Every* Muscle In My Body 2023
*A lot of the important ones
It’s December, which means it’s time to take stock of my body. For the internet to continue tracking my personal growth it’s important that I provide data that can be empirically judged: on its own, against someone else, against next year’s data, or against data from past years (the 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019 reports are available here on medium).
Here begins my FIFTH annual body/muscle review. Can you believe it? And if you can’t believe it, why can’t you? It all makes a whole lot of sense.
This edition comes days into 2024, allowing me to assess the entirety of the previous year, unlike the Spotify Wrappeds of the world that give you their yearly review with a full month left to live. No, we get the whole year, if I can remember it. Which I will now try to do.
I mean…more of the same, I guess. In scant thought going into this I keep thinking that this year I might have eaten more fast food than any year prior, or gotten less exercise, but then I think back to some of those previous years and I remind myself how hard it would be to outdo that.
But maybe I did? I really, really don’t know. Let’s think.
Last we spoke I was inactive, having pulled a couple of muscles on the soccer field. I believe I pulled one or two this year, too, having tried to play without the proper preparation. I can tell you now that I do genuinely miss playing soccer but I do not genuinely miss the competitive aspect of it and I do not wish to do the work to prepare; however, I have made casual plans with myself to use the exercise bike in my basement later this afternoon. Stay tuned (next year’s review) to find out if that happened or not.
I hiked a few times this year, and that counts as exercise. I climbed up to the hanging lake in Glenwood Springs, which I recommend to anyone looking for a very pretty thing to do and see, and I did a few other casual, flatter walks. I never made an honest effort to get into shape, although I did spend a few weeks regularly partaking in sauna, which I know is good for the body. The hikes left me mildly sore and I thought to use the momentum to stay active, and it’s the thought that counts.
One major development did happen over the summer — I saw an actual doctor for the first time in…a little while. The doctor put me on a scale and told me my weight (I don’t remember what it was) and took some blood and told me I needed to eat better and exercise more, which I did mean to do. I think sometime in the summer or fall I was maybe at the heaviest I’d ever been, but also maybe not, I don’t really know.
The doctor also took a stab at a long-existing issue I’ve had and prescribed me adderall, or some variant thereof. The practical effects of adderall aren’t important now, but some of you might know that it also works as an appetite suppressant, and some of you might know that I usually have a pretty big appetite. You now all know, if you finish reading this sentence, that my appetite has been much smaller lately and I definitely lost a few pounds just by not eating way way way too much. That said, I’m still conditioned to eating a lot and will often still eat more than I should, not remembering that my appetite is now considerably smaller.
I’m now remembering that days after I published last year’s review I ate 60 McNuggets on a video chat with some friends. So a smaller appetite makes natural, human sense.
Ah, one more “important” note. In 2023 I turned 30, despite what you may have heard. Though just a number, 30 is associated with aches and cramps and no longer having a young body. I feel like I haven’t had a young body for a while now, and my neck feels stiff a lot, and as I write this my lower back is hurting, and I don’t know what is age and what is negligence.
Ok, enough. You’re not here for my prescription regimen, you’re here for poorly taken naked pictures of me with blunt and sometimes crude annotations. Let us begin.
Shirt and pants on
I don’t know what to tell you, this is just what I look like. I just got a haircut that I don’t like (I didn’t want much taken off and the barberess kept saying “chop chop!” while she disregarded my request. At some point this year I semi-officially changed my shirt size to large, because my belly would make the medium shirts look smaller, but then I even less officially changed it back to medium…frankly I don’t know what size I’m supposed to wear.
The chest, abdomen, and frontal top half
See, here are the plump pecs and bloated belly. No muscle gain in the chest. The phenomenon persists that if I suck in and flex my belly you can still see some abdominal muscles. They’re not not there. They’re just not prominent. I do wonder how they stay ready like that. If the rest of my body is any indicator they should be gone.
Biceps
I didn’t flex my left arm and I did flex my right arm. One of each! That little forearm muscle dimple/ridge on my right arm…that’s interesting. It hints at muscle. As for the left, I can only pray that if I ever find myself dangling from the ledge of a tall building it is with more than just my left arm.
Triceps
The triceps. Such funny, cute little whatever muscles.
Also visible, on the right, is the “penis pointer” muscle, just above my right hip. My body does find natural shape in some beautiful, sexy ways, but you must know where to look. You can see a little bit in the left picture too, but not as much. Really you should be looking at the triceps, I just threw this in as a bonus.
The NECK (front)
Here we find my famous neck. I tried to flex/strain it but it’s possible that I don’t know how to do that anymore. Regardless, any front-neck or jaw muscle is obscured by the hair, much in need of a trim. I don’t consider my neck “strong” and it occurs to me that maybe I should work on that. The neck is important — it holds my fucking head. I should make sure it’s ready to fight, if ever necessary.
“The umbrella view” (neck, shoulders, etc.)
Here’s my back-neck, my laterius deltoids, and my trapecois. With no notable definition, this section of my body looks very much like a hand drawn, rounded, soft line. Does that make sense? I mean the lines are smooth. Not much contour. Looking closer, the shoulder area and general mass…that looks kind of big. Is that because of the weird scrunch in the area due to the position or am I strong there? Or is that just what that normally is?
Full back (swan dive)
Admittedly this is my first time looking at the back of my head since the haircut, and there’s an odd angular flatness, isn’t there? Sort of like a ’50s rockabilly look on the wrong side of my head. Do you see that? I feel like people might not see it but I definitely see it. But I digress. The lats leave much to be desired, as does the ridgey spine muscle, but I’ll never get over what a sexy muscle that is, and I think if you were one of the lucky few who will ever get to intimately see me showing off this muscle you’d find it sexy too.
Underleg (left)
The underside of my left leg. It looks like a healthy leg, right? The hamstring (the bottom/back part) is nice enough, and the calf is, you know, there. I think this is all fine. And I think if you were one of the lucky few who will ever get to intimately see me showing off this muscle you’d find it sexy too.
Front of lower leg (left)
Unintentionally, this is perhaps the most holistic and inclusive picture provided, showing bits of lower leg, upper leg, arms, belly, chest, neck, shoulders, and droopy left eyelid. As readers will know, my right leg is the superior of my two legs, but here’s my left, and it looks fine, if oddly porous with hair follicles or whatever the follicle holes are called, though that may just be the power of my new phone camera.
On exhibit, too, are the rolls, which you couldn’t see from the frontal view earlier, but you see the belly hanging over the underwear, the little roll above that main chunk, and the effects of the belly button vortex, pulling in all that dares approach. (Personal fact: I HATE having the back of my belly button touched. The back? The deepest part, whatever you call that.)
All two legs (front/top)
You’re tired of hearing it by now, but my legs used to be strong. Honestly. Now they’re just…I don’t know, they’re just there. Certain angles can flatter, but most show the disappointing, average legs they are. The right picture shows my feet to look larger than they are, which makes me wonder if I can trust this camera. That image might have been taken in wide-angle mode, in which case am I getting a proper representation? Are the proportions correct? I don’t know. I did retake the right picture to be less bulgey (the initial picture was hella bulgey), but the result looks a little cameltoey and a little like that little flap on a dog that remains when the balls are removed.
Wow, I just looked at pics of my legs from previous years and I used to be harrier! It might be low T or it might be the altitude.
Buttocks (“tuchus”)
MMMmmmmmmm ;). First of all, the camera, again, showing my flawed skin. And to think, I do think of my butt as smooth, but look how bumpy it is. And look at this odd dimple in my left cheek. What is that? Why is that there?
I want to direct your attention to the ridge by the meeting of left cheek and lower back, right next to the hanging towel on the leftern picture. Doesn’t that look like a nice round little transition from back to butt? That makes it look like a round little butt for sure, and I’m kind of a flat guy. Is this changing? Am I growing a donk? And there on the right, where I think I am flexing…I find this somewhat revolting, to be honest. I don’t like it.
Two hands
I read recently, probably on twitter, that fingers don’t have muscles. Is this true? I think it is, but sometimes I see beefy fingers, which must be…I don’t know, tissue? That Alex Honnold boy, for example. Have you seen his hands? They’re like fucking crabs. I have decent hands. They’re strong enough — not as strong as I’d like but strong enough. Earlier I mentioned how useful it would be to have a strong neck…the same is true of hands. If I could have strong hands and a strong neck I’d feel covered. I’m good-ish with my hands and I’d love to be great with them. Not that strength is all that matters, but the legs feed the wolf, and in this case I am the wolf and in this case my hands are the legs.
For better or worse, these are most of my muscles. I can’t think of too many more…I guess the tongue is one? My tongue is doing fine. These muscles make up a large part of my body, working in partnership with my brain, my soul, and my libido. My body can be whatever I want it to be, and if what I want is to not actively choose what I want it to be, then my body is what it currently is.
This review felt underwhelming. Is that what you want? Were the previous ones overwhelming? Or am I just maturing? 30 and only getting older…
Do you like it? Do any of my muscles need to be smaller? Or larger? How many nuggets from McDonald’s do you think you could eat? Let me know, I promise you I’m genuinely curious.
