You want to know why I work out? Partly because I love it, partly because getting stronger is pretty awesome, but also to look damn good, even if it is only from the beard down. I'm not a pretty man, I've long accepted this. I can't lose any weight off my nose or build my hairline an inch forward, instead I build my chest and shoulders, I lose fat until I have visible abs. I don't think doing this makes me narcissistic or saying it so directly makes me vainglorious, I'm just trying to be the best me I can be.
If you work out to look good or even if you don't work out to look good but it comes as happy a side effect; in my mind, there is nothing wrong with being proud of what you have achieved and the progress of your physique. There seems to be a feeling amongst some people that a sense of pride in this sort of progress makes you cocky or conceited, I've got no time for this sort of thinking. If you transform your physique, it is solely you who is to credit. Yes, you may be helped by others (who knows, maybe even me), but the willpower and resolve, the effort and toil; that is all you. I don't know about you, but I think if you have earned something fairly, you can do what the hell you want with it, including putting it out there for others to see.
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| Tom Platz being jacked as hell and rocking a stride of pride past some weedy proles. |
I wouldn't expect a self-made millionaire to be driving around in a beat up Ford Fiesta, not enjoying the fruits of their labour; nope, that dude (or lady) is rolling up in a slick Benz/Beamer/Bentley and letting people know he (or she) has made it. To extrapolate this idea to our realm of fitness and physique, if you're a dude who has been benching and doing pull ups religiously for a year, wear that size-too-small t-shirt. You've earned the pec definition, that V-taper, those arm cannons; why the hell would you throw a baggy T-shirt on and look like any other guy who hasn't put in the hours and effort? Ditto for the girls, if you've invested in squats and deadlifts, that little black dress is going to look damn good, so wear it with confidence, knowing that the reason it looks good is because you worked for it to look good.
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| Maybe not the most practical choice of outfit to go to the supermarket. Not that I'm complaining. |
Like I have said before, and probably will say many times again, there is nothing wrong with training and eating well with the aim of looking good. Even if it isn't your primary goal, training for aesthetics and having some pride in your appearance has its place, especially as the general attributes associated with good aesthetics, ample muscle mass and low body fat, will improve performance in pretty much all sports and improve general health. You can see this in most sports these days, the players may not need to look great, but they do anyway. Let's have a look at a few sports and some examples of people at the top of the game that have great physiques as well: Powerlifting? look at Dan Green. Olympic lifting? Klokov. Strongman? Pudzianowski. MMA? St. Pierre. American football? Terrell Owens. Rugby? Manu Tuilagi. Football? Christiano Ronaldo. Tennis? Nadal ...the list goes on. Have a look at any of those guys and tell me that they aren't concerned with form as well as function. The truth is if you want to be a top athlete, it doesn't hurt to look like one. Doug Young summed it up pretty well and he was a fucking tank so that automatically makes him right:
"I definitely would not want to be very, very strong and not look very, very strong. I want to look just as strong as I am. Looking pretty is, I think, very important to the majority of the people, and to the people that say it's not important, I would consider that they are not telling the whole truth." - Doug Young
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| Maybe not everyone's idea of pretty, but god-damn-jacked. |
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| Being pretty stacked is even an advantage in lame non-contact 'sports' like tennis. |
Now there are always going to be those that insist on talking behind your back; the detractors, haters and backbiters. People might say you've changed, you're like a different person. The thing is, you have changed, and if you've made big changes to yourself, your lifestyle and your habits, then yeah, to a degree, you have become a different person. You've progressed and become a better version of yourself. Those people will be there wherever you are in your fitness/body transformation journey, whether they are doubting you before you begin or finding something to pick on now you have improved yourself. The cliche is that this comes down to jealousy; that may be the case sometimes. I think it's generally more because people don't like change. They don't like you changing and getting better. You're making them look bad, you selfish fuck. Stay average like them, never change, never progress, never stand out. That way, no one will ever hate.
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| If you don't know this MMA legend, do yourself a favour and watch this. |
For those that have just made the decision to get in shape, other people can be the biggest road block to success. There will be doubters, even if it is just offhand comments, these sort of things can psychologically impact you. Do your best to ignore these people, or even better, tell them to eat a big bag of dicks; you have made the decision to positively change yourself, fuck anyone who says you can't. The other group of people you need to watch out for are the sneaky saboteurs, some of these people might not realise what they are doing, like your nice old nan who give you a cup of tea with a huge plateful of biscuits when you visit. In this case you need to explain to these people that you have made the decision to get into better shape and even though they are trying to be nice, their efforts are draining your willpower, with a lot of people it only takes so much temptation before you yield. Others in this category are less innocent, think of the best friend who insists you should just be happy however you look, so just eat some Ben & Jerry's and have a duvet day. Are these people really just talking about you when they say things like this? Or are they projecting their own weaknesses on to you and keeping you down with them? Sometimes you need to objectively take a look at relationships like this and in many cases you need to unambiguously tell these people that they are dragging you down, that you want to get better and that the way they are acting is simply stifling progress.
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| No better than a crack dealer selling to addicts. |
In the end I'm not really sure what I'm getting at with this, no one really needed this article, it's just a some words I felt like sharing with the internet. There's a couple of loosely connected things I'm getting at here: The first is to never feel ashamed of training with the aim of looking better, some small minded people might say it's vain, I say it's making the best of yourself and if you're changing yourself in positive ways, you should be proud of those changes. The second is to block out the doubters and detractors, to avoid the efforts of those who try to derail your progress and to stick to the path of the challenge that you have set for yourself. Hopefully that last sentence in some way made up for a whole page of me justifying why I like to wear tight t-shirts.
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