The truth about body image no one tells you

• Focusing too much on body image can hinder your progress in improving your physique, leading to short-sighted training, destructive dieting, and an impossible standard to achieve.
• Instead of focusing on body image, focus on improving your physical performance and strength. Increasing muscle mass and decreasing body fat will naturally lead to the physique you desire.
• To build an ideal physique, set specific strength goals and work towards them. Once you reach those goals, you’ll have the muscle mass needed.
• When trying to get leaner, do so in short bursts, and stop cutting when it becomes difficult. Then focus on building more muscle instead, which will allow you to get leaner while still feeling good.
• By focusing on objective measures of performance and body weight, rather than just appearance, you can make steady, sustainable progress towards your ideal physique without ever needing to worry about how you look.

Even if you end up building the physique of your dreams, there is still going to be a long period of time where you’re not there yet. And if you’re motivated to improve your physique, there is probably some part of you that’s not satisfied currently with the way your body looks. The thing is, the more you focus on your body image, the harder it is going to be for you to make the changes necessary to actually improve your body. In this video, I want to show you how being overly focused on how my body looked, held me back with my progress for years, how I overcame it to start making much more reliable, faster progress with my physique, with much less stress and how you can do the same to both fast track your journey to your goal body and make it a much more enjoyable one.
So there’s three big problems that emerge when body image is your focus, and these help me back more than anything in my first couple of years of training. The first issue is short-sighted training. The more you are focused on your body image, the more vulnerable you are with your training to be reactive to short-term fluctuations in your physique and be completely focused on the wrong thing because the work that’s going to get you insane transformation over the next couple of years is going to do basically nothing to your physique in the next couple of weeks. And so if you are either showing up to the gym and trying to get a pump or work up a sweat and feel like you’re making progress in the short term, or you’re measuring the success of your training based on how much your physique is changing, how much better you look in the mirror, then you’re completely missing the point.
And this is how people just get stuck in this cycle of showing up to the gym, chasing hypertrophy, doing their sets and reps and feeling like they’re working hard but never actually making any real changes long term. Your physique is fickle and it tells you nothing about the progress that you’re making. If you’d have any real success with training, you need a process that you know works long-term when done right and a way of objectively measuring your progress with that so that you know whether you’re on the path or not. And I’ll show you what that looks like shortly. The second problem is destructive dieting. If body image is your focus and your measure of success, it is going to be almost impossible for you to avoid prioritising short-term fleeting results over the long-term progress that you really ultimately want. Specifically if your goal is to be lean, defined, arms, six pack, whatever, then there is a way to get there that you can sustain that’s easy and that you can improve on with time.
But if your measure of success is whether your body image in the short term is improving or getting worse, then you’re going to want to always be getting leaner. The problem with that is that very quickly you’re going to hit a wall where getting leaner is no longer easy, becomes difficult, even though you might not be as lean as you want to be. You’ve got body fat that’s still frustrating you and the strategy that helps you get to where you are now of hitting a calorie deficit, cutting down, losing weight, stops working like it used to, and it’s very easy to then find yourself in this cycle of cutting down, rebounding back up, gaining body fat and getting frustrated and repeating this cycle whilst making no significant changes Long-term you get stuck in a loop restricting yourself, trying to avoid gaining fat, but never making any real progress towards getting leaner and never being able to sustain a place that you’re happy with can be a pretty suffocating place to be.
I will show you how you fix that as well. The third problem with having body image as your goal, your measure of success is that it creates an impossible standard to be trying to achieve. If your measure of success is how good you look, then you’re never going to get a chance to appreciate it because you’re always going to be seeing your body through this critical lens of am I where I want to be? And you can always be improving. So it’s kind of like pursuing happiness in pursuit of any goal. The way we stay on track is through negative emotion. We compare where we are now to where we want to be and because there’s always a gap, we always have a higher ideal that we’re striving. For instance, a better body negative emotion tells us we’re not there yet. There’s work to do and orients us towards where that gap is so that we can focus on put energy there and bridge the gap.
So if your goal is a better physique and you’re judging your level of success through how good your body looks, then you are always going to be dissatisfied because it could always be better. And so with happiness, if we make feeling good and happy, the goal, then whenever we’re feeling negative emotion, which is an inevitable part of daily life as a human being, then we’re going to feel even worse about the fact that we’re now not at our goal, which is feeling happy. And this just creates this negative feedback loop spiral, which makes it really hard to ever feel good. We feel bad about feeling bad, which just makes us feel worse versus aiming for objective goals that we know will produce happiness as a byproduct, like focusing on our relationships, our physical health, our work, and your physique, your body image is very similar.
If you have the right objective goals to focus on, that will get you a good physique as a result and you focus on those and measuring your progress in them, then just like happiness can emerge from achieving the components of a good life with the right fitness goals, a great looking body inevitably emerges as a byproduct. So the question then is what do those goals look like? What should you be aiming for in order to make sure you do get this great physi as an outcome? The massive shift here for me occurred when I realised that all the aesthetic results that I wanted were tied directly to my body’s physical performance. A great looking athletic physique is honestly simply a reflection of ability, not just any ability. I’ll give you specifics that you can actually aim for, but just realise this concept, it was so freeing for me realising this because it meant that how I look day to day, week to week, utterly irrelevant to actually improving how I look.
It’s a byproduct of these other things. It meant I never actually had to worry about it or think about it. The point in my life where I completely just put it to the side and stopped worrying at all about how I looked was the moment when I really started accelerating in my performance, but also in my physique. So we’re going to get all the good looking body. Essentially what we want is just the best body composition possible at a healthy weight, which means compared to wherever you are now, if you’re not at your goal, we want more muscle mass, less body fat. If you want to look leaner, more athletic, more defined, more toned, that’s it. More muscle, less fat. Now there were two huge breakthroughs for me that made this all very simple and very achievable, one relating to each of these things. Number one, it’s impossible to know whether you are gaining muscle based on your looks.
You can check yourself out flexing in the mirror all day every day. It is not a reliable indicator of progress. Muscle mass takes a lot of time to build, so we need an objective way of knowing whether we are building it. Body composition scales don’t work. No one’s going to go and get a DEXA scan every week. There is one way to know reliably whether you are gaining muscle, and that is through your strength As a natural athlete trying to build a better physique strength is the only reliable indicator you have that you’re gaining muscle and it is reliable. People will come in here and say, oh, hypertrophy muscle growth is somehow a different thing. It’s disconnected to strength. It’s not exactly the same thing. It is focusing on anything other than improving your strength is completely missing the point. There is no way that you can build up to doing things like plange pushups, handstand pushups, one arm chin up or really heavy barbell lifts.
Anything that requires a serious amount of force production from your muscles. You cannot achieve those things without building physical muscle tissues. There is some skill to learn with movements. You can make some fast free gains early on based on neurological adaptation to keep getting stronger over time. The only way that happens is by your body building muscle tissue by you getting bigger. And the beautiful thing about this is it means that if we’re just constantly focusing on improving our maximum strength, measuring that every time we train and having that as our sole goal with our training, it means that as we improve it, we know our body’s growing. We don’t have to worry about how we look. We don’t have to try and measure our muscles in some way. We know that the closer we get to our high level objective strength goals, the closer we’re getting to the level of muscle mass that we want to look how we want to look.
And breakthrough. Number two, fat loss only works if done in short bursts and measured objectively. One key concept, this video, if you’ve ever struggled with weight loss or body composition, understanding this changed my life forever. Getting lean, losing body fat becomes unproductive as soon as it becomes difficult. As I mentioned before, if you’re always trying to lose body fat, it quickly becomes a vicious cycle because without being willing to gain weight, which is necessary, if you’re building muscle, then it’s going to be very hard for you to ever get, let alone stay any leaner. Because once you hit a point where losing body fat is tricky, then you’re getting towards the lower end of the range of body weight that your body’s comfortable being at. And the only way to then improve your body composition, you’ve already bottomed out. And so losing more fat is no longer an option.
So the only option you have is building muscle. Then at the same weight you can be at a leaner body composition, you’ve now got more muscle to make up for the fat that you need to lose. And I guess you’ve got to learn everything by experience. I hope to impart some of this onto guys so you don’t have to go through it. But early days, I was so shortsighted with my goals, I just wanted to look better now. So I prioritised being lean and I just hit this wall. I was so far off looking how I really wanted to look, but trying harder to lose weight or get lean, it just didn’t work. My body wouldn’t have it. And I found this really frustrating. I thought I just had to push harder and try more. And it wasn’t until I completely let go of that and just focused on training and listened to my body and I gained a lot of weight.
But what that allowed me to do is to have so much more muscle mass that I’m now way leaner than I was at that point, but I’m also 10 kilos heavier and it’s easier and I don’t have to try. I had to be willing to kind of go backwards first to not look as good for a few months a year whilst I gained some weight of my body, even things out and did its thing. And the only way that that worked for me was by focusing on performance. I was getting stronger, so I felt good. I knew I was moving in the right direction because my body was building muscle wise, even though the mirror wouldn’t tell me that. I knew I was on the path that I needed to be on to have a really high functioning body. And once I’d realised these things, I saw that that is what I needed to look at.
I wanted to look. So here’s the overarching model that I use, and if I was starting from scratch, this is how I would build my dream physique without ever even worrying about what’s going on in the mirror. And side tip is that I would try and look in the mirror as little as possible and just focus on the process because the less distraction you can have in this process, the better step one, build as much strength as physically possible. You only need six well-selected strength goals, but the faster you can build towards them, the sooner you’re going to have the muscle mass necessary to have serious changes in your physique and get to a leaner body competition that looks really good. That can be done in 40 minutes a week of training with one well-structured meal a day. It’s going to take time regardless of how smart you do it.
So the sooner you can get that in place, the sooner you’re going to be where you want to be. Know that those strength goals will deliver you all the muscle mass that you could possibly want once you reach them. Step two, and here’s where the nuance comes in. Get as lean as you can comfortably get with the current amount of muscle mass that you have. So measure objectively. Again, don’t rely on the mirror. Track your body weight weekly averages so that you’re losing about half a kilo a week. As soon as that process starts becoming physically difficult, you start experiencing hunger and low energy and cravings stop. You’re not done forever, but for now you’re done because once things start getting difficult, you’re both going to be limiting the amount of muscle mass that you can be building. And you might even be cutting into muscle mass and getting smaller as you keep trying to cut down, which is just going to delay things even further for your long term so you can drop weight, get leaner.
Once it starts getting tricky, just realise that the most productive thing for you then is to stop cutting, allow your body to grow as a result of your strength increases, and then you can come back to dropping weight again later once you have the muscle to allow yourself to get to a lean position while still feeling good. The great thing about this is as you do these two things, your performance is always going to be improving. So when you’re building muscle, you’re going to be getting stronger as a result of that muscle. And when you’re cutting body fat, your relative strength is going to be increasing because you’re going to keep that muscle mass and ideally keep more, albeit maybe at a slightly sore rate whilst losing dead weight, body fat, meaning you’ve got less body to move. And the other great thing about body weight training is that because all our strength is based on leveraging body weight, you’re always actually getting objectively stronger, whether you’re currently cutting body fat or not, and you can just repeat this cycle forever.
A rough guideline that I’d give you on timing in the first few years of doing this is aimed for a ratio of about one to three fat loss to not fat loss. So you can hit a calorie deficit for one to three months up to 12 weeks after that. It suggests having a break and then focus on just normal eating and muscle gain for the next three to nine months. So basically every year you can do three months of cutting. At some point. More than that is just not going to be productive because muscle mass gain takes time and you want to be allowing as much time for that as possible. And that’s the framework. You never have to worry about your body image at all for any of these things. You measure strength objectively. You measure body weight objectively and through these cycles, you’re just trying to maximise the ratio of strength to body weight Over time. An aesthetic physique is inevitably going to result from that improvement. The more you progress, the better you’re going to look. Until one day you do look in the mirror and go, holy shit. And that is a very nice feeling.