If you want a great example of how references don’t really help unless you break them down to understand what you’re looking at and why things look the way they do, consider that the infamous Rob Liefeld Cap was pretty clearly directly reffed from pumping-iron-era Schwarzenegger

If you only care about making a literal reproduction of what you see instead of considering why it looks that way, you don’t understand why putting a front 3/4 view chest and side profile arms on the same body looks weird

This cover is also a great example of the importance of silhouette, bodybuilders like that pose because it emphasizes chest-to-waist ratio, if you cover the waist the viewer has a harder time extrapolating the body underneath and it turns into a confusing nugget of torso

You know what, just out of curiosity for shits and giggles I tried to recreate the closest thing I could to this pose that was still balanced enough to stand on it’s own with an anatomy model