When you decide it is time to hit the gym, the body all the sudden becomes a platform to which you can mold your ideal self into physical form. Your physique will always be on display no matter what minute, hour, day, week, year, or any scale of time you are dealing with. To achieve it, you must become an organization freak since your whole day needs to be calculated to ensure that your goal is on track. Essentially, there is no real “break” from working on your physique. Everything from your meals to your workouts, rest and supplements must be tailored a certain way that aligns with what is best for the physique. The more you get into it, the more you realize that such a goal results in a complete lifestyle change. However, a good physique is a sign of many positive virtues including confidence, discipline, health, and beauty. Discipline because the body is an extension of what the mind commands it to do. What you look like will always be the first true impression that you give anyone you meet because the mind is built like that. Before you even get the chance to exchange words, you have already made a number of conclusions about who a new individual is just by looking at him or her. We communicate on a daily basis, but what many of us do not realize is just how much non-verbal communication plays into our everyday conversations. How you look including your posture, your musculature, your energy, and your command of your body all tell a story of how you are. The physique then becomes a way to gain insight into certain attributes of a person.
But why else would you want to achieve a better physique? It is a way to test your character on a daily basis because the way it works is that you get whatever you put into it. You cannot just walk through your workouts and expect things to fall into place. You must will yourself through every rep of every set and work your muscles to the point where they will cry for your next meal. You put yourself through the pain of muscular and neural fatigue, but you know that this is the only way it could be. You spend enough time doing this and you might even begin to enjoy the pain just because you know it will lead to improving your physique. But isn’t that how life works? Think about all the pleasures in life and how they would feel in the absence of pain. For example, you might love eating hamburgers because of how pleasurable the taste is while you are experiencing the pain of hunger and cravings. Remove the pain of hunger and cravings, and eating a burger will no longer be a pleasure task. In fact, it becomes labour-intensive to consume it, just think about the last time you were in the late stages of a buffet session. In the same sense, you can describe the journey of attaining a better physique one that is filled with pleasure and pain on both a short term and long term basis. Each workout is filled with bouts of pain followed by periods of relief. If you’re doing weights, then the period of relief is coupled with a muscular pump (a situation when the muscle being trained is engorged with blood after a set due to higher oxygen/nutrient requirements leading to a sensation of tightness that gives extra bulk to the muscle and a feeling of “damn I look good”). After the workout, you will notice that you feel more relaxed. At this point, the body is rewarding you further by releasing chemicals known as endorphins, which is an endogenous (body’s own natural supply) form of morphine-like neuropeptides that inhibit pain signals throughout the body while producing euphoric (feel-good) effects.
Attaining a better physique will essentially improve many aspects of your life in a nutshell, both mental and physical. However, these benefits are just the tip of the iceberg and everyone will have their own unique reasons for improving their physique. The question is, what are you doing it for?