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“Body building is more than a sport”, Xiaoqian said. “I like to think of it as a way to maintain ‘A body for life’”, following the concept of the best seller book written by Bill Phillips, a former American competitive body builder.
“There might be many things we cannot decide, but we can have the body we wish and live a healthy life”, Xianqian, now 28 years old, said. Body building offers you ways to combine health and strength as a source of mental energy.
Xiaoqian is now working at “Power House”, a small body building center in Xinyi District. Last May, he competed in a body building show in Zhonghe with other body builders of national level and earned the second place.
“I started to do work out as a teenager eight years ago to be stronger than my classmates at playing basketball”, he said. “The first times I participated in body building competitions, I was also afraid not to be at the top level”, but with more years of training he learned that what matters is the process of training, more than the goal of getting bigger and stronger.
Xiaoqian explained that he does not train more than an hour a day, but he trains efficiently dividing his sets up to seven parts: legs, back, arms… In fact, when he is training his body, he is also working on his mind. “As we say in the body building environment: strong body, strong mind”, Xiaoqian said.You need to be hard-working and perseverant to muscle up your body. However, the results bring you the self-satisfaction you need to keep training and understanding better your body and inner balance.
“Training helps me to release and reload energy and makes me feel good everyday. In this sense, I get what I value most in body building: a high quality of life as I get energy and strength in every day life”, Xiaoqian said. He also changed his eating habits, but he considered this restriction to be small compared to enjoying a healthier life.
“I want to keep doing body building until I get as old as 60 years old”, he said. People potential power is unlimited and we make use only of a small amount, so there will always be room to improve. He regrets that some people think they have to take some medicine to accelerate the results of their training and have to experience after effects a few years later. He said: “To me, being a body builder is a long term process in which you need to keep a healthy attitude”.
Xiaoqian wishes there would be a further evolution of the professional environment for body builders in Taiwan. There are only two to three national competitions a year. Body building is not a sport at the national level, hence body builders have to combine a professional life with their training. In this sense, it makes it very hard for them to make a living out of this sport. Furthermore, it does not give body builders the necessary time for training and being able to compete abroad. To Xiaoqian, the Taiwanese environment for body building still steps backwards compared to other Asian countries like Korea.
However, thanks to the opening of many body building centers in Taiwan in the past few years, and especially of ‘California Center’, there has been a rise of popularity of this sport which attracts more and more people of various backgrounds and gives new values to this sport: being beautiful, losing weight… Gyms become meeting places between friends and are less elitist then they used to be.
“I believe everyone coming to the gym can get some self-satisfaction feeling, be it for getting big, fit, pretty or getting a beautiful boyfriend or girlfriend…”, he said.
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