Many of the posts in this thread reiterate a mentality that seems to prevail among bodybuilders and people who train for aesthetics: "It's not what you can do but what you look like." This notion disgusts me personally. Now before I go on let me say that I have a huge amount of respect for bodybuilders in general, in particular the 24/7 discipline and commitment required. I first got in to weight training because of bodybuilding and spent most of my initial training time doing bodybuilding style training.
But I detest the mentality of many people from a bodybuilding type background as it relates to strength athletes. For example, ridiculing Olympic weightlifters for lacking muscle mass or powerlifters for being bloated etc. Just because these sports use the same training implements as bodybuilding does not mean the athletes should look exactly like bodybuilders. It would be like a boxer who runs 5 miles every morning looking at a marathon runner and saying "well he can't box for shit".
Now, don't get me wrong - all of the iron sports are related. I don't think that a powerlifter should be a fat, soft mess with no muscle, capable of only waddling up to a monolift and squatting. Nor do I think a bodybuilder should just be a pumped up jackass, incapable of feats of strength i.e. "all show no go". Friendly banter between the different iron sports is fine but to consistently ridicule one sport or another is ridiculous. We are such a small minority compared to mainstream sports that it is pointless to create even greater divides between each category of weight training.
