A 10-year-old Vietnamese boy has been turning heads on Asian social media after photos of his unusually muscular physique went viral.
Nguyen Hoang Nam’s parents claim that he was always more muscular than other kids his age. Even at birth, doctors noticed that he had more developed muscles than other babies, and by age 6, his body was so unusually toned that his parents took him to a hospital for a checkup. It’s here that Vietnamese media reports get blurry, as they mention “superman syndrome” as the cause of Hoang Nam’s impressive physique, but that is a chromosomal disorder with very different symptoms. The articles also claim that other than muscle stiffness and a general lack of flexibility, the 10-year-old boy is in perfect health.
“When Hoang Nam was 6 years old, his muscles were clearly developed,” Ms. Kim Uyen, the boy’s godmother, told Sao Star. “Fearing that the developed musculature could affect his general health, the family took him to the Children’s Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. After performing tests, the doctor said the child had hypertrophy, also known as superman syndrome, which made the muscles grow. Luckily this disease does not affect the boy’s health.”
That’s obviously not the scientific explanation of the boy’s condition, but there’s no denying that he looks exceptionally muscular for his age. His impressive physique attracts attention wherever he goes, and Ms. Uyen claims that he was contacted by several online influencers to appear in their vlogs, but his parents refused, fearing that the extra attention could cause more harm than good.
Because of the way he looks, Nguyen Hoang Nam is often mistaken for an adult suffering from dwarfism, but to his family, his friends and his neighbors, he is just an extremely well-developed kid.
A while back, Hoang Nam attracted the attention of a professional bodybuilder in Dong Nai, who contacted his parents and asked them to let him train the boy for free and put his great genetics to good use. They agreed, and the boy trained at a gym for about three months, after which he returned home because he allegedly missed his family too much.
According to Ms. Kim Uyen, although Nguyen Hoang Nam is passionate about bodybuilding and weight training, his family would like him to try sports like karate and yoga, to mitigate his muscle stiffness.
Unlike other muscular children we’ve featured in the past, like 10-year-old Lyza Brooks Mosier, miniature Bruce Lee, Ryusei “Ryuji” Imai, or Instagram star Arat Hosseini, all of whom worked hard for their physique, Nguyen Hoang Nam is allegedly just built this way…