Sorry, Wrong Number
AESTHETIC VS ATHLETIC
[This is a revision and rework of a 2013 piece.]
Last week, I made the case for programming—the structured sequence that turns scattered effort into cumulative development—and that without it, all coaching is cosmetic.
But I didn’t touch on program design itself.
For beginners, and arguably the general training population, the intricacies of program design are an unnecessary complexity. Not that programs are necessarily complex. While they might involve calculating 1RM percentages and manipulating training variables across mesocycles, they can also be a few sentences, as perhaps most famously demonstrated by Pavel’s Easy Strength advice to Dan John:
“For the next forty workouts, pick five lifts. Do them every workout. Never miss a rep, in fact, never even get close to struggling. Go as light as you need to go and don’t go over ten reps for any of the movements in a workout. It is going to seem easy. When the weights feel light, simply add more weight.”
That’s a program. But its simplicity is derived from decades of understanding.
And as described last week—when the underlying goal of all programming is to direct our efforts to best effect, it would only be a betrayal of that good sense for us to write a program when— I don’t care what your fitness goal is— literal legions have walked the path before you.
Many of whom have forgotten more about fitness or fat loss, or strength training — or anything else you can think of— than you or I will ever know.
So you have a map to follow. You can step off this well-worn path in favour of hacking your way through the jungle, but then things are going to be much harder, and you may not get where you want to go.
So you’d need a surplus of spare time and energy to justify that approach. If it were me, I’d stand on the shoulders of giants.
The only thing worth concentrating on for at least your first ten programs is finishing them. All of them. Every time. In every circumstance except injury.
Still, choosing (or writing) a program begins with one question— what is your goal?— so in the interests of greasing that path and heading off some misguided misery at the pass, a few caveats are worth mentioning — especially when it comes to what most people want from training: a better body.
The aesthetic goal is unquestionably the most popular of all fitness pursuits and often the sole motivation behind any training and dietary program. Yet when you consider both the outcome and the day-to-day behaviours it encourages, we need to question whether this makes sense.
Just as different methods will help or hinder a particular goal, so too will our point of focus. I’m not looking to rain on your swimsuit parade, but your mindset will determine your success or failure long before any rep or calorie does. And the problem with an aesthetic goal is that it fixes your attention on the wrong thing — a number.
SORRY, WRONG NUMBER
Scale Weight
If ever there was a false metric for success in any fitness pursuit — aesthetic or otherwise — it’s scale weight. You can make dramatic changes—build muscle, lose fat, completely reshape your physique—with no change to that number at all.
Weight loss is never linear. Some drop weight quickly, then plateau. Others grind for weeks before it suddenly shifts. Both represent progress. But if your success is tied to that number, what happens when it doesn’t move? What happens when it goes up?
Unless your goal is insanity, “losing weight” doesn’t accurately describe what you want, so pursuing a number on the scale is not the path to success.
And if the scale isn’t leading you astray, the calendar probably is.
Calendar Date
Your body doesn’t know what day it is. The fast-approaching wedding, beach trip—or the annual collective delusion of January 1st—is another wrong number.
So you’re getting married in three months. Your focus on that deadline is going to do what, exactly? Deadline pressure elevates cortisol. Elevated cortisol encourages fat retention. You’ve just sabotaged the very goal that triggered the stress in the first place.
As for waiting until January 1st—or even Monday—you’re kidding yourself. If it’s important, start today. The holiday season sure as hell isn’t going to help.
And a special mention for those taking two bad ideas and multiplying them to arrive at the fitness and diet industries’ favourite formula — “Lose X by Y”— for which you can take all associated problems and square them.
The Tale of the Tape
Measurements might seem objective — inches and centimetres are hard to argue with — but they are still numbers you can’t control. Use them as a guide, not a goal.
As with the metrics above, when measurements become the focus, behaviour bends to serve them: cutting calories to starvation, exercising longer instead of better, or sacrificing recovery just to make the tape move. Progress becomes pathology—effort warped by obsession.
The tape doesn’t record the unseen: better posture, deeper sleep, calmer mood, faster recovery. It only tracks circumference, not capacity.
You can’t decide what the scale says tomorrow. You can’t decide how you’ll look by some arbitrary date. You can’t decide what your waist will measure next week.
But you can decide what you’ll do today.
NUMBERS THAT COUNT
These are the numbers that matter. Not because they’re sexy or immediate, but because they’re entirely within your control. Measure yourself against your habits— the small wins you decide, repeat, and own.
Decide you will:
Eat real food, in reasonable portions, 80% of the time
Sleep 7+ hours every night
Exercise 3+ hours per week minimum.
Then do it.
These numbers aren’t arbitrary. They’re scalable, measurable, and represent neither a pinnacle nor what might ultimately be required for an aesthetic outcome, only a reasonable baseline. Which is not to say that it’s easy, but nor does it serve us — or our chances of achieving it— by framing it as anything other than what it is: a physiological minimum.
Start small, doing just enough to elicit some change. Make no further adjustments until you stop seeing progress. Then repeat. If you’re intent on reshaping your body, that’s how you do it.
When your body is trained, nourished and recovered, it’s primed to lose fat. And you stop fretting over what you can’t control. Most importantly, the escape clause disappears—you are solely responsible.
Progress comes not from the scale, the tape, or a looming deadline, but from consistent action. Grounded in the certainty that you are doing what you can. And when you are already doing what you can… what else is there to worry about?
THE BIGGER PICTURE
In a society enamoured with bodily perfection, it’s no surprise our fitness goals mirror the billboards. But when appearance becomes the aim, the result is thinking and behaviour that’s at best unhealthy and more often self-destructive.
A truth lost on the fitness and diet industries, where health and performance are routinely subverted—or worse, equated—with an aesthetic ideal. Industries fluent in the language of transformation, and illiterate in meaning.
Strangest of all is their failure to grasp that the airbrushed ideal doesn’t inspire — it deters. Even before it’s Photoshopped, a physique sculpted for a single day of a photoshoot—before reverting to something livable— becomes the benchmark against which many measure themselves. Social media, of course, multiplies this by orders of magnitude.
Women, especially, face a perfect storm. The comparison game is rigged from the start. Invited to measure themselves against this impossible standard, they are then steered to the pink dumbbells, treadmills, “toning,” and calorie restriction — the most dumbed-down methods available.
Expert at pitching the body beautiful, not nearly so good at providing it.
And more often than not, this is women lying to other women. Billion-dollar brands that infantilise women, lie to them, and shop it back to them as empowerment. Fitness dressed up as self-care, built on self-loathing.
Men face similar imagery but benefit from an industry that at least sells challenge — faster, heavier, further. Testosterone helps, certainly, but the real advantage is cultural: men are steered toward performance metrics, women systematically away from them. Toward cardio, not strength. Toward restriction and exhaustion instead of capacity and resilience. Burning energy instead of building capacity.
In either case, aesthetics leave us all show and no go. Or, as they used to say in a less enlightened time—looks like Tarzan, plays like Jane.
The body becomes a billboard, a facade. Like a movie set: it might look good on camera, but you wouldn’t want to live in it.
But the industry mirrors this superficiality exactly. And perhaps people merely look fit because the product has always been less about delivering on the promise of fitness than appearing to deliver on it.
It’s one thing to recognise there are practices in the fitness and dietary sphere that serve the business only. And frequently at the client’s expense. It’s another to see how completely this has warped our understanding.
Most of what we all come to ‘know’ about fitness and diet is more aligned with commerce than our physiology.
Rather than prioritising the principles that actually build capability in their clientele, most of the field is concerned with the fitness of the business. Pack ’em in. Make ’em sweat. Send ’em home. Repeat.
It is theatre. The illusion of fitness.
TWO WOLVES AND A PULLUP BAR
You may have heard the Cherokee parable: A grandfather tells his grandson that inside all of us, two wolves are fighting. One embodies anger, envy, regret, arrogance, self-pity, inferiority, and ego. The other: joy, peace, hope, humility, kindness, and compassion.
Which one wins? The one you feed.
Our obsession with the superficial only feeds our insecurities and lack of self-worth. Trying to change your body out of disdain for it is, at best, the worst way to go about it. Even if you reach your “magic number,” it won’t stay magic for long. Aesthetic goals are built on the approval of others, but your insecurities will never be satisfied. You’re feeding the wrong wolf.
Now compare that to being able to do your first strict pull-up.
That’s a different story. Yes, you’ll feel strong, capable, athletic—but these will pale beside the deeper satisfaction of having done something you once thought impossible. You’ve moved your fence. The natural progression of which is to start taking a long, hard look at every other fence you’ve surrounded yourself with.
In feeding the right wolf, you’ve diluted your insecurities and cultivated resilience. You’ve learned to relish temporary discomfort in the service of something larger. And when you’ve earned that pull-up— or any performance milestone surpassing previous limitations— then go and look in the mirror. You’ll see a body changed, and a mind transformed.
FORM FOLLOW FUNCTION
When you train for a pull-up, a deadlift PB, or a faster 5K, the metrics are simple and binary. Either you can do it or you can’t. You lift it or you don’t. The feedback is immediate, objective, and undeniable.
And yet, these performance goals demand the very behaviours that produce aesthetic results—just framed in their most positive light.
This isn’t theory. It’s physiology. You can’t hit a double bodyweight deadlift without building muscle. You can’t increase your pullups without changing your body composition. You can’t improve conditioning without burning fat and developing work capacity. Form follows function.
The aesthetic goal is a blinkered view—one through which it’s all too easy to miss the vital signals of real progress. You fixate on the unchanging shell of the egg, frustrated by the lack of visible movement, blind to what’s unfolding beneath the surface.
A performance focus, by contrast, keeps you wide open—attuned to sometimes subtle, subjective measures: sleep quality, appetite, recovery, mood. You learn to listen.
One is a slippery slope of insecurity, dissatisfaction, and ultimately resignation—time will have us all. The other an infinite landscape of challenge, discipline, satisfaction, and surprise. Each time you meet and set a new standard, you further explore your potential.
One is a box. The other a horizon.
Goals are never the endgame. They’re a compass, not a crutch—a way to gauge direction and refine course, not to provide motivation. The deepest purpose of your training, nutrition, recovery, and mindset—your fitness practice—is to shift attention from results to process.
Eventually, it becomes how you live simply because it improves your life on every level. What better reason could there be?
The recognition that although a life of exercise and eating well may, at times, mean sacrifice, denial, and hardship, but so will any alternative. It requires work, always. But that too is its reward. Even as we age, each improvement, each challenge met, each discomfort embraced expands capacity and deepens awareness. The pursuit of better performance is infinite; there is always another horizon to explore.
Fittingly, we can best think of our aesthetic ideals as being egocentric—they crave attention. Chase them and they run; ignore them and they follow. Focus on other, more exciting things, and you’ll find they will come to you.
We train for performance. Not because we either shouldn’t, or don’t want to, look our best, but because we do.
Enjoy your weekend.
- OLI