Anatomy of a Bodybuilder – A perfect learning tool for artists

Weight training and Bodybuilding play an important role for me as long as I can remember. I early learned about muscular anatomy through the magazines and my own experience. Bodybuilders and artists have a lot in common: both strive for an aesthetic beauty through painstaking work.

As I wrote in my post about learning anatomy and anatomy apps looking for Bodybuilding sources can be beneficial for your art education.

“A Google search on Bodybuilder or Bodybuilder Anatomy will bring you many, many results from which you can learn from. Bodybuilders have such exagerated muscles and nearly no subcutaneous fat that it is very easy to learn about anatomy from them.”

What you need to know as an artist is not so much the full medical anatomy with the nerve system, cardio-vascular system, intestines ect. but more the anatomy of the superficial muscles and how they act under the skin.

Here is a series of videos by Bodybuilding.com which will show you Anatomy and Biomechanics.

Arms                                                                   Chest

Legs                                                                    Shoulders
 

Abdominals                                                      Back
 

In my post about my Écorché figure I posted the sculpting videos by Julian Kohr. These served as my reference for my own sculpt. Julian shows every muscle and how it’s situated in the human body in 34 free videos:

The videos on your screen aren’t close enough for you to see the body’s muscles?

Go visit the Bodyworlds exhibition.
Here is a Google images search for Bodyworlds: << Google images: Bodyworld>>

Interesting fact: the man from the featured image on top of this blog post is Eugen Sandow. He is probably the inventor of bodybuilding. In his shows he not only presented his great power but he also painted himself white and posed like the old Greek statues. For him these represented the ideal physical aesthetics. Renaissance artists like Michelangelo also took these as an archetype of beauty.