Stupid Question

Did ancient people work out?   I mean… did they really have the massive bulging muscles that you see in Troy and 300?  

Yeah, yeah, I know their lifestyles would require more manual labour and lifting and stuff, so they’d do more incidental exercise.  Well, some of them would anyway – some of those guys, even those in the army, would get servants to do everything.  You’re going to tell me that King Leonidas would do the plowing himself?  

My brothers are quite muscular, and to get that way they have weights at home and they constantly work out – and then they consume vast quantities of whey protein and knock heads together and do chin-ups and stuff like that.

In days of yore, the Jones would work in warehouses as a storeman or even forklift driver.  So that’s plenty of manual labour and heavy lifting.  However, he didn’t work out or eat lots of protein.  He didn’t really eat anything much. Hence, he was a skinny bloke with well-toned yet modestly sized upper arm muscles and absolutely nothing else muscular about him.  This is my counter-example to show that to get really big guns, you have to try specifically for that.

Yes, I know it’s obvious that a movie is a fiction, but I was just wondering if they could have muscles like that before the invention gyms and creatine and photoshop.  Or wait… they had gyms, didn’t they?  Shit, I don’t know.  That’s why I want to brush up on this aspect of history.

Muscles are impressive if you’re the strong guy in the circus.  Otherwise I find lean, dare I say even skinny guys more attractive.  They’re also easier to arm wrestle and to domestically abuse – it’s important when you’re objectifying someone that their body type doesn’t prevent you from slapping them around a bit or proving your superior strength in some kind of physical challenge, so that’s what I go for.

Otherwise, really muscular people just look to me like the following:

PROTIP:  Don’t google image search "Troy muscles" or "Troy movie muscles" without safe search set to at least "moderate" while at work.  Just… trust me.  Same thing goes for "lumberjack".