What makes a bodybuilder a bodybuilder

Being stuck in between tons of pictures of muscular women the answer seems to be clear-cut: THEY are female bodybuilders.

But what, if we look at the border areas of the sport. A woman who is just in offseason and has put on so much fat that her shape can hardly be identified by the underlying muscles. Or what about those women, who have left the sport. Would you still call them bodybuilders?

I for mine found piece in the approach: bodybuilder is a profession rather than a persons characteristic. Everybody who trains in order to compete at a bodybuilding competition, and sticks to the rules as laid out by the bodybuilding association, is a "bodybuilder". And if he or she competes in a different class, they are "physique athletes" or "figure" athletes". The term is temporarily until the person decides to quit the job, or move to another category.

Anybody who has big muscles without competing Id call a muscular person, but not a bodybuilder.

Its probably not everybodies opinion, so I would like to here other POVs. At what point do you call a person a bodybuilder?

Hmm. Well hearing all these other categories seems to dilute the term bodybuilder. To me, a bodybuilder is someone who trains to build and develop their physique and diet to achieve those very results. While I usually think of bodybuilding, I think of it being a competitive endeavor. Even though while he doesn't compete, I have read that Stallone says that an endeavor of his is bodybuilding.

Yea i use the word Fbb as a catch all term for very muscular women .i should stop doing this.

Kind of off-topic, but similar: I get a little annoyed when people refer to standard weight training as “weightlifting.” Weightlifting is the sports of Olympic style weightlifting (clean and jerk, snatch)

The ability to cut "properly".

I always thought of bodybuilders as those who build muscle for aesthetic value. Some compete, and some don't.

However when it comes to women, especially, the water gets murky. I believe when you're referring to competition, then female bodybuilders should only include those competing in that division. However, I've heard people (including the women themselves) refer to competitors from other divisions as bodybuilders as well.

So for me, in this way, it depends on the context.

Tricky one.

This type of question reminds me of my ex who was a 'songwriter'. Nobody paid her to write songs and god were the songs absolutely terrible. But she did technically write songs.