Latest news with #bodybuilding
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Another Bodybuilder Just Died a Horrible Death
After quitting the bizarre injections that puffed up his muscles, a Russian bodybuilder has become the latest in a long and unfortunate line of pro weightlifters to meet untimely demises. As The Sun reports, 35-year-old Nikita Tkachuk hadn't injected synthol — a so-called "site enhancement oil" primarily made up of oils like paraffin or sesame alongside a local anesthetic and benzoyl alcohol that makes muscles appear bulkier without actually causing any strength or fitness benefits — before he died of a heart attack in a St. Petersburg hospital last week. The story of how he got there is tragic, even for the morbid world of weightlifting. After winning "Master of Sports" in Russia at 21, Tkachuk began injecting synthol to appear beefier. That practice is known as "fluffing," and it produces muscles that appear, as Iron Man magazine put it back in 2013, "comically inflated." Eventually, Tkachuk signed a deal with a pharmaceutical company that contractually obligated him to keep taking the shots — a deal that turned out to be deadly. After initially being diagnosed with sarcoidosis, a disorder involving tiny granules of immune cells forming on his organs, the strain from all that "fluffing" ultimately led to kidney and lung failure, and then a heart attack, his widow, Maria Tkachuk, said, per The Sun. "There were many trials over the years," said the widow Tkachuk, who is also a bodybuilder. "[His] resources ran out." Though a lot remains unclear about the man's death, including why he finally succumbed years after quitting the injections, his regret over the use of synthol — which in a 2022 video he called his "biggest mistake" — is plain as day. "If your arm is 18 inches or 20 inches, what will it change in your life?" Tkachuk said ahead of his death, per The Sun. "You're going to lose a lot of health. It's not worth it." "If I could back to 2015-2016, I would not do it," he continued. "I basically ruined my whole sporting career." Though he's joined in death by a long line of young bodybuilders who died too soon after taking various substances to either lose weight or get swole, Tkachuk's story is especially tragic because he spoke out against the injections that ultimately killed him. Now, his wife is left to pick up the pieces. "There are no other words for now," his widow said. "Only shock." More on bodybuilder deaths: If You Still Think Bodybuilding Is Healthy, This Woman Just Died at Age 20
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Sudden Death Among Professional Bodybuilders Raises Health Concerns
2021 was a tragic year for the bodybuilding world. Over two dozen professional athletes died suddenly in a 12-month period, making headlines the world over. The youngest was 27 years old. Today, a wealth of research suggests that elite athletes tend to live longer than the rest of us, but a spate of premature deaths among bodybuilders in recent years has raised questions about the safety of this particular sport. A recent study, led by researchers at the University of Padova in Italy, is the first to investigate the risk of sudden death among a large sample of male bodybuilders. The findings highlight an alarming phenomenon that the authors say can no longer be ignored by athletes, medical associations, or sports organizations. The analysis tracked more than 20,000 bodybuilders over an average of 8 years, during which time 73 sudden deaths were registered at a mean age of 42. Some of these deaths were due to steroids or performance-enhancing drugs. Others were due to vehicle accident, murder, or suicide. But by far the most common cause of death was sudden heart failure, including 46 cases. That is a low absolute risk for bodybuilders in general; however, that is not the case for the most elite professionals. Their risk of sudden heart failure was found to be more than 14 times higher than that of amateur athletes, which suggests that as the sport becomes more serious, it may also become exponentially more dangerous. When looking only at the bodybuilders who participated in the highest-ranked international bodybuilding competition in the world – the Mr. Olympia 'open' category – researchers found an "alarmingly high" death rate. Out of the 100 elite competitors that took part in the competition over the years, 7 died from sudden causes. What's more, five of those deaths were presumed or confirmed cases of sudden cardiac death at a mean age of just 36. "Current data are alarming," the international team of authors concludes, "and sufficient to call for the development of specific recommendations for the prevention of sudden death/sudden cardiac death among bodybuilders, including the systematic implementation of bystander automated external defibrillators." The analysis is limited by a lack of hard data, as autopsies were only available for about 10 percent of sudden cardiac deaths. This means there aren't specifics on how and why many of these individual athletes died. That said, the authors of the study, led by sports medicine researcher Marco Vecchiato from the University of Padova, suspect that extreme training, stringent dietary regimes, and frequent performance-enhancing drug abuse are risking the heart health of very high-level professional bodybuilders. "These approaches can place significant strain on the cardiovascular system, increase the risk of irregular heart rhythm, and may lead to structural heart changes over time," explains Vecchiato. Available autopsies included in the study consistently showed left ventricle thickening and enlarged hearts among bodybuilders. That aligns with a past autopsy study, which found that the mean heart mass of bodybuilders was nearly 74 percent heavier than normal reference values, and that on average, their left ventricles were 125 percent thicker than the average man's. Further research into the particular cardiovascular effects of bodybuilding is needed, including among female athletes, but Vecchiato says the message is clear. "While striving for physical excellence is admirable, the pursuit of extreme body transformation at any cost can carry significant health risks, particularly for the heart," he explains. "Based on this data, the medical associations cannot ignore this health problem anymore and should collaborate with the respective federations and policymakers to promote safer participation." The study was published in the European Heart Journal. Microbe From Man's Wound Able to Feed on Hospital Plastic Exposure to Daylight Boosts The Immune System, Study Suggests Surprise Link Between Menthol And Alzheimer's Found in Mice
RNZ News
25-05-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
New Auckland bakery Fankery opens with long lines outside the door
Fankery's baked goods were already popular before the store opened its doors. Photo: Siān Singh A bakery with a huge following online has opened its first brick-and-mortar shop in Auckland, and has already had lines out the door. A queue slowly snaked around Newmarket on the sunny morning of 24 May, for the grand opening of Fankery. The store officially opened at 9am, but some customers were there as early as 8:25am, they said it was because they anticipated a queue when it was Fankery. Cathy Fan is the mastermind behind the brand. She told First Up she had been looking for a permanent home for her delicious goods for a while. "So for the past two years, I have driven all over Auckland during our pop ups. But running on a pop-up lifestyle, Fankery was still never grounded or physical in my head. I feel like it was a great way to reach people and build communities. But it was still never like a legitimate thing." Cathy Fan is the mastermind behind Fankery Photo: Siān Singh Opening her own permanent store was not something 25-year-old Fan imagined four years ago. She had just begun a career as an engineer, and was also competing as a body builder, when her life was turned upside down by an illness. "When I first started baking, it was actually to help me heal from my hypothyroidism, where I had gained 12 kgs in a month. I had just come out of being an amateur bikini competitor, bodybuilding, and that weight gain absolutely threw me off the rails." But Fan did not let this life changing event get her down and soon started her own business. Fankery now has more than 20,000 followers on Instagram. "It was the beginning to my very own bakery. I started baking to curb my cravings after dieting for two consecutive years. That mochi burnt basque cheesecake - my bakery is now known for. Bro, it came from one of the hardest times in my life. Sharing food online took my mind away from depressing lifestyle I was in, it was something to focus on. So I baked every hour outside of my nine to five job. And now two years later, we are opening our very first door front," Fan told her followers in a video leading up to the store's grand opening. There has been so much demand for Fan's baking that she has had to take some time away from engineering. "Baking kind of brought a new perception on life and it was kind of me being able to show my creative side through food. I just started sharing pics of what I made online, and it just grew from there." Her most iconic creation is a basque cheesecake with a layer of mochi at $22.50 a slice. It's a type of cheesecake from Spain, but Cathy's added her own twist - a layer of gooey confection made from pounded glutinous rice. "I come from a Shanghainese background, we eat a lot of glutinous rice based foods. And so anything like sticky rice, mochi, things like that, I love it. But why I put it in the cheesecake was because I don't actually like cheesecake. I just wanted to make it something that I wanted to eat. And so I was like, it can't go wrong if I try." Fankery opened the first brick-and-mortar store in Newmarket, Auckland Photo: Siān Singh After leasing a commercial kitchen several years ago, finding the perfect store front has not been easy. But Fan took a creative approach and has renovated an old ticket booth in a carpark on the back streets of Broadway. "I have been searching for a physical premise for a really long time. I've had a lot of issues with meeting landlords and them looking at me like, not really trusting me at all. And so when this place came by, it was really small, it's really small, and it used to be the parking booth of Wilson parking, so it is literally in a parking building. "But I was like, oh my God, this is kind of cute. It's something that you walk down the street, you don't expect, but you'll be like curious about it, and you want to check it out. And I love Newmarket because I feel like, yes, Broadway is dead, but the mall is great. Everyone goes to the mall and there's a lot of parking." The grand opening of Fankery's brick-and-mortar store attracted a queue in the early morning Photo: Siān Singh Opening at the same time that many hospitality businesses are shutting their doors, Fan said she tried to stay hopeful. "There are still business that are doing well. There are still businesses that are thriving. I think letting those dark thoughts consume you could be one route you go down. Or the other way is to think of it as positively as it's a chance for you to change. It's an opportunity for us to grow. When you have problems on how to grow, it's actually a good problem to have. "And I'm personally very excited to get away from the pop-up life because doing it for two and a half years, there is absolutely no set schedule. Every weekend is like a super early morning wake up and I want some more stability in my life. What I want is to be able to build Fankery to be a brand that people associate with when they think Asian fusion baking." Cathy Fan is the mastermind behind Fankery Photo: Siān Singh
New York Times
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Way You Build Muscle Is the Way You Build a Life
'Make me a muscle.' Even at 5, 6, 7, 8 years old, I knew to stick my arm out obligingly and contract my biceps. My father, passing through the room on his way somewhere else, would give my upper arm a squeeze and laugh. 'Very good,' he'd say. Then he'd make a muscle back and ask, 'Am I fit or what?' It became a family joke. My father, who at age 21 moved from Hong Kong to New York in the late 1960s, was more an acolyte of Bruce Lee than of Jack LaLanne. But he'd long been an attentive multidisciplinary student of what I'll call Muscle Academy. Everything from practicing judo, taekwondo (in which he earned a brown belt) and karate (a black belt) to steeping himself in fitness Americana: bodybuilding competitions on TV, a subscription to Muscle & Fitness, sketches of famous athletes. By day, he was a professional artist who, among many other accomplishments, created the posters advertising the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo on ABC and, with them, the glorification of the competitors — our modern gods on Earth. On the wall above my bed at home on Long Island, I hung my favorite of the series, an ice skater midspin, all fury and speed. We always had a makeshift home gym, equipped with a motley collection of free weights, hand grips and pull-up bars, as well as nunchaku, jump-ropes and heavy punching bags. As far back as memory serves, my brother and I were drafted to join our father in training sessions. A recently unearthed Polaroid shows us, impossibly tiny in diapers and barely a year apart, standing alongside our father — who was indeed impressively fit in his swim trunks — all of us proudly grinning, arms akimbo in a superhero pose. It was 1979, the heyday of the movie 'Superman.' All we needed were three capes to complete the look. 'Am I fit or what?' Every evening in the garage, the three of us moved in formation: forward kick, side kick, roundhouse kick. Our father would ask us to hold down his legs while he did sit-ups, or my brother and I would dangle from his biceps like a pair of baby monkeys while he lifted and swung us. After dinner, under the yellow sodium glare of the neighborhood streetlights, we'd flank him on nighttime jogs down to the parking lot behind our pediatrician's office, a mile away. We'd chase lightning bugs — and our dad. Exercise was fun in our house, because our father was a perpetual kid, wonderful at playing. Certainly, there was a measure of vanity involved. He had a febrile imagination; as he molded us into miniature versions of him, he enjoyed the fantasy that he could live forever through us, his modest experiment in immortality. 'Pick a sport,' he said. First, we tried soccer, which didn't stick, then swimming, which did. What did we learn, as children, from all of this early training? That being strong was good, for both of us. Perhaps the most striking thing about the physical education my brother and I received under the tutelage of our father was that he trained us equally, without regard for size, age or gender. He set us upon each other for sparring practice. If one of us kicked or punched the other to tears, my father would exclaim, 'You forgot to block!' Then he'd laugh his big laugh, dispense fierce hugs and have us go another round. I grew up feeling that there was value in physicality and that in this arena, I was limitless. In his way, my father was trying to tell us that muscles deserve more consideration than we give them. We often think about muscle as existing separately from intellect — and maybe even oppositional to it, one taking resources from the other. I've spent the past few years writing a book about muscle, and this is what I have learned: The truth is that our brain and muscles are in constant conversation with each other, sending electrochemical signals back and forth; our long-term brain health depends on muscles — and moving them — especially when it comes to aging bodies. But the closeness of muscle and mind is not just biological. Being a writer as well as a lifelong athlete, I can't help but notice how language is telling. Muscle means so much more than the physical thing itself. We're told we need different metaphorical muscles for everything: to study, to socialize, to compete, to be compassionate. And we've got to exercise those muscles — put them to use, involve them in a regular practice — for them to work properly and dependably. We flex our muscles to give a show of power and influence. We have muscle memory; it's a nod to the knowledge we hold in our bodies, of all things sensory, physical and spatial. We lift ourselves up and jump for joy. We muscle through hard things, which shows grit. Even when it's a stretch, we still try. The way you build muscle is by breaking yourself down. Muscle fibers sustain damage through strain and stress, then repair themselves by activating special stem cells that fuse to the fiber to increase size and mass. You get stronger by surviving each series of little breakdowns, allowing for regeneration, rejuvenation, regrowth. Muscle is one of the most adaptable tissues in the human body. It responds to changes in the environment, growing when we put in the work, shrinking when we stop. After illness or injury, it can remember how to rebound. The research bears this out: Even exercisers who begin late in life are remarkably capable of transformation. When we talk about what moves us as human beings, it's muscle. At the most basic level, muscle is the stuff that powers and animates our existence. We move our bodies through the world, and our minds follow. The artist Paul Klee described visual art as a record of movement from beginning to end: 'A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.' A drawing of a dancer, say, is made by a roving hand, which pins down the movement of the dancer, and the finished work is then appreciated by a viewer's ever-tracking eye (with an assist from the extraocular muscles). The idea that robust physical health enables strength in other arenas of your life dates to the ancients: Seneca and other Stoic philosophers wrote about the interconnectedness of sound body and mind. The physical work of building muscle can give you a feeling of flourishing and of agency. Today the same idea drives the scientific literature behind weight lifting as an effective intervention for post-traumatic stress. In an age when virtual technology and society conspire to divorce mind from body and silo us from others, simply moving together in the same space can remind us of our shared humanity — what the psychologist Dacher Keltner, building on Émile Durkheim, likes to call 'collective effervescence.' As humans, we're built to move; as social creatures, it means something to move together. 'Make me a muscle.' Everyone has been asked to make a muscle at some point, to demonstrate a whole host of things, tangible and intangible: strength, flexibility, endurance. Show me you're in good form. Show me you're a person of action. Character that's grounded in something you can feel. It's a way to assert presence. To say: I am here — conscious, corporeal, alive. This philosophy of muscle is one that I want to live by. Fitness guarantees nothing, of course. Exercise is not a panacea for death. My father's father died of a heart attack at 64. After that, my father's fitness discipline was suddenly clarified as a daily grounding, in a way that was not future-oriented but present-oriented. In observing him, I learned the importance of exercise as a practice — not of becoming but of being.
The Sun
22-05-2025
- Health
- The Sun
Bodybuilding star Nikita Tkachuk dead at 35 after pumping body with muscle growth injections he came to bitterly regret
A FAMOUS Russian bodybuilder has died at 35 after pumping himself with 'muscle growth" shots led to organ failure. Nikita Tkachuk's muscles ballooned to gross proportions under the chemical boosters - but a strict contract meant he wasn't allowed to stop. 6 6 The bodybuilder was rushed to intensive care with lung and kidney failure, and was later put into a medically-induced coma after suffering a heart attack. His wife Maria Tkachuk, 36, also a bodybuilder, broke the news: 'Nikita, my beloved husband, has died. 'His kidneys failed, [he suffered] pulmonary edema, and his heart gave out. 'There were many trials over the years. [His] resources ran out. 'There are no other words for now, only shock." The muscle man won the title Master of Sports in Russia at just 21 with a 350kg deadlift, a 360 kg squat and a 210kg bench press. But later in life he turned to synthol injections and signed a contract with a pharmaceutical company to advertise their products. His muscles bulged to ludicrous sizes - but he was reportedly banned from stopping the injections under the terms of his contract. Tkachuk's health deteriorated and got even worse after he caught coronavirus. His lungs suffered from an 'autoimmune disease' and his legs swelled with calcium formations. Bodybuilding legend 'Mr Japan' whose calves made Arnold Schwarzenegger jealous, dies aged 78 In an update, he posted: 'The same formations were found in the hip joint area. 'They did an MRI and realised that the blood vessels and kidneys were clogged with calcium.' He was diagnosed with sarcoidosis - where tiny granules of solid immune cells form on various organs. Tkachuk underwent multiple surgeries and tried to get back to training. 6 6 But two years ago he admitted that he deeply regretted his synthol injections, and begged others not to follow his path. He said in a video two years ago: 'I'd advise you to think again, weigh it all up, think about it. 'I just don't get it - well, if your arm is 18 inches or 20 inches, what will it change in your life? You're going to lose a lot of health. It's not worth it." 'If I could back to 2015-2016, I would not do it. I basically ruined my whole sporting career. 'If I hadn't done the injections and stayed in bodybuilding, I think I would be at a fairly high competitive level now.' The Ukhta Power Sports Federatio, said following his death in St Petersburg: 'We express our sincere condolences to his family, friends, and wife Maria on the sudden death of our dear friend and talented athlete Nikita Tkachuk. 'For many years, Nikita achieved success in powerlifting, extreme strength, and bodybuilding, inspiring those around him with his determination and perseverance. 'Our thoughts are with you in this difficult hour. 'Nikita will forever remain in our memory as an outstanding athlete and a person with a big heart.' 6
