Here's something to consider. 

Everyone wants to look better.  Everyone. 

Even athletes.  It's not like athletes are immune to vanity, thinking of their bodies only as fine-tuned performance machines with no regard for appearance.  Nope, those folks want to look good in front of 15 million viewers on Monday nights at 9 PM just like you and I would.  Remember the US Olympic sprinters who got into such a flap because they posed shirtless draped in the flag back in...was it '04?  Not a shred of vanity there, nope.  If I was half that ripped I think I'd probably never wear a shirt.

(This was after they'd learned their lesson.)

Everyone wonders how movie stars get into such great shape for movies:  this or that guy or girl lost or gained this much weight in this little time to play this or that role.  Sure, the answer is money, in part:  they're motivated by that $20 million payday.  Sure, the answer is that they have time and personnel to help (though having worked with a few Hollywood types I can assure you that the idea that these people really have all the money and time in the world is something of a myth), but mostly it's vanity.  If all goes as planned, zillions of people will see them onscreen, and if they don't look good, the shadenfreude crowd-ie, anyone with a computer and an internet connection--will see it and mercilessly blog about it.

So vanity's a motivator for all of us. 

I mean, come on!  Do you think that American female soccer star would have ‘sponteneously' ripped her shirt off when her team won back in the day if she had been sporting a pasty, doughy, muffin-top gut?   Never!  (though I personally would have loved her if she had-true lack of vanity rocks all the more because it's so rare).

(You've seen the picture a thousand times, but now, instead of the six-pack, picture her with a muffin-top.  It's way funnier.)

So there's an ethos out there among the "How To Train Right" set which says, "Do this but not that" in the gym.  The trend now is for the "this" column to be filled with exercises designed to increase athletic performance, and the "that" column to be filled with exercises designed to buff you up and make look you jacked and ripped, while doing precious little for your time in the 40. 

I don't know.

I've said it before:  muscle ain't fitness.  I experience this time and time again.  Training to look great isn't the same as training to perform great. 

Some coaches would have you believe otherwise.  They would say looks take care of themselves.  In a way, they're right, though of course it depends on what you're training to perform well at.  Most guys, I would imagine, would prefer a slightly beefier look than the average marathon champion, but they'd be pretty happy to look like one of the aforementioned sprinters or a running back from the NFL. 

But the average pro or Olympic-level athlete is going to have way superior genetics to you and me, Freckles.  They're going to be able to build muscle and strength in a jiffy, and they probably aren't going to have to fart around with a lot of curls and laterals to look great anyway. 

But you and I aren't those guys.  We need a little something extra.  We need the curls, the lateral raises, maybe even the leg presses, darn it all!  When the sheriff's out of town, we might even get on the Smith machine and do some presses, darn it, because, well, they make you grow.  The Smith machine has been cursed to the high heavens by all the performance-lovers in the world, and I'll concede that if you're trying to break world bench pressing records, if you're trying to beat your man off the line, if you're trying to make the playoffs, then the Smith machine probably won't get you there. 

But last I checked MOST guys who come into the gym don't care about that stuff.  They want ripped abs and big pecs and all the moralizing in the world won't talk them out of it. 

Like all trainers, I'm paid for results.  I'm paid when people tell me what they want and I help them get it.  I wish it were true-and in a just universe it would be true-that ten extra pounds on the super-safe, elbows-in, chest high bench press would net you more visible muscle gain than a couple of sets of machine flyes a couple of times a week.  But in my experience, it doesn't.  A stronger bench is good for hypertrophy (and for the ego, let's face it) but a stronger bench PLUS some ‘mamby-pamby' flyes just before closing time?  Tellin' ya, Flipper, and I wish it weren't so, but the isolation drill is what's going to give you the edge.

Isolation exercises do SOMETHING-even if it's hard to explain just what-which helps make your muscles pop.  They don't do it by themselves-you've got to do those staple multi joint movements-but they do work. 

This is verging on blasphemy these days (though I seem to have some high-level support on this matter), and I wish it weren't the case, because the idea that performance and appearance are married is pretty pervasive of late, and the idea that I would go to the gym ONLY to look better tends to make everyone's head spin, but those are the clients I get.  Yeah, feel better, yeah, get stronger, yeah, lower their stress.  But the fantasy is to look like a Beastmaster when the shirt comes off. 

I can do scapular pushups with my male clients who want big pecs till the cows come home, and the guy who trains with the ex-amateur bodybuilder trainer who got his cert from a box of Wheaties will kick my guy's ass any day of the week on his steady diet of cable flyes and lateral raises.  It's just the hard truth.

The solution?  Ditch everything we know about healthy, performance-related training and go back to training concepts from the 80's?  Absurd idea, and also a recipe for busted shoulders, bad knees, terrible all around mobility, and years of pain down the line.  Just throw in some of the vanity stuff at the end of the day.  Give them five or ten minutes of stuff that's going to make their hard work really show. I even call it vanity stuff when I'm working with the clients, just to be 100% clear.

That way, everybody's happy. 

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