Hey, BAY, I gotta asume that you don't believe that bodybuilding and boduybuilding competitions are 'dieing" nor anywhere near the graveyard.
A death of a bodybuilding magazine does in no way imply the pending death of the NPC nor the IFBB.
I personally cannot think of any other 'participation event' that comes anywhere close to the present membership growth of both the NPC/IFBB organikzations.
If you know otherwise .... please advise.
It is not that I think it is dying. It is a
niche sport and always will be. Every now and then someone will make a post and say something along the lines of “the industry needs to do X in order to make bodybuilding more mainstream.” This kind of rhetoric is idiotic because this sport is never going to be mainstream. While huge swaths of the population are appropriately interested in fitness and wellness, bodybuilding (pumping up and sculpting your physique to look in a mirror or flex for the sake of vanity, sex, money, etc.) is not healthy and should not be widely adopted. Particularly when doing so involves supplements and extremes that ultimately take the body to a place no one wants to go. Does anyone want to trade places with Ronnie Coleman right now? Or Dallas McCarver?
There will always be a new generation of meatheads and fans, but it is never going to be huge nor expanding to any great degree in part because huge muscles don’t really lead you anywhere in particular. Many young guys look at Arnold and think they will become the next champion, movie star, governor multimillionaire, but how many of them has bodybuilding produced in the last 50 years vs. how many have crashed and burned (kidney, colon, dead, etc.)? All of print publishing is certainly contracting, but no, I do not think bodybuilding is dying. Quite the contrary: the internet has made the idea of bodybuilding much more accessible than it has ever been but it remains a niche sport. And there is nothing wrong with that.