Muscular Dissatisfaction and Supplement Use among Male Intercollegiate Athletes

Abstract

Body image satisfaction was measured among college male athletes participating in track/cross-country, soccer, basketball, swimming, and lacrosse through the use of figure drawings varying in level of muscularity. All the athletes chose significantly different figure drawings to best represent their actual physique, ideal physique, and the physique they believed was most attractive to the opposite sex. For each sport, athletes’ actual physique was less muscular than both their ideal physique and the one they thought was attractive to the opposite sex. Soccer and lacrosse players chose an ideal physique larger than the one they thought was attractive to the opposite sex, while swimmers chose an ideal physique smaller than the one they thought was attractive to the opposite sex. Lacrosse players wanted to gain the most muscle. Those athletes who used muscle mass/weight-gain supplements spent more time per week in weight training and viewed their actual physique as larger than did athletes who did not use weight-gain supplements. The present results further reveal the desire of athletes to gain muscle, possibly to the extent of abusing weight-gain supplements and thus providing the foundation for faulty body image or dysfunctional eating.

Muscularity Beliefs of Female College Student-Athletes

“…Student-athletes in high contact sports (i.e., football, rugby, basketball) reported significantly higher levels of drive for muscularity than student-athletes in both medium contact sports (i.e., soccer, volleyball, baseball) and those in low contact sports (i.e., cross country, tennis, track). This result is consistent with Raudenbush and Meyer's (2003) finding that contact sport participants required a more massive and muscular physique for functional purposes, and also indicated that their ideal body image was more muscular when compared to athletes in other sports. Furthermore, Ross and Shinew (2008) discussed sport appropriateness by noting that the female student-athletes in their study reported that sports that require bodily contact were more associated with masculinity.…”

“…However, instead of female college students (only 17%) reporting the highest levels of external gratification reasons for being muscular (as hypothesized), statistically significantly more male student-athletes (41%) cited External Gratification as a reason they wanted to be muscular. Consistent with previous research suggesting that college men in the United States tend to overestimate the level of muscle mass that they think women find attractive in men (Lynch & Zellner, 1999;Raudenbush & Meyer, 2003), this finding may be related to external sociocultural pressures men face in conforming to standards of masculinity that emphasize attaining the ideal male body. Past research has examined ways that these standards have been conveyed by popular culture representations, with respondents often identifying the muscular body as the most masculine, and associating it with stereotypical masculine attributes such as self-confidence, strength, competence, aggressiveness, dominance, tenacity, and sexual potency (Biller & Liebman, 1971;Mishkind, Rodin, Silberstein, & Striegel-Moore, 1986).…”

“…The DMS has been found to be appropriate for use with both male and female participants, and convergent validity support for the DMS can be found in its significant relationship to other measures of masculinity (McCreary, 2007). In support of the scale's reliability, Cafri and Thompson (2004) In order to analyze the qualitative responses to the questions, the first author created a code book based on a synthesis of Morrison et al's (2003) original coding scheme and literature on muscularity relevant to the experiences of athletes (e.g., Gilchrist & Thoburn, 2008;Raudenbush & Meyer, 2003). In their original analysis of responses to their interview protocol, Morrison et al (2003) Morrison et al, 2003).…”

Prevalence of eating disorders and disordered eating behaviors among male collegiate athletes.

“…These relatively higher rates of pathogenic weight control behaviors are of concern because vomiting and laxative abuse are associated with severe medical complications, such as dehydration, esophageal tears, and cardiac arrhythmia (Rome & Ammerman, 2003), and may be precursors to the development of actual eating disorders. In addition, because we inquired only about these traditional forms of purging, we cannot rule out the possibility that the athletes were engaging in other problematic behaviors, such as ingesting muscle mass-weight gain supplements (e.g., Creatine), to control their weight and reshape their bodies (Raudenbush & Meyer, 2003). In future prevalence research with male athletes, it will be important (if allowed by coaches and athletic departments) to include a larger list of potential weight control behaviors, such as taking supplements or anabolic steroids, and to ask more detailed questions about the types of ex-ercise that male athletes are using to shape their bodies.…”

Dietary Supplements and Young Teens: Misinformation and Access Provided by Retailers

“…1,2 In 2005, Field et al 3 reported that 12% of boys reported using supplements to improve appearance, muscle mass, or strength. More recently, in a 2012 study of 2793 adolescents at 20 urban middle and high schools in Minnesota, 34.7% of boys reported using protein supplements, 5.9% used steroids, and 10.5% used some other muscle-enhancing substance.…”