The internet is crawling with men crushing foods with their muscles.
Last year, something known as the “egg bicep challenge” went viral on TikTok and Twitter. The challenge involved men placing an egg in the crook of their elbows and attempting to crush it with their forearms and biceps as a test of masculinity and strength. Despite looking simple, crushing an egg only with your bicep is apparently tough to do. According to HITC, when you squeeze the egg from both sides of your arm muscles, you’re applying an equal amount of pressure onto each apex of the egg, and therefore it will not crack. Actually having more muscle can be a detriment, since “the bigger your muscles, the more evenly the pressure applied to the egg is spread-meaning it becomes very hard to break.”
Anyway, this didn’t stop men from trying, and of course posting videos on the internet in a parade of meathead vainglory. I’m not really sure what the purpose of these challenges is. Regardless of how “tough” it might be, the challenge just looks messy and awkward.
I bring this year-old trend up now because shirtless men cracking eggs with their big biceps are back in my TikTok feed. We can probably attribute this resurgence to TikTok user @jaytoofit, who posted himself successfully cracking an egg and being sure to notify us, the viewers, that he is “built different.” The odd, hilarious nature of the video very easily turned into a meme on the video-sharing app after one user shared the original video along with his own egg-crushing attempt that proved to be incredibly easy despite his less-than-toned arms. Others have made videos crushing eggs between their buttcheeks and breasts, telling the camera, they too, are “built different.”
But it’s not just the egg cracking. Another “fitness challenge” that went viral recently showed a man crushing a whole watermelon between his thighs. This is a bit more of an impressive feat, but still, hella weird. The video reposted by a popular soccer Instagram account, @433, shows Instagram user @truefitstl forcefully splitting a melon open with his quads, causing the insides to splatter all over his crotch. But viewers were not impressed with @trufitstl’s thunder thighs. Instead, they were concerned about him wasting a perfectly good watermelon: “Just give me that watermelon if you don’t want…”; “Waste of a watermelon but ok”; “He better be eating that man such a waste” read the comments. (However, on the originally uploaded video, @trufitstl did claim that the entire watermelon, despite exploding on his crotch, was fully eaten. Take what you will from that.)
Still, this is the main issue with all these fitness challenges involving food: it’s a huge waste! And for what? No offense, but you should know that any sincere attempt at showing off how big and strong you are will inevitably be laughed at and meme’d into oblivion by internet users, so if you’re trying to prove your brute masculinity, it’s never going to work.
These fitness challenges are reminiscent of other food-related videos that often go viral. Take this seven-pound pizza burrito, a truly gluttonous monstrosity that was definitely only created so customers can snap a picture of it, take two bites of and throw the rest in the garbage. Or back in February, when a woman shared a vile video of her “nacho cone” hack which involved dumping globs of nacho cheese and other fixings straight onto her kitchen counter, which not only is a giant waste of food, but also seems like a nightmare to clean up.
There are plenty of ways to go viral that don’t involve wasting food. Perhaps make a food recipe people actually want to eat and enjoy making? Or take some notes from this guy who posted a TikTok of himself curling two adult human beings? Now that is impressive.
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