ASSUMING A CASUAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ACTIVITY AND APPEARANCE – Body By Science
You’ve probably heard the following type of advice: “Do you want to have the long, lean muscles of a swimmer? Then swim! Don’t lift weights – you’ll look like a body builder!” Such claims are made all the time, and, despite their proliferation, they’re wrong. Once again, you can chalk it up to the way the human mind operates. People will see a group of champion swimmers and observe a certain appearance, or they’ll see a group of professional bodybuilders and observe another appearance, and it seems logical to assume that there is something about what these athletes are doing in their training that has created the way they appear. However, this assumption is a misapplication of observational statistics.
If you should ever attend a national AAU swim meet and sit through the whole day’s competition, from the initial qualifiers to the finals, you would see these “swimmer’s bodies” change dramatically over the course of the day. This speaks to the fact that it isn’t the activity of swimming, per se, that produces this “type” of body; rather, a particular body type has emerged that is best suited for swimming. In other words, the genetic cream rises to the top through the selective pressure of competition. Competition, it can be said, is simply accelerated evolution.
The swim meets starts with the qualifying round. Perusing the people who are up on the blocks prior to the firing of the starter’s pistol, you will note a broad array of body types. When the quarterfinals roll around, those body types will begin to resemble each other. When you get to the semi-finals, they will look very similar, until finally, the compeititors standing on the starting blocks during the championship look like clones. The reason? A self-selection process: accelerated evolution.
However, most of us simply watch the finals and see a group of people who look almost identical in terms of their body type competing in the same activity, and we conclude that this particular activity produced this body type. Thus, we draw an inference that is invalid because we are lacking a broader context, which in this instance should have included all of the different body types that also trained and engaged in the event. This is why you will hear people saying that you “ought to enroll in Pilates class, so that you will develop a dancer’s body,” or you “ought to take dance aerobics classes, so that you will develop a dancer’s body,” or you “ought to take up swimming, because you want long, lean muscles, not big, bulky muscles.” Such statements are the result of misapplied observations and of assumed cause-and-effect relationships that are actually inverted: it wasn’t the activity that produced the body type; it was the body type that did well in that activity. It is the genetic endowment that produces the body type. Therefore, if one desiers to have the body type of, say, a champion swimmer, the best course of action is to start by having the same parents as that champion swimmer-rather than his or her training methods.
