An interesting thread came up in the blog section of our Venus Index community forum. It was about the pursuit of a better looking body via exercise.

Your body is a work of art and you're the sculptor

One of the points brought up was about working out for improving the overall look of your body vs the look your body will develop as a side effect of playing a sport or doing physical activity that is not for the sole purpose of improving the look/shape of your body.

This was an interesting point to me because for at least some people there seems to be a fundamental disconnect between the concept of exercise, and activity and what it does to your body.

To be clear, everything you do from an activity/exercise stand point has an effect on the look of your body. The amount of food you choose to eat also has a big effect on the look of your body.

If you choose to ignore both items and let it just sorta happen to you then you will end up with a body shape and size that you didn’t necessarily consciously choose. This could turn out nicely for you but it could also go in a direction you’re not happy with at all.

Even if you take an active role in trying to form/shape your body if you choose to do an imbalanced workout you’ll end p with an imbalanced physique (picture a cycling with big legs and small upper body, or a swimmer or rower with disproportionately shaped shoulders or lats compared to the rest of their body)

Whether your like it or not, your body is a reflection of the physical activity you choose to partake in (or not partake in) and the amount of food you choose to eat.

Taking an active role in changing the look and shape of your body should be viewed as crafting a work of art rather than a shallow pursuit of vanity.

Working on your body to get it into it’s best shape is rooted in the same social and psychological desire to wear nice looking clothes, and to wash and style your hair, and to live in a clean house etc.

The only difference is buying clothes is easy, building a great looking body takes effort, but once you got the body you can make just about any outfit look good!

John

Weight training is a relatively new phenomenon as the physical culture revolution started in the late 1800′s and took hold in the early 1900′s.

The introduction of ‘fitness clubs’ and structured weekly weight workouts isn’t more than 100 years old.

What Happens When You Stop Working Out (and using drugs)?

As of the day I’m writing this post the first generation of people who followed structured workouts has passed and the second generation (Arnold, Lou, Franco and the gang) are reaching their golden years.

This is an interesting time because we have very little historic data to look at when it comes to weight training. Very few people workout with weights, and of those, even fewer stick with it for a lifetime.

The first two generations had very few adopters and I believe that my generation (gen x) is the first with true mass adoption of a lifestyle that includes weight training. And even my generation has very few people who actually do weight training on a consistent basis. (for example I have been training with weights for the past 15 years and have never missed more than 2-3 weeks in a row)

Even the most famous of famous people who worked out seem to have discarded the practice in their later years.

This is despite a growing body of research that indicates working out with weights is probably the single best thing you can do for your overall health into your advanced years.

I personally will never stop. As long as I can still drag myself out of bed in the morning I will always lift weights.

It’s one of the only things that seems to help keep us ‘young’.

So if you currently lift weights, will you ever stop?

John