In today's society, sport and fitness mass media permeate young people's lives and influence their development of physicality. Through the media, powerful cultural categories such as beauty, gender/sex and race discipline young people's bodies and circumscribe their participation in physical activity practices. Socio-cultural research in physical education has reported that young people aim to achieve an unattainable perfect body and thus high status physicality by internalizing ideals of femininity associated with slenderness and Whiteness, or ideals of masculinity linked with muscularity, strength, skillfulness and forceful actions. While a significant body of research in the sociology of physical education has explored the link between the mass media and youths' social construction of the ideal body, the examination of the construction of the non-ideal body has not been explored. The investigation of youths' construction of the non-ideal body in physical education therefore contributes to a deeper understanding of youth culture's idealization of body and development of physicality. The purpose of this study was to investigate young people's construction of the non-ideal body as portrayed in sports and fitness magazines. The results presented are from a larger year-long qualitative ethnographic study in two public high schools. The participants were twenty-eight high school students in physical education classes. The researcher observed four classes for twelve weeks, and conducted an interview and a member check with each participant. A content analysis and coding procedure was conducted to analyze the data. Results revealed that students identified Black and White hyper-muscular body builders and a Black track and field athlete as the non-ideal female body because they were seen as too masculine. The non-ideal male body was identified as a slim White golfer and a hyper-muscular White body builder. None of the Black males pictured in the sports and fitness magazines were identified as non-ideal bodies. In opposition to the Black or White masculine female, the White slender golf player and the White hyper-muscular body builder were seen as feminized. Considering the results of this study, the researcher theorizes that these non-ideal bodies were identified as borderland because they transgress gendered and racialized body norms. Similar to other findings on the construction of the body, these results evidence how the body is disciplined by gender/sex and race cultural ideologies. To help young people become aware of their idealization of the body, a gender and race sensitive pedagogy in physical education is necessary.Keyword(s): gender issues, high school issues, multiculturalism/cultural diversity