Gaining muscle is hard, and sometimes external motivation can be helpful. It can be incredibly motivating to see someone else's muscle growth story with before-and-after images; their journey from slim to muscle-bound.
For aspiring bodybuilders, there are several online resources and forums for muscle growth stories which we’ll share in this article. All are entirely free.
/r/brogress
Brogress is a subreddit (a community on Reddit) devoted exclusively to before-and-after images of muscle transformations.
All content is user-submitted and non-promotional.
Some of the content focuses on weight loss journeys, but the vast majority of posts are highlighting muscle growth.
We find this subreddit to be a great resource for muscle growth stories because it seems to be a welcoming and motivational community. When people post pictures of their transformation, nearly all of the comments are congratulatory.
Bodybuilding.com
Bodybuilding.com is arguably the premier online resource for all things bodybuilding, and they have a section of their site dedicated to motivational content.
This is a good resource for users who don’t want to actively participate, or who are early in their bodybuilding journey.
If you don’t yet have a transformation to share, but want to read muscle growth stories from the sidelines, this website is a great option.
A lot of the articles in this section of Bodybuilding.com’s site are personal interviews, which are interesting because they allow the reader to understand the journey someone undertook to improve their body, and what their personal motivations were.
/r/fitness
The fitness subreddit is one of the largest health-related subreddits, with over 12 million members at the time of updating this article.
Most of the content on r/fitness is text-based, so there aren’t as many progress pics as the previous two resources, but there’s such a large quantity of content that it can still be a great resource for muscle growth stories for those willing to search.
This subreddit features a “Physique Phriday” thread with progress photos similar to the content on the r/brogress subreddit.
BoredPanda’s Transformations Page
BoredPanda is a content aggregator that has the biggest fitness transformation page we’ve come across.
Their page highlights the best before-and-after transformations on the web, and unsurprisingly the post has nearly a million views.
This is a great online resource for muscle growth stories because it features both women and men, while the first three resources were more male-dominated.
It’s important for both sexes to have positive representation in the fitness world.
