Counter: Gorillas don’t work out and remain strong and fit.

That’s what I’ve always thought! I could never understand how Superman could get to have so much marked muscle if he is naturally able to lift tons without much effort, which makes it very difficult for him to break down his muscle fibers and regenerate them to gain muscle mass.

Unless in the Fortress of Solitude he has a gym with weights made from neutron star cores, he is much more likely to have a belly like the strongest men in real life.

It really depends on the source of the super strength. The juggernaut is a god-empowered being of strength; he looks muscley because that’s what strength is supposed to look like, not because it affects his ability to do work.

Superman looks strong because that’s the ideal humanoid form, apparently, and his eugenics-obsessed ancestors chose that as the look they wanted to breed for.

Mr incredible/robert parr from the incredibles had to work out, and used literal trains as his gym equipement. It’s likely his super power wasn’t super strength so much as fewer limits on how much improvement he could get from his workouts. He is out of shape at the start of his story, and getting rid of that, while relatively easy for him compared to others, did require actual work on his part.

If you had a superhero who had like, a psychic shield or similar that surrounded their body and gave the appearance of super strength, like Victoria Dallon from Worm, then yeah, they’d have to work a lot harder to look like the strength they use on a regular basis.

Except in rare cases, I think you’ve got it backwards. Heroes with super strength get their muscles from their powers, and only the rare few outliers don’t get muscles from their superpowers.

Exercise barely burns any calories compared to the calories burned through your daily activities, like breathing, moving around, etc.

Think Mark, think! If you need on average 2k calories to maintain your current weight, that means your body is already burning 2k calories a day for you doing nothing extra like working out.

What working out really helps with (aside of “increasing strength”) is to keep your body in motion and flexible. When your body is in motion it will ramp up your metabolism throughout the day (comparatively to a sedentary lifestyle).

Also, you have a default level of strength that does not need exercise to maintain. So if I can lift a 40lb bag of dog food with ease, then I can keep doing that regardless of I work out. Now, factor in that if my job was to load and unload 40lb bags of dog food every day, I’d probably get stronger just because my job is my exercise.

Sorry for the rambling, but my point is that there is so much more to being fit and healthy than simply exercising (and I imagine super heroes do all those other things too by way of their “job”).

That’s why Homelander wears a padded suit

Invulnerability brings up the same issues. How do you break down and rebuild muscle when you are impervious to harm?

Like not only would the classic superhero physique not exist, but mutants like Wolverine would be skinny/flabby dudes.

And none of them could get IVs or any other medical treatment that called for needles or surgery.

This is an accurate take.

With superhuman strength, you need to exercise 6-8 hours per day for minor benefits, whereas most regular people start seeing benefits from even 15 minutes of moderate walking per day.