Current mood:	chipper
Entry tags:	fandom - general, fandom - prince of tennis

Prince of Tennis and Asian Musculature.
I'm a fan of martial arts movies because of two things: 1) It's research for Asian musculature and 2) It's got half-naked men running around. (Okay, maybe the 2nd more than the 1st, but whatever, right? XD)

Anyway, I was rewatching one of my favourite movies this afternoon while having lunch, and I took a bunch of screencaps and wanted to share. XD

The thing about these martial arts movies is that you can't really fake a lot of the stunts. Unlike in Prince of Tennis, where you can get non-athletes to perform the special moves and add in the special effects later, the most you can do with fight scenes is cut frames and do wirework to make it appear faster. However, the actors used still have to be actual martial artists or athletes, because it just looks flat-out fake otherwise.

Real tennis athletes will likewise have very developed forearms, deltoids, biceps, and triceps (the manga!Kaidoh is actually pretty accurate), due to the constant stress of their game play.

In any case, I've taken caps from Star Runner because it had ectomorphs and mesomorphs (two of the three main body types) in various stages of development.


Ectomorph.
This is Bond, the main character. He is a very well-defined ectomorph, as the character he is portraying trains several hours a day, every day. (Note: Look at the definition of his deltoids in the 2nd picture, as well as the width of his biceps and triceps in the third picture.)

(I'm thinking characters like Tezuka, Sengoku, Sanada, Atobe, etc. should have this kind of body type IRL.)





This is his sidekick, whose name eludes me right now. He doesn't do the hard training that Bond does (i.e. resistance training), so his muscles lack bulk.

(Perhaps RL Kikumaru, Gakuto, etc. should have bodies like this.)


Now we move on to Mesomorphs. This is Tank, the movie's main antagonist. This is about as big as an Asian will ever get (without taking steroids or protein supplements). Tank is the Guy to Beat on the show, so the character needed to be portrayed as a guy who trains every waking moment of his life. XDDD (Okay, that was an exageration, but you get the idea.) As he is a mesomorph and already genetically predisposed to getting bulky, it won't take him as long to buff up as it will an ectomorph.

(Kawamura, Kabaji, and Ishida are probably characters that would end up looking like this.)

Still, no amount of training will ever get asian mesomorphs bigger than this, and while it may seem that this is already pretty friggin' big, you have to remember what Western mesomorphs look like:


And Bale isn't even an example of the most defined that a western mesomorph will get. (Think Vin Diesel at his finest/biggest.)

Anyway, that's about it for my screencaps. I took other, but they're really for my own personal enjoyment than anything else. XDDDD

But before I go, I leave you with Brandon Routh! Believe it or not, this guy's actually an ectomorph. *___* (You can see by the way his bone structure (and most notably his torso) is very long and lean.)