I remember once finding this video from YouTube where it was a documentary about the days when our former Calfornia and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger giong through his bodybuilding days. It was called Pumpin Iron. I don’t know many guys who come to this website are bodybuilders but there was a small segment from the video which I found rather interesting. It’s at the 12:30-1240 mark. This guy who Arnold is showing how to pose for competitions explains one of his main reasons for bodybuilding.

His story is that his father is really tall but he ended up on the short side so he decided that if he can’t get as tall as his father, he can get as wide as his father. In classical psychology, people would call this an overcompensation. If you can not satisfy your first or real desire, you try to get better in a path that is similar to the first. From Youtube (source link).

When I remembered that there was a thread on the Make Me Taller forums about the former Guinness World Record holder for the world’s largest biceps, Greg Valentino. The thread was appropriately entitled “Greg Valentino and his Height Complex”

From the Youtube video they linked HERE, you can hear around the 1:00-1:20 time frame him stating “…I’m only 5’5”. I have small man complex. And I just said, “man, if I can’t grow taller, I’m going to grow bigger and that’s exactly what I did…””

There are some really crazy videos on YouTube of a former Mr. Olympia Ronnie Coleman doing extremely heavy weights and I am stupified at his width and muscularity. He is built very solidly. When you get a closer analysis on his stats, it turns out that he is either 5′ 10 (source) or 5′ 11″ (source). From the profiles of other body builders, we see that most of them are not overtly tall. However that can be explained away from just normal physics. Shorter people have an easier ability to pack on the muscle in the right places and get wider. The taller you are, the more mass you will need to add to gain the type of size, definition, and cut. When you become the #1 in the world in almost anything, there is a sense of confidence and personal identity attached to that label or prestige. It would make sense that the best bodybuilders probably don’t worry too much about their height after the years go by with success but I do wonder whether the reason some guys start to go into bodybuilding is because of the height complex.

While these are only two instances they may indicate a bigger trend or pattern which I might not have noticed before. I have never gotten into bodybuilding myself but I remember very clearly seeing many of the same people in the University Fitness Center back in college. There was a term for them, “gym rats”. Most of them were not the tallest or the smallest but the one constant was that I would see them almost everyday there, no matter how heavy their course load was. They never got very big but they did exercise a lot.

Most of these guys were caucasian guys around the 5′ 10-6′ 2″ height range so they were average in height. Back then I didn’t care about how tall I was but I did notice that the really tall guys were never the ones who worked out very intensely, or even showed up. It was very surprising to see anyone over 6′ 4″ in the gym. Thinking back on it I theorize that maybe some of these guys might have been secretly or unconsciously trying to get more muscular or big because they were trying to overcompensate for their inability to become taller.