I’m a trainer-in-training, I work at a gym, I wonder things. Superheroes are just like us in that they put their bodies through some crazy stuff. The athletics they perform to save the world are amazing, but what about all the times some adversary shanks them, or they get shot, or they plummet sixty stories like that’s just something you do on any normal day. Or how about when they work out; just how “in shape” are they? What kind of problems do they have to work through when battling the latest psychopath, criminal, or monster?
The cumulative injury cycle is a process the body goes through to adapt to continued and repetitive stressors. Much like the emotional growth that characters in all media go through,the muscular system has to be broken in order to grow stronger. Let’s say you work out or get shanked. Muscle tissue is damaged and the first sign of repair is inflammation. This is why muscles appear bigger than they are after a workout. After a while, the repeated stress on the body forms what we call knots. If the knots aren’t taken care of, the body starts to adapt to the path of least resistance. People who hunch over a keyboard all day get knots in their neck and shoulders and pretty soon their posture becomes all hunchy. That’s a muscle imbalance. There are muscles that are working overtime to keep your body in that position, and there are other muscles slacking off because the new posture doesn’t require as much work from them.
We’re born with no muscle imbalances. As children, our posture is perfect. We learn to misuse our bodies, our bodies accommodate our nasty habits, and we both suffer in the long run for it. All superheroes have muscles (including the dead ones, but let’s not focus on them), so all superheroes are at risk for muscle imbalances. Batman, for example, grapples across the city with his grapple gun in his right hand. That’s a lot of force and trauma on one side of the body. How does he counteract that? Of course no one’s going to draw him with one side slightly bigger than the other because superheroes are supposed to look perfect, but most people are stronger on one side of the body than the other, and with something that’s repeated so frequently, I think it would be visible on Batman. How does that affect him?
Keep in mind that I’m pretty new to comics, but I noticed the other day the differences in the fighting styles of Batman and Nightwing. Batman is a big guy, somewhere around 210 pounds, and he’s bulky. He’s not going to be able to do the fancy jumps and leaps that Nightwing can do. Nightwing is a trained acrobat. His muscle is much leaner and he’s flexible. He would have no problem vaulting over enemies and spinning in mid-air to avoid projectiles. My guess is that Nightwing has fewer muscle imbalances that Batman, because he has to be able to perform complex movements, and tight, rigid muscles are not going to cut it.
I’d like to see Bruce Wayne in physical therapy after getting stabbed, or Nightwing foam-rolling after a long night of crime fighting. I don’t need to see a lot of it, but I always like the short bits where we see our heroes acting like normal people. It’s also a good learning experience for us; being Batman takes work, and not all work is sweat-inducing. Recovery is not immediate, and no great feat of strength comes without a price. Superheroes push their bodies to their limits and as far as we know, they go home and sleep off a stab wound and a concussion. I wouldn’t recommend trying that at home.
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