We seek to highlight the meanings of pain for practitioners of bodybuilding gyms in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Eight academies between the northern and southern areas of the city were investigated for 12 months (2008-2009) using participants, ethnographic observations and open interviews, in addition to the data collected in the previous survey period. The construction of the body in this group is related to the organization and administration of intensity and type of pain perceived and interpreted by athletes or assiduous practitioners, a fact related to the rituals of institution building one bodybuilder. The bodily pain is therefore not only parameter for the effective construction of form, but fundamental to hierarchical demarcation of roles and identity of those who are part of the dominant fraction in the field of bodybuilding. It is also, for some individuals, a strategy to overcome suffering.
pain; suffering; bodybuilding; strength training; body anthropology