As soon as he walks in the door of Powerhouse Gym in Syosset, New York, Sadik Hadzovic gets blitzed. Two young men announce,“It’s swole time,” that they’ve got their pump on, so now is the moment for selfies, whether the bodybuilder has completed his own workout or not. It’s gotten so bad that Hadzovic is having the windows of his BMW M6 tinted, because people will bang on his windshield to ask for an autograph while he’s still parking. In fact, getting in touch with him took weeks—Hadzovic ignored my emails, assuming I was yet another stalker. As a rule, he loves his followers and is generous with his time. But being an Instagram star does attract some wack jobs.

Although Hadzovic, 30, has won four bodybuilding titles and twice was runner-up for the brass ring, Mr. Olympia, the stage that really matters to him is the one you cradle in your hand. On social media (and therefore mobile phones everywhere), Hadzovic stands out as a symbol of self-maximization, of a man who’s not only physically enlarged himself but also expanded his body and self into a brand. He is an exemplar of the shredded ideal, a goad to his followers’ vanity, a charismatic creation of dense muscle so unblemished by fat that every striation is like a cord in a thick wire cable. His job is “fitspiration,” a word officially recognized by The Oxford English Dictionary early this year. But while the jargon may be new, Hadzovic is really just carrying on a tradition of ideal male physiques that dates at least as far back as AD 216 and the ancient Farnese Hercules statue.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s boyhood idol was Reg Park, the bodybuilder-turned-actor he saw in Park’s breakout 1961 film Hercules and the Captive Woman. Schwarzenegger himself helped kick off the bodybuilding craze of the 1980s with Pumping Iron and Conan the Barbarian, an homage to Park’s sword-and-sandal flicks of the ’60s. Today’s Hercules, naturally, can be found online. Search #aesthetic on Instagram and nearly 16 million posts come up. These images and videos provide a theater where men who’ve chiseled themselves into versions of Hadzovic and other body artists can flex and flaunt their muscles. On YouTube, an entire category of video now exists documenting the aesthetic lifestyle.

Despite the deprivation and long hours needed to achieve this Herculean standard, scores of men try to emulate these guys, and while motivation can be as individual as a fingerprint, it often starts and ends with mirin (admiring stares). You can become Hercules by following his every move and tracking how he eats and trains. You can purchase the supplements he uses, buy the clothes he wears, and ask him questions about how he has achieved his heroic form. Sometimes you can hire him to coach you via Skype as you strive to look just like him.

Brian Finke

With 1.8 million followers, Hadzovic is an icon in the iron game, consistently ranked in the top 10 internationally on Instagram. Like his social media rivals, he’s super jacked, something the camera—and his followers—seem to love. Marika Tiggemann, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Flinders University in Australia, does not find that surprising at all. Although fitspiration promotes health, fitness, and strength, she says, her research suggests that it’s the appearance-related bonus, not the health benefits, that tend to be emphasized. People whose fitness is especially conspicuous seem to garner more followers. If you look at respected trainers who have great bodies but not outsized bodybuilder-type muscles—figures as varied as Julian Smith, Jay T. Maryniak, and Ido Portal—they rarely have more than half a million followers. To Viren Swami, Ph.D., who teaches social psychology at the U.K.’s Anglia Ruskin University, the reign of big musclemen on social media may even be a leading indicator of a crisis of masculinity. “Men are losing power in terms of gender equality,” he says, “and one way they try to reassert their masculinity and dominance is through physical power.”



Perhaps, but marketing guru Daniel Saynt, founder of NSFW Agency, an outfit that connects brands to niche influencers, says the trend toward exaggeration in beauty and physique is common to both men and women. He likens it to “Kim Kardashian causing women to aspire to fuller features, a larger ass, bigger boobs, plumper lips. That bigger aesthetic is something people pursue more.” Bodybuilders, he adds, offer the spectacle of self-transformation, which also coincides with popular trends. He cites the popularity of shows like The Biggest Loser that focus on these massive physical transformations. Remaking yourself over time structures the stream of images and videos on your phone into a story line. With figures like Hadzovic, “it’s almost like you’re following them on the journey of getting this way,” says Saynt. “You see the before and the after. Followers feel connected to them and download their fitness regimens.” You can follow their story live, see what they’re doing day to day.

When Ulisses Jr, who has some 4 million followers and lives in London, began uploading videos to Myspace in 2003—a year before Facebook launched and seven years before Instagram—his friends laughed at him. “No one cares about your tips or even about working out,” he recalls them saying. “And anyway, trainers don’t make any money, so why are you wasting your time?” At first he didn’t make any, but he quickly made the transition from Myspace to Facebook and eventually carried over many of those fans to his Instagram account. Getting in early paid off later, because once you have 50K followers, growth starts to self-perpetuate, Saynt says. “Above 100K, you’re going to see that growth speed up.”

In a sense, Ulisses’s friends were still right: His earnings don’t come from his work as a trainer, though he does train a few select clients, mostly bank presidents. Now he makes his living from sponsorships and appearance fees, not to mention his clothing and supplement lines. And these days, people docare about his training tips.

Brian Finke

The stars of social media have major earning potential, says Chris Gesualdi, vice president of the influencer division of VaynerMedia. For a sponsored Instagram post, the general fee is $100 to $150 per 10,000 followers. For someone with Hadzovic’s following, that translates to between $18,000 and $27,000 per sponsored post. Plus, Hadzovic tells me, he commands up to $7,000 for an in-person appearance, which includes “first-class flights, five-star hotels, and food and transportation paid for.” Given the financial stakes, sponsors have become wary of fake or bought followers, and they’ve become more sophisticated about which influencers they take on. A company will gauge the amount of engagement, the number of people who “like” a post, and the number of people who comment on the post. They also read the comments to make sure they seem authentic.

Hadzovic has flourished without employing analysts to track his followers, and he does not use professional photographers. In 2015 he only had about 5,000 followers. Then he started putting himself out there, posting things beyond fitness, “hanging with my mom, putting rims on my car.” He attributes his success to, as he puts it, “being real, not pretending every day is a good day, not trying to live up to some online persona. I’ll say, ‘Cardio sucks, but I’m going to do it.’ ‘Dieting sucks, but you’ve got to do it.’” He’s also consistent. He posts five to six times a day and punctuates the food pics, shots with his girlfriend, workout videos, and sponsored posts with plenty of unclad, rippling skin. It’s a smart tactic, Saynt says: “People will like a body shot more often than they’ll like anything else. It’s more intimate.”

Achieving the look of a living statue requires monkish discipline. Hadzovic adheres to a rigid training schedule, working out five days a week, often twice a day. Yet as compulsively as you need to train to look like Hadzovic, the most arduous aspect of the regimen is the diet. To whittle body fat down to a single-digit percentage demands superprecise eating, weighing and measuring every calorie, following a rigid schedule, and avoiding sweets and even most fats. Hadzovic frequently posts photos of his meals with graphics indicating the weight of each component. The lifestyle is austere. Drinking and partying won’t allow you to have a pose-worthy physique.



Brian Finke

Between photo ops and sets on a leg-press machine, Hadzovic recounts how he got started in his career by fitness modeling. Or rather, he explains, “I thought it was fitness modeling, but it was actually just some rich New York City gay guys in a fancy condo taking pictures of me in my underwear.” Not that he felt exploited. In exchange for the shoots, he received free pictures, and some of those did end up on the covers of romance novels and underwear packaging. “I’m not embarrassed by it,” he says. “They didn’t sexually harass me and I got a ton of followers from those shoots.”

The irony, however, is that bodybuilders, physique competitors, and others in the aesthetic lifestyle can rarely work as mainstream fitness models. “Nowadays, fitness models aren’t just standing still looking good; they have to be able to perform skills on set,” says Topher DesPres, who runs the fitness division of Wilhelmina Models. “Clients ask for a CrossFitter or a football player. Bodybuilders aren’t athletic enough.” Athleticism requires flexibility, mobility, and agility, none of which are trained in aesthetic workouts.

Aesthetic training isn’t simply about looking good but about realizing a specific physique, one that emphasizes those beach-bod muscles of the upper body (along with, bizarrely, the calves). For that reason, power in the posterior chain—the glutes, hamstrings, and lower back—tends to be ignored. As trainer Steve Cook (1.7 million followers), one of the most thoughtful advocates of the aesthetic lifestyle, points out in a vlog, “Guys in bodybuilding typically don’t do heavy deadlifts because they don’t want a thicker waist, and they don’t do heavy squats because they don’t want their core too big.” The fact is that deadlifts and squats are two of the most essential lifts for both athletic power and health, but doing them will make squeezing into skinny jeans difficult. For those who work out exclusively for appearance, then, having muscle isn’t necessarily about being athletic. It’s about gaining gorilla size to impress others.

The need for mass, and the recognition that comes with it, was a theme that recurred as I interviewed the body artists of Instagram. “I was just a scrawny African kid,” said Ulisses. “I wanted to gain some size.” Hadzovic, who was born in Montenegro, has a similar story. “I was so skinny as a kid. I hated the guy I saw in the mirror. I couldn’t make eye contact, I was so insecure. I wouldn’t take off my shirt to get into the pool.” He attributes his lack of confidence in part to not having a male role model: His father left when he was 8 years old. He sought exemplars on TV. “I saw pro wrestlers, and they were jacked. Stallone, jacked. Arnold, jacked. That’s what I thought being a man was.” In the ’80s, Schwarzenegger and Stallone stood out as cartoonishly huge. Yet today with ripped actors like Chris Hemsworth, Hugh Jackman, Jason Momoa, and even comedians like Kevin Hart, conspicuous muscle in Hollywood is so common no one notices it. Unless, that is, they are huge enough to be called The Rock.

According to the Harvard psychiatrist Harrison Pope, M.D., M.P.H., constant exposure to extremely muscled images in popular culture can lead to a condition called muscle dysmorphia. In a recent JAMA article, Pope defines this as “a form of body image disorder characterized by an obsessive preoccupation with a muscular appearance.” Most men with the disorder strength-train; yet they “describe dissatisfaction with their body size and shape and are preoccupied with the idea that their body is insufficiently muscular.” This quote comes to mind when Hadzovic tells me he recently gained 26 pounds of muscle to bump up from the Men’s Physique category to Classic Bodybuilding. The reason, he says, is that at 5'11" and 180 pounds of perfectly chiseled beef, “I didn’t like what I saw in the mirror. As guys, we start working out because we want to get big. I wanted to get bigger.”

That said, Hadzovic displays none of the traits of muscle dysmorphia, which, Pope writes, include “elevated rates of mood and anxiety disorders, obsessive and compulsive behaviors, substance abuse, and impairment of social and occupational functioning.” On the contrary, Hadzovic is friendly, upbeat yet relaxed, and genuinely engaged with friends and fans, socially and occupationally.

But I can imagine how poring over images of men like Hadzovic could contribute to such problems. Pope adds that sufferers are especially prone to steroid abuse—a huge health risk. Hadzovic competes in Mr. Olympia, which does not routinely test for performance enhancers, and there is a widespread belief that to get large enough for the bigger pro bodybuilding categories, you need to be on the juice. When I bring up steroids, Hadzovic assures me that the only products he takes are the ones he promotes, and that he’d never promote a product he doesn’t take.

It may well be that bombardment by images of maximized bodies can play a role in disordered self-perception, but for the fitness-minded, social media is an unprecedented resource. Recently I needed to drop pounds for a weightlifting contest; being fairly lean, I was finding it impossible. Through Instagram I found a free shredding diet devised by Cook’s coach. Counting calories and macros, weighing my food, and wringing virtually all the fat from my diet was brutal, but it worked exactly as advertised.

Brian Finke

Whether people tune into transformation stories on social media for curiosity or to actually transform themselves, they’re entering a digital realm that’s reshaping fitness. Never has so much live information been available in such a graphic way.

Whichever platform you prefer, also educate yourself offline about how to eat, and read new research that’s been translated into layman’s terms. Sites like Suppversity and Examine.com frequently post updates on the quality and usefulness of supplements. As for apps, the possibilities are infinite. You can challenge friends to pushup competitions on Spar!, build your own workout videos with Sworkit, and tap PumpUp or Strava to get support and share routines with a community of like-minded people. On Fitner, you can find the exercises your favorite athletes, coaches, and trainers do. And don’t discount the value of digital fits­piration. Watching the best train, compete, and recover can be highly motivating and help you stick to your regimen.

Hadzovic himself does it. He follows nearly 2,000 people. He also pays attention to who follows him: “A lot of my fans aren’t bodybuilders. Some don’t even have gym memberships. They follow me because they like my personality, they like my never-quit attitude. It extends to different hobbies and interests, it’s not just fitness and bodybuilding. People get inspired by all sorts of things. I’m not a musician, but I’m inspired when I hear a good song by a musician I like.”

But what comes into sharp relief when you spend time with Hadzovic is that he’s not like you or me. He combines ferocious dedication with savvy, smarts, and a winning personality. He shines even in self-deprecation. As we duck out of the gym, he asks, to no one in particular, “What am I famous for? Looking good? Having a good body? Anyone can do that.”