Those who want to look athletic are no longer reluctant to lie on the operating table to reshape their bodies. In this method, fat suctioned from the body is re-injected into specific areas with special techniques to create an "illusion" in the muscles.
Muscle aesthetics is the name given to obtaining the contour of the key muscles that stand out in an athletic body. Plastic and aesthetic surgery specialist Prof. Dr. Ferit Demirkan calls it "the latest point reached in the liposuction and fat-injection techniques used for body shaping — essentially, creating an illusion." Which muscles are addressed depends on whether the patient is male or female. In women, the shoulders and abdomen are worked most, but the aim is not to create a "six-pack" as in men — a flat look with a faintly defined contour is the target. In men, many muscles give the athletic look: the deltoids, the muscles that form the biceps, the pectorals on the chest, the abdominal muscles that create the six-pack, the upper-leg muscles, the muscles that shape the buttocks, and the "butterfly" muscle on the back. A sporting background — having trained the muscles before — yields better results than muscle aesthetics alone.
Who requests it
Who asks for muscle aesthetics? Requested mostly by men, it appeals to the middle-aged with regional fat problems — those whose body does not take good shape even after losing weight, and those with gynecomastia (male breast enlargement). For a good result, the skin must not have lost its elasticity and the body must not be too fatty. The best candidates are men who built their bodies when young and lost their form in middle age.
How it is done
Staged liposuction and fat injection are performed. In an athletic body, low subcutaneous fat is as important as developed muscle. So the "negative spaces" that define the boundaries between muscles are marked — the simplest example being the grooves between the abdominal segments. Liposuction removes the entire subcutaneous fat layer in these areas to bring out the lines. A thin layer of fat is then left in areas like the groin, waist and under the chest, shaping the body's overall contours. Any fat over the muscles to be highlighted is thinned or shaped.
Some of the harvested fat is then injected into the shoulder muscle, under the chest muscles, into the abdominal muscles, the buttocks and the legs, increasing muscle volume and creating fullness. A special compression garment must be worn for six weeks to keep the achieved shape during the edema and healing period.
About 50% is reabsorbed
How likely are the sculpted muscles to revert? Prof. Dr. Demirkan explains: "In fat injections there is roughly a 50% loss — if we inject 100 cc, about 50 cc dissolves within a few months. The remaining, surviving fat cells stay there for life. Injections into muscle also lose some fat. But gaining weight again pulls the athletic body back to how it was."
