For Better Fitness Outcomes, Focus on Performance Rather than Aesthetics
Most people who embark on a fitness journey for the first time do so with the primary objective of improving the way they look, and this makes perfect sense. People want to be more confident and comfortable in their own skin, and chasing aesthetic goals in the gym can be an effective way of making this happen. It can also be maddening.
On a psychological level, the process of building muscle and losing unwanted body fat primarily requires two things. The first is making meaningful changes to daily habits so that they align with these new goals and the second is cultivating patience. Aesthetic changes, especially when it comes to building muscle, come notoriously slow for most natural, genetically average individuals.
Unfortunately, fixating on the image looking back at you in the mirror does nothing to speed this process up. An emphasis on outward appearance often leads to frustration and loss of motivation, and in the worst cases can drive people to develop destructive habits, including disordered eating and steroid use, in pursuit of faster results.
There is, I think, a better way. An approach that emphasizes the setting and achieving of performance goals is better for cultivating a healthy mindset towards fitness and more sustainable over the long term for most trainees than an approach that emphasizes aesthetics. A decent performance based training program can also lead to serious physique improvements as a byproduct without requiring you to obsess over body image.
This performace focused approach is more psychologically sustainable for a couple of reasons. The first is that it makes progress easily quantifiable. Rather than obsessing over whether your pecs are looking subjectively better, you could take a look at your training log and see that you used to only be able to press 50 pound dumbbells, and now you can press 75 pound dumbbells. This provides concrete proof that the program is working, which is a huge deal when it comes to compliance. Every seemingly small personal record, whether it’s five more pounds on the barbell or five seconds off your mile time, provides a sense of accomplishment. This build up of small victories will make the process of achieving an ambitious fitness goal more enjoyable, and thus more sustainable.
The second reason is that performance training fosters an attitude towards fitness that is based on self love rather than self loathing. This is because the performance based approach encourages an attitude that focuses on what your body is capable of rather than just what it looks like. Most people will be happier with their training when they are focused on being able to do things they’ve never done before, like doing an unassisted pull-up or finishing a marathon, than when they are focused on making themselves look a certain way.
This self love benefit tends to also bleed into nutrition and recovery and make habit shifting in these areas far more enjoyable. In my personal experience, I’ve never had an easier time cleaning up my diet than when I committed to training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu three times a week. This was because I knew that if, for example, I had fast food for lunch on a training day, it would come back to bite me later when I was grinding it out on the mat. This mindset made it far easier to opt for healthier foods throughout the week, because I was focused on how certain foods would make me feel rather than how they would make me look.
Perhaps the most important benefit of focusing on performance, however, is that it pushes you towards a physical and mental state that allows you to get the most out of your life. Not only do you become physically capable by consistently breaking performance barriers, but you also develop the natural grit and confidence that comes with a record of achieving measurable goals. You start to learn that you can do things physically that once seemed impossible. For example, by focusing on building qualities like cardiovascular endurance and lower body strength in the gym rather than just improving body composition, that hike you want to go on with your friends becomes much easier and the new physically demanding hobby you might want to take up becomes less intimidating.
In terms of aesthetic benefit, the most admirable and desirable physiques in the world are more likely to be found in the octagon, on the playing field, or in the summer Olympics than they are on a bodybuilding stage. As you could probably imagine, high level athletes don’t spend a lot of time worried about their bicep peaks or chest striations, and are more concerned with becoming stronger, faster, and more durable. For most people, focusing on these qualities will create a physique that appears outwardly strong and fit and is capable of performing as well as it looks.
If you want to give this a shot, there are a couple ways to approach it. For example, you can set a performance goal based on a physical feat you want to accomplish because it interests you. This could be finishing an endurance event in a certain time, it could be hitting a certain powerlifting total, or it could be performing an advanced calisthenics exercise like a handstand pushup. Alternatively, you could think about changes you want to make to your physique and then choose a performance goal that is conducive to making those changes. For example, if you want to build more impressive arms, you could focus on getting better at chin-ups. If you want to lean out, you can focus on setting a record 5k time or performing a certain CrossFit style circuit faster than before. Either way, once you decide on a certain goal, you should tailor your training, nutrition, and recovery habits accordingly and then seek steady, consistent improvement until that goal is reached.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with training for aesthetics and there are plenty of people who have great success with the bodybuilding mindset, the vast majority of trainees will be better served by focusing on health and performance above all else. The key to a successful fitness journey is consistency, and the easiest way to be consistent is to take a sustainable and enjoyable approach to training. The steady pursuit of performance goals checks both of these boxes, and as a result will provide better outcomes for most people than training for the sole purpose of aesthetics.
