In a room lined with swords, a red magic circle glows on the floor, and at its center, where a hero ought to be, sits a shirtless bodybuilder in a cardboard box with a protein shaker in his hands. The summoning has gone wrong, though not catastrophically. The image is titled “That Time I Summoned an Abandoned Buff Guy Instead of a Hero From Another World,” a joke familiar to anyone who has wandered past the light-novel shelves of a Japanese bookstore, where titles are often long enough to double as plot summaries. It can be downloaded for free, in two sizes.

Meet the Men of Muscle Plus

This is one of nearly 5,000 images on Muscle Plus, a Japanese stock-photo website devoted to showing very muscular men doing things very muscular men don’t usually do. In a series called “Spring French Bread Festival,” one bodybuilder attempts to feed another a baguette beneath the cherry blossoms. Elsewhere, three shirtless men lie on their stomachs, chins propped in their hands, posing obediently behind a tiny toy poodle. 

There are men declaring their love in the middle of a tea plantation, men frolicking among sunflowers and men who have been abandoned in cardboard boxes, sometimes in the woods, sometimes by the roadside. The last scenario has proved popular enough to warrant an entire category, sute macho, or “abandoned buff guy,” borrowing its premise from the stray kittens left in cardboard boxes by Japanese roadsides.

muscle plus stock photo site

Free To Use Photos Sorted By Muscle Type

Stock photos usually aim to be invisible. The woman laughing at her salad is meant to be glanced at and forgotten, maybe to advertise health insurance or office catering. Muscle Plus keeps the genre’s apparatus and turns its purpose around. The archive is searchable by subject and by “muscle group” — pecs, biceps, back, etc. Each listing identifies the models, locations and relevant anatomical features. Our summoned macho, for instance, is filed under triceps, shoulders and “isekai reincarnation macho.” Most photographs are available for commercial use without registration or attribution, although the site’s terms prohibit using them to train AI models or compile datasets without prior permission.

muscle plus stock photo site

The Professional Macho

The man behind all of this is Akihito, a bodybuilder and entrepreneur whose company, Smile Academy, also runs Allout, a troupe of muscular performers you can hire for ads and events. In 2018, he started giving away photos that were originally shot for promotional pitches, picking the ones that seemed too ridiculous to actually use. The joke took off during the pandemic, and what started as a folder of weird publicity shots turned into a full-time project. In a 2021 interview with Walkerplus, Akihito said the free photos didn’t make any money on their own; they were there to get people’s attention for the company’s paid work.

The shoots are a lot more labor-intensive than they might seem. Akihito and his team come up with dozens of scenarios ahead of time, ideally in places where a guy with huge pecs has no business being. He told Walkerplus that the hardest place to shoot was a gym, because a bodybuilder lifting weights in a gym just isn’t funny. For a series in the tea plantations of Yame, in Fukuoka, the men flexed for six hours in the summer heat with almost no shade. Another time, Akihito climbed into a trout pond in February to play a fish.

For all that effort, the photographs have acquired an audience whose intentions remain somewhat mysterious. Asked by Chanto Web in 2023 how people actually use the images, Akihito admitted that he suspected they weren’t being used very much at all. Illustrators and manga artists, he explained, were among the few who found them genuinely practical as anatomical references. 

Can Muscles Save Rural Japan?

Meanwhile, an actual commercial clientele has emerged. Muscle Plus calls this part of its business kinniku de chiho sosei, or “regional revitalization through muscle,” borrowing the language of Japanese government programs intended to revive struggling local economies. The men have posed with Imabari towels, dug sweet potatoes on a farm in Karatsu and staffed a pizzeria, a handicrafts shop and a greengrocer in Tokyo’s Honancho shopping district. 

At the greengrocer, they recommend broccoli with zeal. In Takaharu, a small mountain town in Miyazaki, the then-mayor joined them for photographs at the town hall. In Sapporo, a collaboration with the Cocono Susukino shopping complex involved the men surreptitiously adding protein powder to ramen and loading soup curry with broccoli; the resulting photographs were displayed in an exhibition, complete with face-in-hole boards for shoppers. 

Whether the photographs have persuaded anyone to visit these places is difficult to say, but in a country already saturated with promotional images of regional produce, hot springs and scenic farmland, a bodybuilder looking personally disappointed by the size of a sweet potato has a certain advantage.

And there is something rather sweet about the men themselves, who’ve spent years cultivating bodies worthy of gym ads and thirst trap calendars, only to spend their working days posing in sentimental or vulnerable scenes. Muscle Plus has them knitting, picking flowers, losing arguments and gazing affectionately at very small animals. 

“Even the Cat Abandons the Buff Guy”

In one photograph, a bodybuilder has been left in a cardboard box in the woods, his shoulders spilling over the sides, while an orange cat walks past without giving him a second glance. The website calls it “Even the Cat Abandons the Buff Guy.” The cat, as it happens, was an unplanned addition. During a shoot with three buff dudes eating roasted sweet potatoes at a campground, it wandered into the frame and made itself comfortable among the models. 

And if you’re wondering what to do with any of these photographs, the homepage has some advice: “Let’s think about what to use it for later.”

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Updated On November 11, 2026