How to Achieve the Body of Our Dreams
What does it mean to pursue the body of our dreams?
What’s up campers? To kick things off for today’s lesson, I want to dive into the differences between physique, endurance, power, and strength. Don’t get me wrong, there are many more athletic measurements than the ones I just listed, but for our purposes today I want to dive into these 4 and how they really apply to the body of our dreams. Let’s get started with what they actually represent and how they combine to produce that coveted body image.
Physique, endurance, power, and strength all work together to produce a body that is good-looking, athletic, and capable. Mobility, stability, body awareness, etc. can all be assumed within these 4 categories as also being essential for our purposes today. When most people consider the body of their dreams they consider it to be pain free, capable, fast, and sexy. Maybe you could come up with a few other attributes, but generally speaking, all of these apply to the masses. It’s not just about looks, but they’re important, and it’s also not just about performance or health metrics either, the body of our dreams really is a culmination of many of these attributes in cooperation with one another. Consider all of these when picking out your next workout program.
Physique
Physique can be understood as the aesthetic nature of our bodies. For a good physique, one needs to have size, definition, and balance. A good physique is a healthy looking one, with healthy looking body composition, healthy looking skin, and confident posture. All of these things help send unrecognizable signals to those around us about who we are. A good physique is not something that someone can buy, it takes a lot of discipline and hard work to maintain and makes us more attractive individuals. The truth is, attractive people are fun to be around, especially when they are attractive people with incredible personalities and engaging conversation. Someone’s physique, or overall aesthetic fitness level heavily weighs on their overall attractiveness, and in turn makes people like magnets for social interaction. This obviously doesn’t guarantee happiness or even the body of our dreams, but it does wonders for one’s self esteem, their social interactions, and comfortability in one’s own skin, so a good physique is still pretty damn essential in the pursuit of a dream body.
Endurance
Endurance can be interpreted in a few different ways, but we will define it today as one’s overall ability to both live their daily routines without fatigue as well as one’s ability to be able to perform athletically for an extended period of time.
To make things simple in the beginning, we need endurance in order to perform at a high level throughout long work days coupled with family responsibilities and social commitments. Our dream body needs to be able to handle extended periods of time without rest, it needs to be able to perform without reprise in our daily tasks. If we have a lower endurance level for workload, focus, or overall performance, we can fall behind on essential tasks that push us and our families forward. What good is a dream body if we look great but can’t make it through the work day without a nap before dinner?
Heavy influencers on one’s ability to endure the day is diet and supplementation. If we regularly feed ourselves foods that don’t process very well we can slow down our metabolic functions, cause tiredness or fatigue, and lower general feeling of wellbeing. If we learn the kinds of foods our bodies deal well with we can feed them regularly for success in our busy work days. As for supplementation, most people (like everyone, no joke) do not take in anywhere near the micronutrient and vitamin levels that are recommended for good metabolic function. Personally, I have been taking 1st Phorm Micro Factor for years to support my own metabolic processes and I believe anyone would be hard pressed to find another product that provides the level of support that Micro Factor does. In all, control what you can control. Feed your body foods that fuel it well while supplementing the micros that your body needs to improve overall daily endurance.
The second half to this one is athletic endurance. If we want to be able to perform, athletically, for an extended period of time (whether that is cardio based training, steady state paces, high intensity work, etc.) we need to put ourselves into situations that permit endurance adaptation. The body only adapts to the environments we put it into, therefore if we want to be able to perform for an extended period of time (running for example) we need to continue to “progressively overload,” the body with longer, more challenging training sessions in order to encourage endurance adaption. A dream body is a body that can perform well, for long periods of time.
Power
Many people probably would not even consider power to be a main focal point attributing to the body of their dreams, but I would argue that power is a strong aspect of overall athletic performance and essential to a dream body. We want our dream body to look great, endure long periods of time, and also be able to create force in a short period of time. Peak force output is a great health metric to track as the body’s ability to convert stored energy into quick, explosive force can be difficult to do and also help show varying levels of athletic conditioning. In terms of an engine in a car, often times we will hear comparisons between performance vehicles and how long it takes them to achieve 0-60 MPH, and this can be compared to total power output for our bodies. We want a body that can not just achieve great force over a long warm-up period, but also one that can display incredible force in a quick 0-60 timeframe, so to speak. I would even argue that this metric heavily influences one’s personal perception on overall athletic ability. A person who wields a high amount of power output in their athletic performance would feel very physically capable, being proficient at manipulating their own bodies as well as the world around them with greater ease. A dream body is a body that can produce force quickly and efficiently.
Strength
A dream body is one that not only looks attractive, can perform for long periods of time, and can create force quickly, it also needs to be able to produce a large amount of force in general. Strength is probably the most common metric people consider when referencing athletic ability. Often times, strength is directly correlated with athletic prowess, masculinity, and overall bodily capability, but we know it can be none and all of these at the same time.
In order for a body to be athletically sound, it must wield some formidable amount of strength, otherwise both aesthetics and power are diminished by a lack of strength (which is directly related to muscle mass).
Strength can be associated with masculinity and definitely amplifies both masculine character traits and physique traits on men, but it does not necessarily make women more masculine by improved overall strength. In many ways, women are often regarded with their aesthetic physiques through great focus on strength training over extended periods of time. I have found in my many years of personal training that an emphasis on strength-based training helps accentuate the aesthetically pleasing aspects of both the male and female physiques. It is only when the artificial implementation of androgenous hormones takes place in the female physique where women become “bulkier,” or push their bodies beyond a more feminine structure. In contrast, strength training helps build the legs, glutes, back, chest, arms, shoulders, etc. on both males and females in generally attractive ways. Most commonly, individuals who are holding onto large amounts of excess body fat can initially feel like they are getting “bulkier,” or gaining weight when beginning a new strength training routine when in reality they are simply replacing excess body fat with muscle mass and creating a stronger, denser physique.
We want bodies that can do big things, and that is exactly what bodily strength permits us to do. When our bodies are strong, they are sturdy, capable, and formidable for the world around us. No one wants to feel powerless in any situation, and a strong body can even help produce underlying confidence in situations that don’t directly require large amounts of physical strength. If our bodies are physically strong, our minds will insist that we are more capable with them.
Our Dream Bodies
To pursue a dream body is to pursue many different pursuits, consecutively, consistently. A good fitness routine challenges our bodies through all of these planes of athletic and aesthetic prowess. A dream body is constantly challenged with aesthetic balance, athletic endurance, explosiveness and strength output, while also being fed well, supplemented well, and recovered well. Our dream bodies are a never-ending pursuit (as cheesy as it may be), our dream bodies are an idea, not really a tangible, but that’s the beautiful thing about fitness, it doesn’t ever end. In different seasons of our lives we may weigh on one of these cornerstones of fitness more than the other, and that is okay too, because different seasons of life demand different outputs. Your dream body is your own, and training for it could look very different than the person next to you.
Personally, I have built the Protocol10 Training Gym community around all of these aspects. We add in the awesome dynamic of supportive community and competitive challenge along with the rest of these focal points in order to produce an incredibly engaging fitness experience. If you don’t have one of those I would highly recommend getting into one, you won’t regret it.
Keep chasing that dream body, friend, we’re all gonna make it someday.
Coach Happel