Aesthetics vs. Athleticism: It’s an age-old debate in fitness. Some argue it's pointless to lift just to look good but have a 6-inch vertical and can’t run five sprints to save your life.
Others argue that looking good is the reason they work out because they don’t need to be super athletic in their daily lives. However, problems arise when you get too focused on one aspect of fitness while ignoring the others.
Your body is built to work as one solid unit. Its purpose, for thousands of years, was to chase down food to eat and run away from predators that wanted to eat you. Since then, we have evolved to till fields, build castles, cross oceans, tame the wilderness, and ultimately, our evolution peaks with sitting at a desk from 9 to 5 and watching football on the weekends. Regardless of your goals, spending time in the gym is much healthier for you than sitting around all day.
Part of what makes working out great is the ability to focus on whatever you want! All these people are in the gym doing, for the most part, the same exercises. However, a few tweaks in the number of reps performed or training intensity and you can perform, and look, very different. The gym is your place to focus on yourself, not anyone else. Respect yourself and your own goals.
If you want to go to the gym to look good next summer and don’t really care about being able to deadlift more, then do that! If you are going into the gym with the goal of breaking the state powerlifting record but don’t care how large your biceps are, then focus on that! Don’t let anyone tell you that you are doing something wrong just because your goals don’t align with their “far superior fitness ideologies.”
The past couple of decades have seen large rips torn in the fabric of exercise and health. Everyone has taken to hating on others over internet forums just because they don’t have the same fitness goals or dreams. It’s truly sad because so much can be learned from someone who goes to the gym for a totally different reason than you do. So much knowledge can cross over from sport to sport but is lost because of a lack of open-mindedness.
All this goal-setting in the gym is great, but it should incorporate some balance as well. Just because you don’t care how much you deadlift doesn’t mean that you should ignore it and stay bad at it because it doesn’t exactly align with your goal of getting a bigger chest. Just because your goal is to squat 800 lbs raw doesn’t mean that it is an excuse to stuff 5,000 calories a day down your throat, dangerously balloon in weight, and lose some cardiovascular health. Being fit is a continuum and everyone lands on it somewhere. The majority of the continuum is healthy, but as you get closer to either end, it can become unhealthy.
Ask anyone what’s most impressive, aesthetics or athleticism, and the answer should be both. You can train to get stronger and look better at the same time. Beginners, especially, can expect huge growth in both muscle size and proportion, but also strength gains as well. Maintaining that balance between athleticism and aesthetics may be more impressive than either one by itself.
At the end of the day, working out should be about you and nobody else. Athleticism and aesthetics are two totally different things that don’t even have to be mutually exclusive. Strive to be the best and healthiest version of yourself and the rest will fall into place.
