{"id":204103,"date":"2025-10-16T11:52:30","date_gmt":"2025-10-16T11:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/204103\/"},"modified":"2025-10-16T11:52:30","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T11:52:30","slug":"should-we-blame-ancient-greece-for-todays-search-for-six-pack-abs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/204103\/","title":{"rendered":"Should We Blame Ancient Greece for Today’s Search for Six-Pack Abs?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"male\"Hunters and their dogs depicted on an ancient Greek<\/a> vase c. 510-500 BC. Credit: Public Domain<\/a><\/p>\n

The cultural obsession with six-pack abdominal muscles shows no signs of abating. And if research into male body image is to be believed, it will likely only grow, thanks to social media<\/a>.<\/p>\n

By Conor Heffernan<\/p>\n

Today, there\u2019s an entire industry centered on obtaining \u2013 and maintaining \u2013 chiseled abs. They\u2019re the subject of books and social media posts, while every action movie star seems to sport them. Pressure is also mounting on women to sport six-pack abs as body ideals for athletic women have evolved.<\/p>\n

All of this raises the question, when did the six-pack craze start?<\/p>\n

It may seem like a relatively recent phenomenon, a byproduct of the fitness culture boom in the 1970s and 1980s, when Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo reigned, and men\u2019s muscle mags and aerobics took off.<\/p>\n

History proves otherwise, however. In fact, Western culture\u2019s fascination with chiseled abdominal muscles can be traced back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when the ideal male body image in the West started to shift.<\/p>\n

Greeks inspired envy with their six-pack abs
\n\"male\"Nineteenth-century painting by Philipp Foltz depicting Ancient Greek Athenians looking particularly fit as they listen to Pericles\u2019 Oration. Credit: Public domain<\/p>\n

While I was researching Irish health and body cultures, I became fascinated with changing male body ideals.<\/p>\n

French historian George Vigarello has written about how the ideal male figure and male silhouette shifted in Western society. British and American cultures in the 17th, 18th and, to a certain degree, the 19th centuries valued large or rotund male bodies. The reasons for this were relatively straightforward: Rich men could afford to eat more, and a larger frame was indicative of success.<\/p>\n

It was only during the early 19th century that lean and muscular physiques began to be highly coveted. In the space of a few decades, plump bodies came to be seen as slovenly, while lean, athletic or muscular builds were associated with success, self-discipline and even piety.<\/p>\n

Part of this transformation stemmed from a renewed European interest in ancient Greece.<\/a> Kinesiologist Jan Todd and others have written about the impact that ancient Greek imagery and statuary had on body images. In much the same way that social media has distorted body image, artifacts like the Parthenon Marbles<\/a> \u2013 a group of sculptures brought to England in the early 1800s<\/a> whose male figures sport lean and muscular physiques \u2013 helped spur interest in male muscularity.<\/p>\n

This interest in obtaining an athletic silhouette deepened as the century progressed. In 1851, a grand commercial and cultural celebration known as the \u201cGreat Exhibition\u201d was hosted in London. Outside the exhibit halls were Greek statues. Writing in 1858 on the impact those statues had, British physical educationalist George Forrest complained that the British \u201care apparently devoid of that beautiful series of muscles that run round the entire waist, and show to such advantage in the ancient Greek statues.\u201d<\/p>\n

Projections of military might
\n\"male\"Credit: Greek Reporter<\/p>\n

Statues and paintings influenced the public long before photography came to bear on fitness standards in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Equally important, however, was the growth of military gymnastics at the beginning of the century. At the same time that the ideal body types for men were changing, so, too, was European society as a whole.<\/p>\n

As a result of the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the 19th century, several gymnastic programs were created to bolster and strengthen young men\u2019s bodies around Europe. French soldiers were renowned for their physical fitness, both in terms of their ability to march for days on end and to move quickly in battle. After many European states suffered humiliating defeats at the hands of Napoleon\u2019s forces, they started to take the health of their troops much more seriously.<\/p>\n

Gymnast Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, through his Turner system of calisthenic exercises, was tasked with fortifying Prussia\u2019s military strength.<\/p>\n

In France, a Spanish gymnastics instructor named Don Francisco Amor\u00f3s y Ondeano was charged with rebuilding the physique and stamina of French troops, while in England a Swiss fitness instructor named P.H. Clias trained the military, particularly the men of the Navy, during the 1830s. To accommodate the growing European interest in fitness, ever-larger gymnasiums were built across the continent.<\/p>\n

Soldiers weren\u2019t the only ones participating in these programs, however. For example, Jahn\u2019s Turner system \u2013 which promoted the use of parallel bars, rings and the high bar \u2013 became one of the most popular exercise programs of the century among members of the European public and went on to gain a following among Americans.<\/p>\n

Clias, meanwhile, opened classes for middle- and upper-class men, and Amor\u00f3s y Ondeano \u2013 along with other European gymnastics instructors \u2013 was regularly quoted in gymnastics texts published from the 1830s onward.<\/p>\n

The male six-pack industry is born
\n\"male\"Heracles strangling snakes (detail from an Attic red-figured stamnos, c. 480\u2013470 BC. Public domain.<\/p>\n

So the seeds for modern six-pack mania were planted in two ways: First, men started eyeing Greek statues with envy. Then they developed the means to sculpt their bodies in those statues\u2019 images. Meanwhile, writers from the 1830s and 1840s prodded men to aspire to having svelte bodies, strong torsos and no excess body fat.<\/p>\n

But the obsession with six-packs truly blossomed in the early 1900s. By then, strongmen like Eugen Sandow were able to build off the existing interest in Greek imagery and gymnastics by using photography, cheap mail postage and the new science of nutritional supplements to cash in on the quest for the perfect body.<\/p>\n

Sandow himself sold books, exercise equipment, nutritional supplements, children\u2019s toys, corsets, cigars and cocoa. Sandow, who was once hailed as the \u201cworld\u2019s most perfectly developed specimen,\u201d inspired countless men to shed excess \u201cflesh\u201d \u2013 the term given for body fat \u2013 to show off their abdominals. Abdominals, incidentally, was always the term used at this time.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until the late 1980s and early 1990s that getting a \u201csix pack\u201d referred not just to cans of beer and started serving as a stand-in term for visible abdominal muscles. Searching through Google Ngram shows that from the mid-to-late 1990s the term\u2019s popularity grew exponentially.<\/p>\n

\u201cSix-pack abs\u201d quickly became part of our parlance thanks to ingenious marketers determined to sell a range \u201cget fit fast\u201d devices, from Abs of Steel to 6-Minute Abs.<\/p>\n

Few of these have stood the test of time. Yet the longing for the coveted six-pack \u2013 as the more than 12 million Instagram posts with the #sixpack hashtag can attest \u2013 endures.<\/p>\n

Conor Heffernan is an Assistant Professor of Physical Culture and Sport Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hunters and their dogs depicted on an ancient Greek vase c. 510-500 BC. Credit: Public Domain The cultural…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":204104,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[6647,102,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-204103","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fitness","8":"tag-fitness","9":"tag-health","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204103\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/204104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}