Acrofatic / Real Life

• The main reason fat people can be agile is because they rely on fast-twitch anaerobic muscles. This is why many of the early baseball heroes like Babe Ruth were a bit on the pudgy side. They didn't need endurance, just a quick burst of speed to get to first base.
• Sammo Hung, a legendary action superstar and frequent collaborator with Jackie Chan and Yuen Biao in Hong Kong action cinema. He suffered an injury at 16 that left him bedridden for months, and the resulting weight gain has more or less become his calling card. Even nearing the age of sixty and not getting any thinner, he can still go toe-to-toe with the likes of much younger action stars such as Donnie Yen and Wu Jing.
• Most female practitioners of traditional Middle Eastern and African dance are exactly this— not particularly surprising, as the dances come from places where being fat is a sign of good luck and/or affluence. Though it's also because of a concerted effort made by practitioners to reach out to heavyset women, who are often rejected out of hand by ballet or modern dance studios. Dancing is a highly effective treatment for the body image problems that a lot of women face because it naturally boosts endorphins, attracts positive attention from others, and also teaches you how to move your body in a more elegant way ALL the time.
• Lizzo may be a big girl, but, as many of her live performances have shown, she can move. As if to emphasise this (as well as her message of body positivity), her troupe of backup dancers are all examples of this trope as well.
• Big Pun was morbidly obese, a fact that ultimately led to his death, but that didn't stop him from giving intricate Motor Mouth performances on just about all of his songs that even healthy people would struggle to have the lung capacity for.
  400 pounds, but I move fast.
• Comedian Joey Diaz is a very large man and is also an accomplished jiu-jitsu practitioner.
• Heavy Impact from Americas Best Dance Crew is a group of acrofatic dancers.
• Any aging martial artists and swimmers tend to fall on this category, overlapping with Stout Strength— Bud Spencer being the prime example. Also most SCA heavy fighters.
• Chris Farley was a football player in high school and played rugby at Marquette University. He was surprisingly agile and performed some of his own stunts. His dance moves in this skit are actually pretty hard to pull off.
• Oliver Hardy was a talented physical comedy performer and a graceful dancer, as seen in many Laurel and Hardy shorts.
• Silent film comedian Fatty Arbuckle, who earned his nickname (it would later cause him health problems), was very nimble as well.
• Nick Frost is a very heavy man but is very physically capable and agile as the action scenes in The World's End and his Salsa dancing in Cuban Fury prove.
• Both Curly Howard and Curly Joe De Rita in the later years of The Three Stooges. Howard was a skilled ballroom dancer and showed his dancing skills in some of the boys' shorts.
• Roy "Big Country" Nelson is one of few mixed martial artists to compete at a high level that could be genuinely considered "fat". He spent most of his career with a massive beer belly, which he would rub after stoppage victories. It was widely known that his entrance into the UFC was delayed considerably due to reluctance in hiring a fat fighter. On The Ultimate Fighter, Nelson fought the most-watched MMA bout in U.S. network history against chiseled street fighter Kimbo Slice, won a lopsided stoppage, and promptly demanded a cheeseburger. Recently, however, he has come under considerably more pressure to slim down and drop to light-heavyweight.
• Going simply by numbers, it is possible for people who are short but muscular to be classified as overweight by the Body Mass Index, even though they don't actually have that much fat on their bodies. In a way, if you were to fall under this rather curious arrangement, you're statistically acrofatic!
• Daniel Cormier is also known for his obesity and his love of Popeye's chicken. However, he moves faster than he looks and has defeated some of the best and more fit heavyweight superstars. He has recently dropped to light heavyweight and has been crowned a UFC champion after Jon Jones was stripped of it.
• John Belushi; just watch The Blues Brothers and see the acrobatics a small fat man can perform while dancing on stage. He was a starting linebacker on his high school football team. His nickname then was "Killer".
• Actors in general, including overweight ones, are often trained in mime and other forms of movement performance since acting can rely on gesture and body language as much as it does on speech. Even bumbling comedians need to be athletically trained in order to perform their pratfalls properly.
• Women who play roller derby often fall under this trope. While there are many players who are slender or average, some of the best are much larger.
• Eric Esch, a.k.a. Butterbean. This guy is like steel wrapped in fat.
• According to ESPN the Magazine's NFL Draft Glossary, this is what is scouts refer to as a "circus elephant", a big man with stunning agility, and not just for someone his size.
  • William "The Refrigerator" Perry of the Chicago Bears in the 1980s would be a prime example of the type.
  • Linebackers and linemen in football almost always fit this trope since their main role is to hit hard, but they need to be quick on their feet as well. Sure, linemen may not have the speed that a running back or a cornerback does, but when the pocket collapses and the quarterback has to run to avoid a sack, he has to run fast. To put this into perspective, the average NFL running back, normally the fastest member on the team, can run the 40-yard dash in a little over 4.3 seconds, while the average linebacker can run it in 4.6 seconds.
  • The Kansas City Chiefs will see your William Perry and raise you Dontari Poe. During a 2016 game against the Denver Broncos, the nearly 350-pound defensive tackle Poe was put into the Chiefs' offensive line for one play. The Broncos defense lined up to try and stop Poe from running the ball... but instead he fired off a picture-perfect jump pass to a teammate for the touchdown.
• James "Lights Out" Toney, Sextuple Weight Class Champion. Could, on a slim day, be described as "chubby." Still one of the slickest, most technical boxers of the last twenty years. Hard to imagine such a hefty dude being so fast... He was most dominant at the lower weight classes when he was slimmer and in shape. While he did quite well as a (fat) heavyweight and WAS very slick and technical even after putting on the weight, it was from his sheer talent as a boxer: he did well in spite of the weight, rather than because of it.
• Fred (Rerun) Berry was quite a dancer. This is only to be expected from a founding member of the Lockers
• Jack Black. Although on the pudgy side, he is surprisingly agile and can perform physical comedy with the best of them. Specifically referenced in his appearance on Community, where he tries to gain access to the group by claiming they need "an agile fat guy". He then accidentally high-kicks Jeff in the face.
• While the calorie cap certainly exists, many professional basketball players, particularly "bigs" who usually play the center position, are notably husky— including such all-time greats as Charles Barkley and Shaquille O'Neal.
  • Barkley was particularly an example in college. He slimmed down a little in the pros — his official playing weight was 252 lbs. — but was frequently up in the 280 to 290 range while at Auburn. His first national exposure came during the 1984 Olympic trials, and other players there reported being amazed that anyone so big could be so explosively quick and such a powerful jumper.
  • Bill Simmons lists "the five fattest NBA players of my lifetime" as Stanley Roberts, John "Hot Plate" Williams (the nickname is a deliberate takeoff on John "Hot Rod" Williams)^note  Hot Rod found this Actually Pretty Funny, went out of his way to befriend Hot Plate, and the two became close buddies, Hot Plate was very torn up at Hot Rod's death in 2015. , Thomas Hamilton, Robert Traylor and Oliver Miller, most of whom fit the trope despite weight issues.
  • Boris Diaw was notably pudgy during his NBA career... yet had surprisingly graceful footwork and once recorded the highest vertical jump of any player.
    • Now that Diaw has retired, the current player who fits this mold is Nikola Jokić. Despite his weight, Jokić has established himself as perhaps the best center in the NBA today, has won multiple MVPs and a NBA Championship.
• Pablo Sandoval of the San Francisco Giants. During the 2009 season, he was 5'11" tall and weighed close to 280lbs, but showed remarkable agility despite his size. After scoring a run by jumping over the opposing catcher's tag at home plate, a teammate gave him the affectionate nickname of "Kung Fu Panda".
• Aiden Trimble, head of the FSK, is anything but a small man. Not that you'd ever notice whilst he's moving.
• Fighting bulls. Nicely summed up by the Mythbusters' trial of the 'bull in a china shop' adage.
• Manx cats, as well as lacking tails, have a generally bulky body shape and faintly ridiculous long hind limbs that earned them the nickname 'cabbit'. However, they are still perfectly capable of the dainty athleticism that cats are known for.
  • Any fat cat in general. Even outright obese cats can be shockingly agile and good jumpers when they decide to move.
• While it's up to you to decide whether or not crocodiles can be perceived as fat, they are easy to mistake for sluggish predators on land. It's really downright terrifying to see how fast they actually run.
• Similarly, gorillas may look overweight but are still incredibly powerful, and a charging silverback is still quite frightening, even if it's usually just a bluff. In fact, the overweight appearance is simply due to their need for a large gut in order to sufficiently digest the amount of vegetable matter they eat.
• This also applies to the 3 biggest land animals on the planet, hippos, rhinos, and elephants. Not only are they surprisingly fast for animals that weigh multiple tons, but they're also pretty difficult to stop when charging.
  • The American bison is also a very agile beast considering its bulk, and a surefooted climber and jumper. It's also notoriously territorial and travels in large herds, earning well deserved reverence from Plains Native tribes.
• Troy Jackson aka "Escalade" was a 500 lbs professional streetballer.
• Thais Carla, a hefty Brazilian teenager who's a skilled, graceful dancer.
• Also from Brazil, the late comedian Bussunda of Casseta & Planeta, whose biography states that "defying the laws of physics, remained playing great soccer despite gaining weight". (In fact, the afternoon before his death was spent playing Association Football with some foreigners.)
• Professional baseball pitcher C.C. Sabathia is around 300 pounds with an obvious spare-tire. However, he is one of the most dominating aces playing baseball today. He won a Cy Young award while on the Cleveland Indians and he led the New York Yankees to a World Series title. He's known for his great stamina, despite his size. He can throw over 120-to-140 pitches an outing. Because of this, baseball experts call him a work-horse.
• Former pitcher Rick "Big Daddy" Reuschel actually ran well enough that he was sometimes used as a pinch-runner, a task often reserved for leaner athletes.
• David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox is huge (6'5") and has an obvious gut, and while he may not be the fastest person on the diamond can haul when he needs to and most other players will wisely get out of the way.
• Buster Mathis and his son Buster Mathis Jr. were overweight heavyweight boxers during the golden era of heavyweight boxing. However, they were both known for having great agility, flexibility, and defensive skills, despite their size. They both would be contenders who only lost to the elite level of boxers during their careers.
• Pretty much any sumo wrestler. Notable however as a good example that, for all the benefits of acrofatism, being overweight still carries significant health risks. Indeed, recent times have seen much urging for the wrestlers to slim down.
• Jack Patillo from Rooster Teeth is not exactly the thinnest guy around (admittedly not the fattest, either, but still), yet he can move with surprising speed when he needs to. Case in point is his tennis match against the lighter and faster Gavin Free, where he utterly curbstomps him, mostly owing to his better grasp of the game but also with surprising bursts of speed to make shots count.
• Melissa McCarthy doing a dance routine in the "Honey Baked Ham competition" skit, the second time she hosted SNL.
• Bob Hoskins was a former circus acrobat who did many of his own stunts on the set of Super Mario Bros. (1993) and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
• Daniel Lambert was an English prison keeper at the end of the 16th century. He became famous for being incredibly fat. At the time of his death, he weighed 52 stones (330 kg or 739 lbs). But he could still run 11 km "with much less apparent fatigue than several middle-sized men who were of the party" He also gave swimming lessons and could stay afloat with two men over him.
• Drag performer Divine was a very large man in real life but was known for doing pretty much anything John Waters asked during their collaborations on films, including wading through a river in full drag requiring only a single take and doing quite a bit of physical comedy in the film Lust In the Dust. Later in life, many of his friends were concerned by how much strain Divine put on his body during club performances with a ton of dancing, during which he was often seen dripping with sweat. Sadly, he died at the age of 42 of a massive heart attack.
• Boxers in the upper weight classes can be this. For one, there is the practice of weight-cutting where competitors diet and dehydrate themselves before a weigh-in to make the cut for a lower weight class than they would usually qualify for since it is advantageous to be in the upper range of your weight class. Since weigh-in day was traditionally a day before a fight, the competitors would have time to put weight back on for the match. Obviously, fighting an opponent above your weight-class is considered dangerous, however boxers usually tend to gain weight as they age. It isn't uncommon for boxers to move up a weight class or two during their career and still keep good win/loss records. Gaining weight basically makes them tougher or at least less likely to get a concussion from a heavier opponent.
• Veteran baseball pitcher Bartolo Colon is short and pudgy, but he's a consistent pitcher who has given many solid starts throughout his long career. He has over 200 wins and counting. In 2015, at 40 plus years old, Bartolo is still going strong. He is also very quick for his size; able to field his position when a ground ball occurs.
• D. Boon of the Minutemen was constantly jumping around and energetically dancing on stage despite his weight.
• Former Sheffield Wednesday goalkeeper Kevin Pressman might not have been the thinnest of players, but was surprisingly agile and had good reflexes in his prime. What he lacked in grace, he made up for in shot stopping. As this clip attests, he also scored a mean penalty. Off the pitch, he also made headlines when he chased down a car thief over fields for a mile and a half, and eventually caught him.
  • While Wednesday had Big Kev, Everton had Big Nev, aka Neville Southall, one of Everton's longest-serving players with over 500 league appearances to his name, and widely considered to be one of their best goalkeepers of all time.
• This guy.
• Sebastien Charron is one heck of a freerunner.
• Manatees are capable of swimming much faster than their chubby bodies suggests, up to 20 miles per hour. And they're graceful enough that from a distance, sailors used to think they were mermaids.
• Zach Galifianakis, during his heavier days, was pretty agile despite having a noticeably round gut, and would regularly perform a bit of physical humor in his standup routines, and sometimes even a little ballet.
• Jessamyn Stanley is a plus-sized and body positive yoga instructor who possesses a full and plump body shape, especially in the belly, but she is a talented yogi who can do complex moves like going on her head that would leave the most slender amateur yogi stunned.
• Jody Bunting is a British fitness instructor and life coach who at one point in 2001 tipped the scales at 200kg/434lbs/31 stone. He turned his weight loss journey into multiple TV appearances in 2001-2003 where he repeatedly demonstrated astonishing flexibility and energy for a man of his bulk.
• Gert Fröbe, who played the title character in Goldfinger, was described by one critic as "heavyset yet nimble", and this was fully on display in the film. See also his dancing in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and physical comedy in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.
• For an automotive example, consider Monster Trucks. Per Monster Jam specifications, these trucks are 10.5 feet tall, 12.5 feet wide, and 17.5 feet long, and they can weigh as many as 6 tons. These are truly massive vehicles, but that doesn't prevent the drivers from pulling off some amazingly agile stunts with them in freestyle competition.
• Jays catcher Alejandro Kirk. He's listed at 5'8" and 245 pounds, but can spring up from a crouched position with impressive agility, was an All-Star in 2022, and is one of the better defensive catchers in the MLB.