For males, ages eighteen through twenty-two are the years of peak testosterone, maximum training capacity, and robust recovery power. (These are the same years young men are recruited to be soldiers.) Men are in an unprecedented physiological prime for athletic improvement at exactly the years they are of age to be pursuing a collegiate degree. It makes sense that a sports industry built for eighteen- to twenty- two- year- old male bodies would have a body ideal of leanness—and an expected trajectory of steady performance improvement.
