Sports, Body, Type

As is known in the US, body types and shapes are apparently a big deal.  In the US, we are told to basically conform to a specific “standard” body type, height, weight, etc. Though I’m not much of an athlete anymore, I use to play tennis competitively when I was younger.  I played for about twelve to fifteen hours a week, from about five years old till I was about seventeen or eighteen. I was never really skinny or even very visually muscular but I can say that I was fit and had muscle behind my weight -- at least fit enough to win competitively in tennis.  Growing up as a lifer in a Baptist private school, most of the people there were pretty much the same: either small with little or no meat on their bones, or tall and gangly with even less meat on their bones than the rest.  Since I have always been a bit beefier than my friends and fellow students, I was often asked to join the football team. Of course, I always said no because I was playing tennis. We tend to idolize and worship our favorite athletes, seeing them as the pinnacle of human health. However, it seems that football seems to be one of the only sports that requires the exact opposite body type that most of society would frown on, but because it is football we don’t seem to care as much. In an article by Men’s Health they gave a test to see if you are an ideal healthy man: http://www.menshealth.com/fitness/fitness-level-tests

In it they have a basic ranking of Weak, Ordinary, and Exceptional. If the ideal healthy person is supposed to be able to do all this: Running 1.5 miles in 10 minutes, Run 300 yards in one minute, Toss a basketball 75 feet while kneeling, etc. Then, I think that we should not be looking at athletes and making them the standard to US Health. We tend to idolize athletes and look at them as prime specimens of health, though some can never realistically claim that shape that the US covets so much. We seem to pine after what others think of us and try to conform because of social pressure and a need for attention. However, some are just born with the luck of having bigger bodies than others and instead of worrying about social image, maybe work on something that actually has substance, like one’s character.