Well, as I've mentioned before, I'm quite into my fitness these days. It wasn't always the case, and during my last visit here I had temporarily ceased due to non-training related injury. But am now back to it, though spending only around two and half hours each week training in my home gym (at my height last year, it was closer to six hours), and am now much healthier in body and mind as a result. I believe that point was accurately made by Nanook that often depression is caused by poor diet and lack of activity; which is certainly the case for me. (I also quite smoking, improved my diet and have gone basically tea-total to help get back into shape).
I don't believe there is anything inherently Se about it. The image of the vain bodybuilder caring only about gaining muscle mass maybe. I could describe my physical changes over the two years I've been doing this in terms of measurements and weight, but that is unimportant. The reasons why I do it are primarily to increase my quality of life and independence. Aside from emotional and mental well being, the real life changes, for me, were:
When I first started, I could hardly get to the top of the hill I live on without being so out of breath as to be asked if I was asthmatic. If I bought one of those giant bags of dog food, I had to heave it into the trolley with both hands. I'd have to make several trips to the car to bring the shopping in. If I carried my daughter on my shoulders, more than 10 minutes and they were on fire. If I had something large that needed moving in my home, I would have to call someone to assist.
Now, I can run up that hill with little more than a touch of sweat. I can pick up those giant dog food bags with one hand and swing them over my shoulder with ease. I can walk around with my daughter on my shoulders for an hour without tiring. And recently I had to take my broken cooker to the scrap yard. I carried it to the car myself and threw into the skip without assistance. And now, I'm the one called to assist people in moving large things. It's made me more independent and vastly improved not only my life span, but also made life a great deal easier.
As for Higs point about disliking people who do this, I'm guessing that's down to questioning the eclectic nature of such people's interests, perhaps finding such a "macho" attitude to be very Neanderthal like. Maybe. But bare in mind, before doing an hour long full body workout yesterday, I had spent my day first styling my daughters' hair as I do everyday (yesterday was a Dutch braid for one and French braid for the other - not exactly a macho skill to have), then after shopping and errands played a computer game with my son and did a little bit of computer programming as a part of my current robotics interest (I solved an issue I was having which I thought was down to the initialisation of a variable, but it turned out the answer was to convert a procedure to a function that returned a value rather than just manipulating a global variable. It made the coding much neater). I consider prescribing to stereotypical gender or high-school social group roles as being highly primitive and not in the spirit of the INTP nature of refusing to follow the pack. I would personally rather just do whatever I feel the desire to do.
