I'm huge and strong, got challenged to arm wrestling somewhat regularly at parties. One dude who made me look like a complete chump was an average sized male cheerleader. Also my boxing sparring partner was a gay dude who was scary fast and I would've never wanted to see competitively.
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2026
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Oh yeah same thing applies, gotta have major full body strength and precision muscle memory to be on the bottom of a pyramid or throwing folks 8-9 feet straight up.
Also why skaters are badasses. All three sports involve fighting gravity and the earth without killing yourself. One of my coworkers used to be a professional cheerleader and she works in sales now because she suffered a spinal fracture in a cheerleading accident.
>eating chili
>"remembers one [more] thing"
>it's a source of insight from the women in his life
obviously i agree that gymnasts are very strong. but something about this analysis rubs me the wrong way. i feel like evaluating sports based on which ones have the strongest/toughest practitioners misses the point of sports by accepting the reactionary obsession with strength rather than grasping the true value of sports, which is teamwork and cooperation
Coming from my MMA perspective I think there are other really important reasons to do sports that aren't always fun. Cultivating a dogged desire to win and aspiring to embody competency are really good things that sports can give you. Even if you're getting smooshed stomach first into the mat until you get strangled and you're not having fun, you might still come back the next day because of that desire and you'll be better off for it.
As controversial as it was, I think MMA promotions scratching the itch to ask which martial arts are best for dueling was a positive thing. People got real quiet about their uber deadly techniques and no touch mastery of chi - what a breath of fresh air.
I was someone who was pretty easy to shame as a kid, but I remember there was one time in high school where it came up that I went to a gymnastics place as a little kid as many little kids do, and one of my peers tried to ridicule me for it, and it just didn't register as something that it made sense to feel shame about at all for a litany of reasons even though they were really insistent on it. It was just kind of funny and it might have helped me to understand how that sort of attitude is bullshit more generally. While I wish I never had our culture of shame impressed upon me, I'm glad that I was able to get out of it relatively early.
Good for you. I didn't even come to terms with my own complicated relationship with gender till my mid 30s.
There was a photographer a decade or so back who did a bunch of nearly nude portraits of Olympic athletes. It’s totally non-sexual but you probably shouldn’t look them up at work.
It’s super amazing to see the ways the different sports not only favor certain immutable aspects like height but the training results in such different musculature. These are peak performance humans, in their prime, and the diversity is mind blowing. One might think, naively, that there might be some “perfect athlete” shape but nope, we are as diverse in our excellence as we are in all things.
they should do an olympics where everybody does the other events
I remember reading some article a few years ago that argued that the most "well rounded" (or whatever term) athletes are actually motocross riders. Might seem somewhat counterintuitive, but to be competitive you need both very high full body strength to muscle the bike about and absorb impact, and very high stamina to be able to actually use that strength over the full course of a race.
I think I remember that. It was the pure strength sports that stood out, like there's no upside to keeping your weight down as a powerlifter, and not bothering has the huge upside of always having sufficient caloric intake to build strength, so they were both big (muscular) and big (just... Big). No visible muscle definition (while still obviously having very visibly big muscles) but still obviously the physically strongest people present. You aren't telling me they aren't "fit".
Yeah, I have no doubt that women's gymnastics practitioners could beat the shit out of most random dipshits on the street, but men's gymnastics has a much greater emphasis on raw strength (they're literally different sports for anyone unaware - they compete on different events) so I would imagine anyone who competes in that would be a total beast.
is this one of those things like target shooting where they don't want us to see women being better at something?
I just put it down to the traditional idea that men are STRONG and women are ELEGANT. But yeah pretty much.
No need for a gym to train gymnastics. Doorframe pullup bar (or free standing) plus a set of gymnastics rings will keep you occupied for years.
(that's what I've been doing - for years. Only just started adding weight for fun)
Obviously to do tricks is a slight different story, but there's a lot of calisthenic tricks/exercise variations that have a lot of crossover.
Gymnasts are basically ninja but real
i swear everyone who wins those Ninja Warrior shows/events and like half of the Tough Mudder races worldwide are former gymnasts
the build is absolutely OP and we were all denied it by ingrained cultural misogyny/patriarchy
idk. gymnastics seems like a buzzing hive of predation through all of history. Too much focus on teenage bodies. Attracts monsters and creates cycles of abuse/selfharm. Do we really need it?
This seems like kind of a backward way of looking at it, as though the abusers just seep up from the ground wherever there's gymnastics and there's nothing to be done about it but not have gymnastics. I think we'd be much better off worrying about combating patriarchy (etc.) than combating gymnastics.
I wanted to get into gymnastics a couple years ago but realized there's no adult gyms. So I got into skateboarding instead
Yeah top two people I would never want to have to fight (outside of blood sports) are gymnasts and skaters and its really a tossup between the two. I'm sure we have all seen the infamous Mike Vallely fight video.
I mean I wouldn't want to mess with a new jersey / new york baseballer
blood sports
Combat sports?
yes.
Now let us consider how much the USSR went hard for gymnastics including male gymnastics.
This is leaving everything obvious abkut the casual viewer of female gymnastics reasons for watching. Like, first off, the dudes are hot too, athletes tend to look pretty hot, second I dont even fucking buy it, youre appreciating the gymnastics even if you won't admit it or youd jusr be watching porn instead cause it is later than 2002
Gymnastics are cool and I could really go for some chilli
Is your sister trans or something, I'm a little confused
No but I always felt social pressure against it but was reluctant to ask to join a gymnasium because it was looked on as girly. Like way more social pressure against especially young boys in the sport back then.
