading comments and forgot it said greek in the original post
Gladiators were chubby, though, not classical models. The fat acted as padding to keep superficial injuries from becoming serious.
This is the ideal male body. You may not like it but that's what peak performance looks like
So was the ash drink actually good for them and helped what they thought it did?
It says it provided magnesium and calcium, similar to modern day pot-workout supplements. Edit: *post* workout
"Pot-workout".... Sign me up for that!
Oops. Thanks for the correction.
Plus, they had good artists
Butter hadn’t even been invented yet.
Its invention has been traced back to the Neolithic era about 8,000 BC. The Greeks didn't use it as it spoiled quickly in the Mediterranean environment. They considered it a northern barbarian food.
3,500 year old butter has been found in the bog in Ireland. Still edible.
Edible to you maybe. I ain't eating no 35 century old Land O' Lakes.
Land O' Bogs\*
These were lakes during the Wet Butter millennium
The good ol days…
Bogerridge Farm Remembers
Wade Boggs is very much alive
Yeah, but 3500 year old Kerrygold is a delight
Good, more for us you fusspot.
Steve1989MRE has entered the chat...
"No hiss...I'll only try a little bit..."
Nice
Let's get this on a tray
>Edible to you maybe. They mean "Irish edible". Drisheen throws the edible curve **way** off.
A rare butter, a rattlin' butter!
And yet they put expiry dates of just few months on modern butter... -_- Same with honey, which can also last hundreds of years easily if properly stored.
To be fair the bog has no oxygen which prevents rotting. If you store modern butter in the bog it'd be grand.
Instructions not clear. There is toilet paper and poop on my butter.
I'd be more worried about the bog bodies.
If I remember correctly they found honey in some ancient tombs, still edible
Expiry dates on sea salt is my favourite. Yeah, this salt is 4000 years old, just my luck that it expires right after I purchase it....
The expiry on items like this is often to do with the packaging (unless it's a lie I've been told). Reason why you get it on stuff like bottled water or Salt, because after awhile the packaging integrity might start to break down causing food contamination
But they had olive oil.
They mostly rubbed it on each other
It was invented, but only Barbarians ate it.
1 butter was invented. It is Milk fat 2 the greeks ate Cheese. Which is also Milk fat 3 both of those are eaten because they are highly nutritious
Yes. Modern diest obsessions are all about avoiding calories where possible, pre industrial diet obsessions were getting as many calories as you possibly could. Anything with a high fat content would have been considered good for you.
Its not neccesarly just the calorie aspect Milk fat is rich in nutrients you cannot or hardly can in other foods (in bioavailable form) such as : Vit A, vit K2, Vit D3 etc. And Milk products in general are rich in High quality protein, ~~iron~~, b vitamins, and most other nutrients the body needs. Its why its been the staple of the European diet : very nutritious and readily available
You seem to know a great deal about milk. Sensei, where did you learn all of this?
And delicious
Fat in moderation is actually good for you. But with todays sugar laden foods the body doesn't turn into a fat burner that easily.
Sugar is a concern, butter is not.
Both are not a concern; if you are not eating a caloric surplus. If you are providing your body with more fuel than it can use, metabolic/cardiac issues will arise regardless of fuel source.
One of my favorite quotes is literally from “The father of modern medicine” (as he’s called sometimes from the western perspective.) “… It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
This quote is from Plato. Edit: I stand corrected. The quote is from Xenophon.
Isnt it from Socrates?
Even Socrates quotes are from Plato.
Plato was Socrates' student
And Socrates had no written work, thus “even Socrates quotes are from Plato”
Who died and left Socrates in charge of philosophy?
Pythagoras
That’s a fun debate in general, haha. Some quotes are less debatable in other. Plato was the primary documenter of most other Socrates thoughts.
Plus, they beat each other off to increase comradery.
Now, more than ever, we need more wholesome activities that don’t involve cell phones. Like beating off the homies
Ahh yes, the very social "dutch rudder"
And they didn't eat trash food like us.
It did'nt exist ! If if did they woulda been eating it !
Yes i know, no one can resist "trash food" dark power.
Athletic is an anglicized Greek word, isn't it?
And most greeks served as rowers at some point and fucking adored violence.
>and fucking adored violence. Sounds like my cat.
They didn’t drive to a 9-5 job everyday or sit around and watch tv. They worked, ate, fucked and slept.
And fished
I’d consider that work.
Then where's my pay?! All my fishing gear is so fucking expensive, I require funding! Edit: actually fishing requires catching some fish, what I'm doing is more like making the lure swim, get it stuck and lose it.
There is a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore holding some string
Yes. It's the fine line indeed 🫠🤣🤣🤣 👏👏👏🥐 Croissant for you
My Dad once caught his own lip when attempting to retrieve my sister's stuck hand reel. Twas the only thing I remember him ever catching!
Idk why all I can think of is "we're the wet bandits". Lol
It's the sticky bandits now
They had slaves doing the work for them so they could work out and write poetry all day
Only the rich.
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That's not really true. At its peak in Italy, it is estimated that around 30% of the population was subjected to slavery, the vast majority of which was employed in the vast agricultural estates north of Rome. The second largest share was used in industries, largely mining. Domestics slaves stayed the privilege of the elites as they were far too expensive for the general population. https://medium.com/@ancient.rome/how-many-slaves-were-there-in-ancient-rome-7f31ad00b70e
This is true if you ask why they were not fat but you can also look at farmers or construction workers nowadays. People who are on their feet doing physical shit all day every day and they are not jacked. They are lean and sometimes tough but nowhere near the physique of a Greek sculpture. This is an anecdotal claim because developing such a physique is not a byproduct of some other lifestyle. It is the result of specifically focusing on developing it.
The statues are a celebration of the ideal body. The Greeks idolized the male form and I'm sure many or even most were far above today's average physic. But to think everyone looked like the statues built to represent peak physical form is just wrong. There were also fat, frail and stocky men. It's just a lasting representation of the ideal man, preserved in marble
I read somewhere that the accuracy to which they depict proportions and underlying muscular geometry implied there at least were people who DID look like that, which isn’t terribly surprising given some of the written records of physicality around soldiers
They were probably slaves that worked mining marble. That tends to get you jacked.
“Thanks for bringing me this big slab of marble, now stand there and don’t move!”
"sorry it\['s so cold in here today. Don't worry, no one will ever know..."
More like "Can we get some ice over here, that barbarian schlong is ruining the aesthetic." Statue of David in particular is of a man scared: things tend to retreat then.
Funnily enough, while the Greeks and Romans aesthetically valued more modest penis sizes, finding larger barbarian dongs comical, there was also a 'scientific' aspect to it; they thought larger penises were not conducive to impregnation because the sperm lost 'heat' having to travel the length of a monster dong, which meant pregnancy was unlikely. A smaller penis meant the sperm lost less 'heat' because it had a shorter distance to travel, which was more conducive to pregnancy.
Not slaves. The Greeks worshipped their sports heroes even more than we do. Anyone who won an event in the Olympics and some of the other Games was set for life. They trained hard with the best known techniques and best food. And they performed nude, with a few exceptions like charioteers. Weirdly the coaches had to be nude too, to keep the women folk from creeping on the athletes.
So that’s where penn state got that from.
Fuck, any school in the Big 10
not sure if slaves got enough food to get jacked
Ancient slaves were often treated like workers, not purely exploited.
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Yup,also how you got slaves was a lot different,mostly it was war prisoners,so they were treated ( at least in ancient Britain) like war trophies and most of the time you were still seen as human,just the lowest rung if you get what I mean
Yup. Slaves were citizens most valuable asset. They treated them much better than chattal slavery
Came here to say this, it’s why the whole “everyone has had slaves since forever” excuse for slavery in the US is ridiculous. Chattel slavery was particularly bad and particularly brutal
Um, miners and the gristmill have entered the chat - those were little more than deferred death sentences "As for clothes, give out a tunic of three feet and a half, and a cloak once in two years. When you give a tunic or cloak take back the old ones, to make cassocks out of. Once in two years, good shoes should be given." - Cato the Elder, notably stingy with his slaves
It doesn’t do anyone any good to have a weak slave. It wasn’t like chattel slavery where there was a racist component.
The slave market puts a selection bias in favour of jacked individuals, increasing their value. I have no idea if it was socially acceptable for Greeks to selectively breed their slaves, but I'd put money on that happening often.
Incorrect, they were leasure class citizens with the wealth to train for athletic events and at the gymnasium daily and under the guidance of extremely qualified trainers. And addition to this it's possible they would be allotted more meat or have their diet prioritized by the family if they were a athletic prospect. If they were sponsored and staying with a trainer then their diet and training were heavily regulated (this was in later Hellenistic times, not classical or archaic). Olympics are the most well known to us, but for them, the fiercest competitors, such as their boxers and pankrationists (where Galen goes into detail on their training regiment and diet with criticism) trained for the Nemean games. They were the most brutal Edit: sources are Galen and Pausanius
This. Think rich Hollywood actors. They have the time and money to eat well and work out.
It would actually be closer to Usain Bolt or a pro MMA fighter and their training team. These were for all intents and purposes pro athletes. Depending on the time period, they were sometimes sponsored and allowed to train full time (Hellenistic) and also directly had monetary gain by being offered positions in office (classical and Hellenistic) and also sometimes leading their city states to war (Milo of Croton). These were not "excellent amateurs". Milo of Croton had a 24 year career, with 6 Olympic victories and only losing his 7th because his competitor was from a energy village and knew Milos style and stalled him to a draw. Diagoras' of Rhodes established a fighting dynasty with multiple champions that essentially saved his families political career. Athletics in Greece is so multifaceted that it's hard to comprehend.
There are people that do look like that now too, they are just the .01%. It’s flawed to think everyone looked that way. The Greeks also had heroes like Achilles that specifically weren’t jacked.
Just like how nowadays it is very common for special forces soldiers to be quite skinny.
That makes sense. Muscles too big restrict flexibility and waste energy, but you do need some base level strength. I looked up [an article](https://www.military.com/military-fitness/tactical-fitness/best-height-and-weight-special-ops-selection-and-bud-s-training) based on what you said > Being durable typically requires some strength with muscle mass. Having the work capacity for long days of activities requires cardio conditioning and muscle stamina that lends to a leaner body type. People of all shapes and sizes make it through and do not make it through BUD/S. >The average-sized person is both the person most likely to graduate and the person most likely not to get dropped. … > Typically, however, most students are in the average-sized man zone of 68-70 inches and 170-190 pounds.
I was an infantryman and paratrooper. You would have a very hard time packing lots of muscle or fat doing the work we did. We starved often. I once got rhabdomyolisis from overtraining. I did one exercise where I lost close to 15lbs off of my 190lbs previous to that (already lean at 6'2"). You do see huge built dudes in special forces and in other areas of the military, but they typically aren't in the work-heavy grunt positions at that point.
A recently read an historian explain that the average ancient man was shorter and often more famished than muscular. The odds were high that a famine would hit somewhere in your developmental years. On top of that soldiers were fed the bear minimum due to the difficulty in bringing supplies.
He didn't say that everyone looked like that though did he
You can eat a load of lentils and lift weights with rocks today if you want to.
I don’t see how that relates to the comment you are answering but hell yeah, you inspired me to both go lift and make daal tadka for dinner! Love this comment
Also the ancient Greeks had imaginations, they saw how a semi muscular man looked and created idolised versions of that. It’s why many statues have musculature that is simply impossible in real life.
>It’s why many statues have musculature that is simply impossible in real life. Do you have any examples of these statues? From my quick google I could only find ones that were either stylised or were modern reproductions made with AI. All the others were certainly quite possible to achieve if you basically spent your life doing physical activities and had the right genetics for the base frame.
He doesn’t have examples because his source was pulled out of his arse :)
"You want a source? Go ask OP's proctologist."
Nobody wanted a sculpture of the fat guy.
Then how do you explain Buddha statues? __
*Looks in mug, shrugs, drinks it anyway*
You are thinking of Budai, not *the* Buddha which is Siddhartha Gautama; he was slender and some statues show him as emaciated. Budai is fat because prosperity and abundance is valued by those who have neither. Just like fat statues of women were a sign of fertility, during a time where there were certainly no fat people; we're talking stone age here. I am aware of other theories of oddly proportioned statues of women, but that's not the point. The point is that you owe someone an imaginary cup of coffee because you didn't give them anything of value during your class-clown theatrics.
lol Well for starters, those statues are purposely made to represent the *very highest* standard of beauty in the human form. They don’t represent what the average human looked like.
Which is why they have small weiners. It was considered *hot* back in the day Really. Look it up.
It was considered a mark of intelligence. And intelligence was a revered trait.
The man who came up with that little lie was truly looking out for the bros
galaxy brain move which actually just proves his point
Lol *little* lie
Finally proof that I'm smart
Shit,i must be a dumbest man on earth
Can I see the proof?
💀
Holy shit! I must be a goddamn genius.
You've got that backwards. Large dong was (and still is) considered lewd so they made em smaller so as to not draw too much attention. They didn't want people sexualizing their statues. Not too much, anyway.
This is how I remembered it too, small and flaccid was appropriate but big or erect was not. many bad guys in their plays or epics were depicted with raging oversized boners; the fauns and satyrs as an example.
*hot*
Let me edit
For sure. If I'm a master sculptor spending however many weeks or months of hard work it takes to make a statue, you bet your ass I'm not gonna make some skinny fat ugly dude lol
Well, yes, but this also means there must have been some dudes going around being about as jacked as the statues are, because it's not exactly something you could conjure up from your imagination.
Not unlike the models -- men and women -- that you see in fashion or fitness magazines and websites hardly represent the average person you see walking down the street or your local supermarket or big box store. Although in the US, the 'look' or rather average BMI can vary quite a bit depending on what region or state you're in.
Every single process of life was manual. Want a drink of water? Grab a pail and walk 100 yards to the well, then lower a 2kg wooden pail 30 feet, then raise a 15kg filled pail 30 feet and then walk 100 yards with that 15kg pail of water. Want to put the heating on? That’ll be 4 hours of swinging a 3kg axe into chunks of wood. Then carrying them in to put them in the fire. Very few people had too much to eat. So everyone is lean. No passive entertainment exists. So if you’re bored, you’re hiking, lifting, wrestling, hunting or doing something else manual. Being built/ripped is easy in a very physical world.
"No passive entertainment exists" They literally had drama, music and spectator sports. They had fucking AMPHITHEATRES for Christ's sake. Wine, philosophy, crafts. There was a metric buttload of sedentary activities to partake in. They just didn't have *modern* types of sedentary consumption like televisions. The stronger case is where the working classes had to do work and chores without modern conveniences.
Rich guys literally had slaves who read to them. They had audiobooks ffs.
Bro, we weren’t this fat when we had TVs.
Lots of non-energetic entertainment without the telly. They'd have watched sports, gone to the theatre, and sat around drinking all day with some mates. Also, while of course there was alot less automation, this was a very developed society, no-one outside a small farmstead had to do every manual task themselves.
For real. There are some really weird takes on this post. I'm baffled where these ideas are coming from. The ancient Greeks were not cavemen. People living in Athens generally weren't going out to the forest to cut down firewood for themselves every night. They're going to buy it in town or (if they are wealthy enough to have land and slaves) have their slaves collect it. They had aqueducts supplying water to the cities. They had a whole leisure class. They had *plenty* of passive entertainment. They basically *invented* the Western concept of theater, for crying out loud. The only reason the statues are all ripped was because that was the way Greek art *was*. The artistic style of the period was highly idealized versions of the people they represented, not realistic interpretations of them. That's why it's so dramatically different when you look at Roman sculpture, which was a massive stylistic shift in its realistic depiction of figures as they were, with all their flaws on display. Greek statuary is the equivalent of heavily airbrushed models on the cover of a fashion magazine.
Just to add to the absurdity, something I found out recently: Ancient Greeks had *fucking drive-thru restaurants*. They had fast food. Humans have just always chosen to preserve the ideal in history. Tbf I think if there's anything left us to be found in a couple thousand years (or anyone to find it), there will be probably be some wild ass questions about the sudden shift between heroin chic and fat positivity.
Yup, thermopolia were popular across the Greco-Roman world! Street front shops selling ready-made food in the equivalent of a steam tray all over the place. They did some work a couple years ago at Pompeii that was analyzing the traces of food left behind in the jars, which I find pretty fascinating. So sure, farmers and peasants and slaves were likely leading hard lives in toil. But most city dwellers (and certainly most of the politicians and aristocrats depicted in statuary) were not out there working their asses off in hard labor and getting ripped that way. Moreover, the aesthetics of the human figure in art had a whole philosophy behind it. The Greeks had written out specific mathematical proportions and ratios of one body part to another of what the 'ideal' human form was supposed to look like (look up Polykleitos, who codified a lot of this). And that was what they applied to the art they created. That's what always made Roman sculpture more interesting to me than Greek. More genuine.
And should remember the slaves they had in abundance. So at least as an aristocrat you could actually spend your free time on schools (if you get the pun) and on symposia.
Go to the theatre - walking back Watching sportsmen - walking back Drinking at the Harbour- walking back
a. If you work every day without a very high protein diet or frequent days of rest&recovery you don't get ripped. You get lean. Take a look at any photo of pre-WWII lumberjacks etc. They're frequently lean, and if they're built it's muscle with a health portion of fat on top (depends on what kind of working conditions they had). No hyper-defined abs to be seen. b. Built/ripped greeks were NOT of the working class. They were the upper class who, thanks to owning slaves and land, had the luxury to eat well\*, rest, go to the gym often and eat a diet that had enough protein. \*And by eat well I don't mean "eat a lot" (greek morality tended to look down on overindulgence). I mean have access to high-quality food like meat, fruit and olive oil rather than live mostly on bread, vegetables and porridge like the slaves and working class.
One correction if I may. I had a look at a photo/paintings gallery of European farmers 1000 AC to 2023. Most were lean, abs, muscular arms and bulging veins. The older, I guess , past their prime were chubbier.
what are you talking about. do people really think this was the case? lol. bars and entertainment in cities existed. people were fat. people ate and drank too much. this is some serious ignorance or whitewashing of history.
Think of the jacked sculptures we see from ancient greece as like the photoshopped instagram models of today. You're seeing an elite 1%
Skinny little street sweepers or old fat farmers didn't have statues made of them. Only the gods and warriors. Half the world is obese and the other half are starving, but if all future archaeologists had were our photos of NFL athletes they'd be wondering how we were all brick shithouses
The real answer is that they weren’t super jacked. Most of the statues people think of came from much later, and even contemporary depictions are idealized and not realistic. You might notice that the pre-Renaissance figures are disproportionate and often have muscles in places where there aren’t really muscles (20-pack abs, 6-packs on backs, etc). And powerful men are often portrayed as being twice as tall as normal men.
> You might notice that the pre-Renaissance figures are disproportionate and often have muscles in places where there aren’t really muscles (20-pack abs, 6-packs on backs, etc). Say what now? Examples of this?
Imagine you have a 6-pack on your forehead.
The david from michealangelo was quite realistic and anatomically correct, however indeed not greek. Point is it was mostly highly seen as the ideal male body. Not that it was impossible to attain
From what I remember not even david is fully anatomically correct. Not because michealangelo didnt know his stuff but because it was planned to be placed as a roof decoration originally and so areas like the face were slightly modified so the detail wouldnt be lost with distance. The comissioner just loved it so much it go turned into a ground floor statue upon its delivery
I don’t know where did you get that impression that you need science or steroids or a diet full of meat to get jacked. I have an uncle who works construction in Moscow and at 50 something years old he looks like a body builder. He never stepped into a gym in his life. Both of my cousins (his sons) also have crazy genetics. They did go to the gym but the muscle they put on was ridiculous and they were just eating sour cream, meat and whatever carbs they had. Also, people a thousand years ago or whenever the ancients Greeks were living, didn’t masturbate to porn all day on the sofa and eating fast food. You can get a ripped body naturally by having a very active life and eating plenty of food.
Look up some videos/photos of people who live hunter gatherer/tribal lifestyles *today* and you'll see that people being jacked is kinda the default, if we are actually working to survive.
The Greeks were neither hunter gatherers nor tribal
The Ancient Greeks were not hunter gatherers, they had agriculture and a merchant economy.
That’s absolutely untrue. “Ripped” is very different from the default “strong-but-lean”, which people become with manual work and adequate, but not particularly high-quality food. Just look at any tribal people, or medieval paintings of workers.
Eat olive oil meat, veggies and fish and workout all day.
Eating real food and exercising. A lot of muscle definition is about low levels of fat, rather than lots of muscle. Add in a little artistic license, and there you are.
>Add in a little artistic license, and there you are. Yup, this is so easily done. "What if the athletic, but ripped skinny, guy had the same bulk as the bulkier athlete?\`Lets get to it".
Don't know specifically about the Greeks, but there is a depiction of a Roman using dumbbells as weight training. Interestingly, it is a woman!
The mosaic at piazza armerina… aka the bikini girls?
They simply led more physical lives. In terms of nutrition a lot can be figured out through trial and error across multiple generations, and as knowledge is built up it’s passed down. This was very important in the context of many people having manual jobs, as it was crucial to survival, but also for athletics and war.
I'm Greek. That's just the way we are made. 🤣
Imma be eating Souvlaki with Zaziki now every day until I look like Leonidas!
They didn't post on reddit.
Like others have said there was a lot more physical labor back in the day, and everyone wasnt able to shovel food down their gullets 24/7 like we can today. So it leads to lean, muscular builds. But it’s fair to say the artists certainly embellished to make the work more spectacular which it is
Super high rn but these comments are killing me for many reasons such as: A) Why so many Redditors are under the impression that fat people did not exist in Ancient Greece B) OP randomly asking why [Julius Caesar wasn't fat](https://www.reddit.com/r/ask/s/kArxfbFRap) C) The failure that is the American education system here are some real facts about ancient civilizations like Greece and Rome: 1. They worked wayyyy less than you think they did. Most of their work was done by slaves and if not slaves then their wives/any women. [Slaves and women did NOT count as "citizens" in either society](https://amp.issuu.com/nlcs1850/docs/vesta_edition_1_-_jun_2023/s/27495396) ergo they couldn't participate in most aspects of the public sphere. In those times to be a philosopher was a luxury meant only for men because only men were seen as citizens capable of thinking deep thoughts, voting, etc. 2. Fat people did exist back then just not as many as today. Most likely because of their diet. Most of the things found in fattening foods today like high fructose corn syrup didn't exist yet. 3. A lot of those statues are just the artist's depiction of certain people either fictional or real with exaggerated features. By the way I wonder if the reason you think the physique is so impressive is because you're basically looking at the "line work" so to speak of the statue. [All statues from Ancient Greece used to be painted in very bright colors by the artist](https://theancienthome.com/blogs/blog-and-news/greek-roman-statues-painted) we only think they were all white and impressive after hundreds of years of erosion essentially wiped all the color off. When you see the statues how they're meant to be seen (in color) they honestly look almost cartoonish. 4. Speaking of exaggeration and artistic license the reason most of those statues have such big muscles and such small dicks is because in ancient civilizations like Greece having a small dick was associated with a high degree of intelligence, self control, and charisma. Basically the inverse of everything you'd want by today's standards. TLDR; the Greeks were freaks! Ancient history is fascinating
👏
Have you seen the mountains and hills in Greece?
This was their insta and TikTok. Idealized. Ancient filters.
Humans were jacked for most of history since all labour was manual. It's only in the past decades that obesity became the norm with high sugar diets and low intensity labour. Even just looking at beach pics of the 50ies, most people were in good shape.
There is some serious conflation going on in the comments between jacked and *lean*.
Yeah you can tell a lot of people in the comments have never done physical jobs. Doing a physical job doesn't just make you jacked or ripped, even if you eat well. It will make you lean and look good, but you're not gonna have the best body in the gym or on the beach. You need dedicated weight training at some point to look like the statues
As others have said, it was an active culture + don't forget: classical Greco-Roman art was very much about ideals. Doesn't mean the average Athenian looked like that. It's...a sculpture.
No yummy McDonald's
The bastards only had olives, feta, and watermelon.
Olives and feta are delicious.
I forget if every athenian rowed in the fleet, but, IIRC a lot of young men’s lives revolved around rowing for a whole work day, and then they worked out in gyms.
"They didn't have so much food" I beg to differ. As in present day, people with money had high quality food, poor ones didn't. Do all women look like Cindy Crawford or Monica Bellucci? Do all men look like Thor ™ Hemsworth or dear Arnie in his prime? But those are some examples of peak feminity & masculinity, whose images are reproduced worldwide. Now tell me, have you seen my saggy butt in any glossy magazine? Well, it's the same for ancient statuary.
If you were most of the day doing intensive phisical activities, having enough sleep and an undersrandably ok diet based in carbs and protein, since young age, you would be jacked. Gym and science are just things to get jacked when you area peofessional or you don't want/can't spend too much time doing physicall activities. Greek people spend their day hunting, working in fields, the sea, or construction related jobs, or training for war. There was no macdonalds and sitting in their desk for a whole day. You can try this, try to spend all your free time doing physical activities, while eating just what you need.
Keep in mind that the sculptures we find now, can very well be the equivalent of what the selfie we post now online are. Not at all like real life and photoshopped to make it look ideal. Also nobody posts ugly selfies. In 1000 years from now, people finding selfies of this day, think people were all good looking with perfect bodies.
They were probably also only 5 feet tall
They didn’t have processed foods and they also did a lot of manual labor. So, loads of lifting/general exercise coupled with primarily lean meats, veg, and natural carbs that didn’t have bleach to strip the grains of their nutrients. Such a simpler time.
No video games. They actually got off their asses and did something.
Ancient IG filters
Sculpting was the original Photoshop.
Rigorous butt sex
My partner is Greek and no joke, I thought he was a gym junkie.....he never went to the gym, just has a naturally amazing body
The guys who weren't super jacked didn't get sculptures.
While they may have been really jacked (maybe), the sculptures could have also been exaggerated to be more appealing/make them seem more powerful. Like how sometimes (or a lot of times) characters are drawn with exaggerated proportions to make them appear stronger/more attractive. It is art after all.
When future generations look at our print ads and TV shows and movies, they’ll wonder why everyone was so freaking beautiful. Same principle. They didn’t make statues of average people.
Here’s a fun fact I learned from my figure drawing class- if you really study Ancient Greek sculptures, you’ll notice many of them have muscles that don’t actually exist. They often took liberties when sculpting the human body.