Lately I’ve been watching a lot of fitness-related videos on Youtube and my viewing history must’ve hinted to the algorithm to suggest a video by the New York Times called The Dark Side of the Male Fitness Internet, Explained (watch it below). It’s part of a video series by journalist Amanda Hess, where she decodes the culture of the internet. Growing up I’ve always been interested in cultures, especially subcultures because they stray from the mainstream, are often weird but always interesting! In this particular video she talks about Zyzz, an amateur bodybuilder from Australia who was the poster boy for the bodybuilding subculture called “aesthetics”. In the span of four years, he became an internet celebrity by motivating young men to take up fitness but died suddenly at the age of 22.

Train to look like a Greek god

From what I gather on Bodybuilding.com’s article Physique Training: 5 Keys To An Aesthetic Body, aesthetics is a form of bodybuilding where the goal is to build a proportional and symmetrical body to resemble that of a Greek god. Aesthetic bodybuilders train their bodies to be strong and powerful so they look chiselled from every angle, with a V-taper (wide shoulders and a small waist), and large quad muscles.

The most famous bodybuilder in the world, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is a prime example of aesthetic bodybuilding. The former Mr. Universe is often cited as one of the most important figures in the history of bodybuilding and one of Zyzz’s bodybuilding icons.

Who is Zyzz?

According to his Wikipedia page, Aziz Shavershian was an Russian-born amateur bodybuilder, personal trainer, model and stripper based in Sydney, Australia. Better known by his internet handle Zyzz, he became an internet celebrity through his online presence on BodyBuilding.com forums, motivational videos on Youtube, spawning hundreds of Facebook fan pages.

A self-declared “skinny guy” with an ectomorph body type in high school, he decided to join a gym after graduation and began body building to “impress girls”. In an 2011 interview on bodybuilding website SimplyShredded, he was asked where his motivation came from:

If you asked me this question when I started training, my response would’ve been completely different. Originally, it started out innocently enough, I wanted to get bigger so I wasn’t so skinny, and have a bit of a build on me to impress girls. I’d look at pictures of shredded guys and tell myself, that’s going to be me. 4 years into my training, I can safely say that my motivation to train goes far beyond that of merely impressing people, it is derived from the feeling of having set goals and achieving them and outdoing myself in the gym.

With the help of social media in 2008, Zyzz became an internet sensation with motivational videos showing his evolution from a skinny guy to an online fitness star, inspiring young men to begin bodybuilding. He built a a fan base dubbed the Aesthetics Crew, who followed his philosophy of training hard gym to sculpt a God-like physique. But it was short-lived, in 2011 he was found unresponsive in a sauna while on vacation in Thailand. He died from a heart attack and his autopsy revealed an undiagnosed congenital heart defect.

Now for the dark side…

The story about Zyzz is a jumping off point for an essay about masculinity in the modern age of the internet. Then the video takes a turn into online bro culture, filtered through the guise of fitness, can easily become toxic masculinity – when men believe they must be hyper-masculine by being dominant, violent, sexually aggressive, apathetic, homophobic and the like – that these online communities are destructive to not only men, but to society in general.

When I first stumbled upon this video I didn’t expect it to get into the dark subculture of online bro culture. Initially I thought it was a warning story about a young bodybuilder who in his pursuit of online celebrity who became infatuated with the idea of the perfect body and took his fitness training to an extreme, leading to his untimely death. Was I ever wrong! As a woman, I find the online bro subculture very disturbing and incidents bleeding into real life are unfortunately becoming more commonplace. Earlier this year in April, there was an incident in my hometown of Toronto. Known as the Toronto Van Attack, a 25-year-old named Alek Minassian drove a truck onto a busy street, killing ten people and injuring several others. He was arrested and is currently awaiting trial. According to several news media outlets, he was a self-declared “incel” (involuntary celibate), one of the extremist male online subcultures shown in the video. My question is: as someone who regularly participates in male-dominated activities, like fitness, how do you discourage extremist behaviours of hyper-masculinity? A big question that deserves some thought.