The mystery man turned out to be the bodyguard of Sabry Nakhnoukh, a controversial Egyptian businessman, who attended the wake. Nakhnoukh is used to being the center of attention, but this time around, he was overshadowed by his employee.

The real-life Hulk only shows up in the footage doing the rounds on social media for a few seconds, but it was more than enough. His overgrown muscles and his tiny head made him an unusual sight, and the internet was ready for it.

Although some praised his intimidating figure, most comments made fun of the man’s disproportionately large arms, compared to the rest of his body, especially his head. Some alleged that his arms were full of synthol, as it would be impossible for him to grow his muscles to that size.

Will we ever learn this online star’s name? Probably not, but he’ll live online as a meme forever!

Muscle symmetry has long been one of the most important judging criteria in fitness and bodybuilding competitions, and it has long been generally accepted that symmetrical muscle development is paramount for an attractive physique. Now, a 19-year-old youth is challenging these norms by only working out muscles on one side of his body for an extremely asymmetrical look. @TheCrookedMon10 took TikTok by storm last year when he began documenting his #looksminimizing journey by only working out the trapezius muscle on the left side of his body, and he started gaining more attention as the size difference between his two traps grew. Today, after months of only working out his left trap, the youth’s appearance is striking, to say the least.

Photo: @TheCrookedMon10/TikTok

Nicknamed “Trap Man” by his social media followers, the 19-year-old TikTok sensation reportedly started the #looksminimizing trend in response to “looksmaxxing,” a concept that refers to the process of maximizing one’s own physical appearance. That’s all most young men seem to care about these days, so he decided to differentiate himself by trying something different. Everyone said a symmetrical, muscular physique makes you popular, so he decided to do the opposite.

Photo: @TheCrookedMon10/TikTok

“Why? It’s simple. If you’re in a Ferrari and you scroll through TikTok, you’re going to see a bunch of videos about making yourself look better. They’re always telling you to do this, to do that, to make yourself more attractive and get more women,” @TheCrookedMon10 said.

Trap Man trained only his left trap for 160 days, and the results are striking. Although studies have shown that, when you train only one muscle, the effect is transmitted to the other side via the nervous system, a phenomenon known as cross education, in this case, one muscle is clearly a lot more developed than the rest, resulting in an asymmetrical appearance.

The youth’s unusual look has sparked a fair bit of controversy online, with many warning that such a bizarre training regimen could result in injuries and long-term health problems. He is not letting these warnings get to him, though, and he has already started his next project, training only his right leg for a period of time. You can follow his bizarre fitness journey on TikTok.

For more unusually developed muscles, check out Neckzilla, the man with the thickest neck in bodybyuilding.

Koorn has always been into fitness, but it was only after being forced to take a break from kickboxing in 2020 due to COVID-19 restrictions that she realized she was much more comfortable with a bigger frame. She has since more than doubled in weight, embracing her curvy figure and dedicating herself to building massive muscles. She feels stronger than ever, and despite getting called ‘fat’ or ‘too manly’ online, she only focuses on the positive and she encourages other people to do the same.

“What I do when someone calls me names like that is I delete the comment and then I block the person, I put no weight on negative mindsets, there will always be people that think they know better or can do it better, but this journey is mine and I will do it my way without the negative comments,” Jackie told Media Drum World. “Honestly if people are saying nasty things to you on your journey just ignore the negative thoughts or comments.”

Koorn says that when she was doing kickboxing, she always felt strong, but also exhausted because of the constant dieting. Now, as a real-life She-Hulk, she feels even stronger, but also more comfortable in her own skin, because she doesn’t have to cut weight all the time. She just focuses on a healthy diet, trying to consume as many calories as possible during her bulk-up period, and lifting weights to build muscles.

The Dutch She-Hulk begins her training sessions with 100 pushups and 250sit-ups, followed by two hours of strength training,, which usually involves deadlifting up to 150 kilograms, up to 200 kg bench presses, squatting with 100 kg in extra weights and pushing up to 450 kilograms on the leg press. That’s pretty impressive, even for a male bodybuilder.

Despite the occasional criticism for her curvy figure, Jackie Koorn also gets plenty of compliments, with some men going as far as saying they want to marry her for her perfect body or calling her a perfect woman. But at the end of the day, she likes herself the way she is, and that’s what counts.

Rubiel Mosquera has a pretty impressive physique, but just one look at his neck is enough to explain his popular nickname, Neckzilla. It really is something to behold, and while he doesn’t hold the official title of the thickest neck in bodybuilding, there are many who believe he truly has the most muscular neck in the sport. Seen from some angles, it seems like his traps stretch all the way up to his jawline, but it’s actually his neck that is simply a lot more muscular than most. It is so muscular, in fact, that some bodybuilding fans have expressed concerns that the size of Neckzilla’s neck distracts judges at bodybuilding competitions causing them to miss some of his other assets.

You might be tempted to think that Mosquera dedicates a lot more time and attention to his large neck to make it stand out, but the Colombian bodybuilder says he trains all of his muscle groups equally, like any self-respecting bodybuilder.

Although he doesn’t focus too much on his neck when training, the young bodybuilder is fully aware of his main asset and always shows off his neck on social media. For example, he once measured his neck on Instagram to prove that it was thicker than that of rival bodybuilder Larry Wheels. The measuring tape showed over 52 cm in circumference (40.2mm), which is just insane compared to the average person.

Neckzilla competes mostly in national and regional bodybuilding competitions, and so far he has had encouraging results.

For more interesting and impressive bodybuilders, check out the world’s oldest competing bodybuilder, and Vladislava Galagan, probably the most beautiful woman in bodybuilding.

 

Old sayings like ‘seeing is believing’ or ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ perfectly expressed the belief that one had to see something before believing it to be true. It used to be like that, anyway, before advanced digital tools made us not trust our eyes anymore. In an era of life-like AI-powered news anchors and men posing as beautiful women with the help of phone apps, it’s hard to believe anything you see these days, especially when it looks too good to be true. Case in point, Vladislava Galagan, a 27-year-old fitness model who rose to prominence on social media thanks to the ‘perfect mix’ of an attractive, feminine face, and an impressively muscular body. While boasting hundreds of thousands of fans, Galagan also has plenty of doubters who accuse her of digitally altering her photos for attention, or using AI-powered tools to ‘beautify’ herself.

Photo: Vladislava Galagan/Facebook

“People tell me my muscles are photoshopped because they can’t believe someone who looks like me could be so strong,” the 27-year-old told SWNS. “I am constantly told I look like ‘Kendall Jenner on steroids'”.

Born in Temryuk, Russia, Vladislava Galagan started going to the gym 11 years ago and eventually got hooked. She now hits the weights at least six times per week, working out around 90 minutes per session, and east four meals per day, favoring protein-rich foods like beef, eggs, turkey, chicken, and fish.

Galagan has admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs to improve her physique but added that it’s not some magic pill that makes hard work and dieting irrelevant. It’s just something that gives her an edge in her quest to achieve a superhuman-looking physique.

The Russian-born fitness influencer who now lives in Prague, the Czech Republic, admits that people often accuse her of faking her photos and videos to enhance the contrast between her pretty face and muscular body, but she claims it’s just genetics.

 

“I hit the sweet spot with a mix of my face and my body,” Vladislava said. “I’m muscular and good looking, it sells really well. So many people think it’s CGI or Photoshop, but it’s not.”

Vladislava Galagan is not the only female bodybuilder to confuse the world with the combination of a pretty face and an incredibly muscular body. A few years back, we featured, Yeon-woo Jhi, South Korea’s ‘Muscle Barbie’.

 

Jim Arrington discovered bodybuilding when he was 13. He walked into a drug store and saw these big, bulky guys on the cover of a muscle magazine. He immediately ordered a copy of a 25-cent book by George Jowett, a Canadian strongman, and started doing the exercises detailed in it using his father’s three-pound steel balls. They certainly weren’t the most useful bodybuilding tools, but they helped him put on more than 10 pounds of muscle in a few months, so he kept going. He has been going at it ever since, and even though his body is much more fragile now, at age 90, he has no plans of ever stopping weight training.

Photo: Guinness Records

“At my age, your body’s a lot more fragile,” Arrington told Men’s Health last year. “You have to be more careful when you’re training, and you can’t abuse it — your tendons have a tendency to want to detach. In the past five years, my left bicep broke loose, and I had a little bit of a tear in my right bicep, too. So you can’t do things you used to be able to do. It’s really disheartening, but it’s important to keep soldiering away.”

When he started bodybuilding, Arrington dreamed of becoming Mr. America one day, but as he grew older he realized that he didn’t have the genetics for it. He has small bones ligaments and muscles, but he never let that discourage him. He kept training, even in his later years, when many other bodybuilders gave up on their passion because their bodies couldn’t keep up. In 2018, at age 85, he was awarded the title of ‘oldest active male bodybuilder’ by Guinness Records, and he has held it ever since.

“Unless someone else older than me comes along, I’m sweeping the competition,” Arrington told People Magazine. “I have small bones and I would never be able to put on the size to become Mr. America, so I guess my strategy was to outlive and outweigh everybody by waiting until everybody grew up or died!”

Arrington, who lives in Venice, California, and trains at the ‘Mecca of Bodybuilding,’ Gold’s Gym, continues to compete in over-80s competitions, but he has been trying to convince organizers to create an over-90s category. He continues to train, although not as often or with as much weight as he did in his glory days.

 

“I usually exercise two to three times a week for about an hour, and it’s a full-body workout, but it’s not a whole lot of weight,” Jim said.

If you’re unfamiliar with fitness and bodybuilding, the name Helmut Strebl probably doesn’t ring a bell, but among fitness enthusiasts, he is famous as “the most shredded man in the world”. It’s an unofficial title, but looking at photos of his amazing human specimen, it’s hard to imagine anyone successfully challenging him for it. The guy is a walking anatomy model, with muscles so well-defined that you can practically see every fiber contracting under his skin.

Photos of Helmut Strebl’s incredibly shredded body have been doing the rounds online for at least five years now, regularly going viral on social media platforms like Reddit and Facebook. The man is 54 years old now, and no longer in his prime physical shape, but he still looks better than 99.9% of men and is still active in the fitness community.

In one of the very few interviews he has ever given, Helmut Strebl told Simply Shredded that he started lifting weights when he was a 12-year-old ‘skinny weakling and an easy prey for bullies,’ as a way to protect himself. He was inspired by a schoolmate he described as a “muscle machine” and started training with two bottles of washing detergent filled with water, as weights.

It was only at age 16 that he started going to a real gym, but his discipline and focus on the goal of becoming a fitness model started yielding impressive results. He had a very methodical approach to weightlifting, planning different training sessions well in advance for every muscle group, and also planning his diet in great detail.

In order to look as shredded as he does in some of these photos, Helmut Strebl drops the level of body fat to a measly 4%, which is remarkably low and incredibly hard to achieve. But he has considered it a worthy sacrifice in order to attain this amazingly defined physique.

While he may not be the most muscular man in the world, when it comes to muscle definition, Helmut Strebl is in a league of his own and definitely worthy of the title of “world’s most shredded man”.

Masanori Sugiura, a third-generation owner of the 60-year-old sushi restaurant Imazushi in the city of Anjo, started working out at the gym when he was in his 20s, but he never imagined that his hobby would one day help him keep his family business afloat. The trained chef had seen his profits plummet from the usual 100 million yen ($940,000) for the April-June quarter, to just 10 million yen, because of the coronavirus, and at one point had cut his staff from 50 to just four. But then he had a wacky idea to put his muscles to work as a way of attracting new business, and the “Delivery Macho” service was born.

Photo: Delivery Macho

Sugiura and some of his gym buddies started delivering food orders themselves, and surprising customers by taking their top of and revealing their chiseled physiques. They also started posing for photos with their clients, and some of those pics ended up on social media, helping the “Delivery Macho” service go viral soon after its launched. People couldn’t stop talking about the muscly delivery boys, and Imazushi saw a sharp increase in daily orders.

“I started this for fun together with a specially selected group of five bodybuilders,” Sugiura told The Mainichi newspaper. “In the future, I’d like to try hosting macho tuna cutting shows abroad.”

Photo: Delivery Macho

As many of his bodybuilding friends were out of work during the pandemic, because gyms were closed, Masanori Sugiura had an easy time finding trustworthy delivery boys with the appropriate physique. They needed a quick way to make some money, and he wanted to keep his business afloat. Today Imazushi receives around 8 to 10 Delivery Macho orders on busy days, and monthly revenue from the service alone tops 1.5 million yen ($14,000).

The Delivery Macho service is manly aimed at the city of Nagoya, located just 30 kilometres from Anjo, but Masanori Sugiura says that his muscly delivery men can travel to other cities, like Tokyo or Osaka, for the right price. He is currently looking to hire local talent in major Japanese cities, after seeing a surge in requests.

 

Locals wanting to experience Delivery Macho need only call the Imazushi restaurant, ask for the service and place a minimum delivery order of 7,000 yen ($66).

As a teenager, Valdir became addicted to drugs and lost so much weight that his friends started calling him ‘Skinny Dog’. He managed to turn his life around though, and started going to the gym every day. Still, he wasn’t satisfied with the results his hard work lifting weights yielded, so when someone introduced him to the popular muscle-enhancement substance synthol, he became hooked on it. The Sao Paolo-based construction worker has been regularly injecting synthol into his biceps and pectoral muscles for years, and despite being warned that he risked having his limbs amputated if he continued to use the substance, he hasn’t been able to stop.

Photo: Valdir Segato/Instagram

“The doctors tell me to stop it, the advice they give me is to stop using. But it’s my decision to use it because I want to, because I like to,” Valdir Segato said, three years ago. “They call me Hulk, Schwarzenegger and He-Man all the time and I like that. I’ve doubled my biceps but I still want to be bigger.”

And he has indeed gotten bigger over the last three years, with his biceps now measuring 23 inches in circumference. The problem is they don’t look natural at all, but like inflated balloons ready to be popped. He doesn’t care about that, though, he just wants to get bigger and likes the attention he gets because of his deformed muscles.

Valdir regularly posts photos and videos of himself on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram,where he uses the handle “Valdir Synthol”. He currently has over 19,000 follower on Instagram, which is not too shabby.

Synthol consists of 85 percent oil – most often sesame oil – 7.5 percent lidocaine, a painkiller, and 7.5 percent alcohol, to sterilize the mix. It is injected directly into the muscle to increase its size or change its shape. It is used by some bodybuilders to touch up certain muscles that may be slightly deformed or underdeveloped, but in extreme cases such as Valdir’s, it ends up making up most of the apparent muscle.

In some cases, synthol use can cause a variety of health problems, from pulmonary embolisms and strokes, to granulomas, cysts and ulcers in the muscle.

If you don’t want to put in the work, maybe use this instantly buffing undershirt, just don’t pump yourself full of oil.

Looking at 34-year old Yeon-woo Jhi, it’s hard to imagine that she was once a skinny, frail girl suffering from panic disorder and struggling to overcome social phobia. But everything changed 14 years ago when she started going to a gym near her house, hoping to get stronger. She just wanted to stop feeling weak and never imagined that she would one day compete in major bodybuilding competitions, but as her strength and stamina increased, she got more passionate about fitness and eventually decided to show off her toned up physique on stage. Jhi won the first bodybuilding competition she ever entered, and that only inspired her to work harder. She went on to win the Arnold Classic Europe Amateur in 2013, and became a pro in 2015.

Photo: Yeon-woo Jhi/Instagram

Photo: SBS 

Yeon-woo Jhi has been competing in bodybuilding events for nearly a decade, but it was only a couple of years ago that she became a mainstream online celebrity. Photos of the muscular beauty went viral online and people just couldn’t get over the contrast between her cute, doll-like face and her brawny body.