Muscularity index as a standard?

[Malik]

A lot of Power Athletes who, by most standards, would be described as healthy do rate as overweight or obese using the BMI equation. That is is why it is not used for those people [or the very short or very tall where the BMI is also not all that usable].
It is a good general guidance as to possible problematic weight issues, for some but not for all.

Yup. BMI is bullshit. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has a 34 BMI. I'm no The Rock, but I'm way outside the Army weight regs (based on the oh-so-outdated BMI), and I still kill my PT tests. And yet my commander clicks his tongue every time I step on a scale.

I know lots of guys who have 20-25% bodyfat who can run a 7-minute mile or bench 150% of their weight. I'd much rather have a Fred Flintstone-looking guy hauling my damaged ass out of the line of fire by my dragstrap with one hand than some androgynous "fit" Pilates wunderkind who's built like a whippet tugging at me and screaming for help. I can't be the only soldier in history to harbor this sentiment.

 

[Alile]

But you train your muscles two ways.
1. To be strong.
2. To be big.
So your index shows the size of muscle not the actual strength of it. You are basing your work on an visual illusion.

 

[caters]

Bigger muscles are naturally stronger than smaller muscles due to hypertrophy. So I would assume people with big muscles not only trained to build muscle, but build strength in the process(After all, to get big muscles in the first place you would need 1 of 2 things, a genetic mutation increasing muscle production, or gain strength. This is especially true for the arm and leg muscles which don't hypertrophy with just use alone(unlike your abs for example which easily get bigger with use alone)).

So people at 3 on the index with big muscles would also be stronger than most people. 2 would mean strong, but not stronger than average(for males at least, Alma is at 2 and is female). 1 would mean average female or weak male. -1 to -3 could include any of these but only some muscles show or none of them show. 0 would mean weak regardless of gender. Note that this is for past puberty. In puberty and before, strength really varies, even within the same number on the index so you could have a weak child at 2 for example.

 

[CupofJoe]

Bigger muscles are naturally stronger than smaller muscles due to hypertrophy.

But maybe not proportionately or effectively. I don't think volume of muscle is a reliable measure of usable strength. You can "pump" muscles for volume but not effective strength. so twice the muscle mass may not give you twice the strength.
Is it not the old adage that you lift lots of "small" weights repeated for strength and fewer "big" weights for size when it comes to body-building?
I'd go for usable strength over apparent muscle any day...
I know of an averagely muscled woman that can beat any one [man or woman] any time she wants in an arm wrestle. She works at a stables and spends maybe half her day shovelling gifts the horses leave behind. Her muscles aren't large but they work very well when she needs them to.
Also I must admit I don't understand the need for your scale within the story [except maybe as an intellectual exercise].
How will this scale be of use for the story you want to tell?
Will only people with a +2 body survive a critical event?
Will all the -3 people be rounded up and shot when food gets short?
Is there a genetic breeding programme to create the "perfect" specimen?

 

[caters]

No, no, and no. Anyone who isn't stuck will survive a critical event if it is evacuation. Famine, maybe only negatives would survive but muscular people will come back years after through breeding.

As for being rounded up and shot, no. To them, starvation is much better than cannibalism. Plus, all they have is bows and arrows and a vital organ shot is very unlikely with that for humans.

And no, there is no genetic breeding program in this story. It is the generation ship one that has the genetic "no defects" program.

What I have heard for building muscle strength is "increase weight to a point that is hard but not "have to injure yourself" hard and do it at that weight until it is easy, then increase again"

So bigger weights = stronger muscles
Stronger muscles = easier to build muscle(what happens when weights go from hard to easy)

So you increase both strength and size of muscle by increasing resistance and to get any results from the arms or legs, you need resistance. But for abs, as long as you keep doing new workouts and go from 1 set to 3 sets for each exercise, you will get that muscular 6 pack or 8 pack or whatever you are aiming for. Abs are the easiest to hypertrophy(and unfortunately the easiest to atrophy as well).

 

[Efigenia]

?

I don't get it - why don't you just have them pass a fitness test?

 

[caters]

Aren't fitness tests designed to see if your heart is healthy?

Besides, with 2 hearts and circulatory systems, if 1 is diseased but the other is going strong, it will be asymptomatic and they will be healthy, even if 1 and only 1 heart were to go into V fib.

I don't see how a fitness test could determine the degree of muscularity they have in different areas of their body.

If they got into sports then maybe heart health would become more important but the muscle:fat ratio is very important both to me since I don't want too many people getting side effects of obesity such as cirrhosis and to the humanoids.

Basically, the more muscular a humanoid is, the more humanoids of the opposite sex it will attract. With females, being muscular also helps keep reproductive pains(pregnancy pains, menstrual cramps, ovulation cramps, labor pains) at bay. Unfortunately, muscular humanoids have worse morning sickness(I myself tend to voluntarily contract my abs from bottom to top in waves when nauseous if it is to the degree that I have to throw up. This is especially true when I have a stomach virus since a stomach virus causes my stomach(the organ where the most physical digestion takes place) to become weaker).

So it makes more sense to me during this early, no sports phase when birth rate and death rate are the highest priorities, that muscle to fat ratio would be a much better thing to measure than HR during exercise(Heart Rate), especially considering that without a digital ECG you can't know if it is 140 BPM or 138 BPM without counting the pulse or heart sounds for a whole minute and that 1 minute might actually represent HR gradually slowing down to 70 BPM so the HR might be off with that stethoscope or pulse method. It would especially be off in humanoids with 2 hearts and circulatory systems because you might hear the second heart beat a fraction of a second later than the first one so you would have to measure the heart rates of the 2 hearts separately and heart sounds would only be helpful in cases where the 2 hearts are perfectly in sync. Pulse would not be helpful at all here since measuring via pulse would give a heart rate twice as fast as the actual heart rate.

 

[skip.knox]

@caters, let us grant that your approach is correct. What's next?

How does it figure into your story? What other aspects of world building depend on or derive from this?