Pretty simple question: Would you rather be stronger than you look or look stronger than you are?

My friend and I had this conversation last week, so I figured I'd bring it to the good people of RM. My instinct is to say "be stronger than I look" thinking about playing sports basically. But pretty quickly I knew the real answer was look stronger than I am. I mean, I train hard and want to keep getting stronger, but how many times in my life will I really be put to the test for people to find out I'm not as strong as I look, or vice versa? The vanity in me wins out on this one.

Y tu?

Depends on what you do really, but appearance gets you a lot more in this world than raw strength.

There are a lot of nerdy tiny strong as hell wrestlers. A physics undergrad degree later they are all training for MMA.

That said, it's not worth it to me to take roids or get cosmetic surgery.

Oh no doubt, I'm not really talking about extremes here.

IE, me personally: I'd rather look like I could bench 225 than actually be able to bench 225. That said, really I'd like to be able to and look like it too.

edit: this post was supposed to edit my last one, not quote it.

is 225 even that much? i am not trying to be a dick here and believe me, my selfview is attrocious.

for my 3rd or 4th set i get 225 for about 7 or 8 reps and i feel as though i am weak for not being able to do more. i generally start out at 135 for about 15-20 reps as my warm up, go up to 165 for 10 reps, 185 for 10 reps, 205 for about 8 and then finish what i can with 225

yeah but you are also 400 pounds. lifting 225 for a guy who's 175 is way different than a guy who's 350 lifting 225.

id rather be stronger than i look.

No it's not. I mean for me it is, but no it's not like you have to be a monster to bench 225 by any means, I know a guy who can bench 225 and he's the most unathletic, out of shape person ever. But for me personally, my body type and benching experience, I'm a long way off from throwing two big wheels up. My set on monday was 95x10, 115x8, 135x6, 145x6. I'm atrocious at bench press. Part of that is being skinny my whole life and part of that comes from not benching. While I'm awful on the bench I can do squats and deads with guys a lot bigger than me.

So for me personally if/when I even can bench 225 I'd look pretty strong.

Why? Do you play a sport or do something where strength benefits you?

Strength isn't just a benefit for sports, it's a a benefit for day to day existence.

not at the moment, i'll probably start playing hockey again in the summer. i just think the satisfaction of knowing how strong i am is more important than what other people think b/c of how i look. exercise is 1/2 mental for me, its as much about me competing w/ myself as it is about how i look or how much i weigh.

Yeah. I mean ideally I'd like to look strong and be even stronger. But as someone who has always been thin but strong I'd rather look the part for once now. (Not in a bodybuilder sort of a way by any means)

The question is kinda stupid anyway since the two really can go hand in hand with good diet and hard training. I'm not going for size w/o the strength or vice versa, but if I had to take one I'd rather look stronger than I am.


Though, there really isn't much better than people misjudging you and you shocking everybody with how well you handle yourself on a field or jump on a basketball court.

this might be part of it for me, too.

should we turn this into the new workout thread? i think the other one's lost in GD somewhere

The thing with the feeling good about being misjudged, that works 1 at a time.

We all want to be as strong as possible.

That said, every day is a beauty contest. If you're an athlete and you have the measurables and you look strong as shit, you're going to get the benefit of the doubt all the time. Like say Lamar Odom. You're going to be the 1st picked, and you're going to get laid a lot. In our society, appearance is 1/2 the battle, hell it may be more than half. Yes, we are that shallow.

If you're Mugsey Bogues or say a guy like Thomas Brown at Georgia, every day you have to reprove yourself to stay where you are.

Thomas Brown destroyed weight lifting records at UGA. Pound for Pound, probably the strongest guy ever at UGA. He made himself into a trusted tailback and he was really hard to bring down... but he's coaching now and not playing football probably because other guys are simply bigger and faster.

It's like.... would you rather be Darren Sproles or Michael Turner?

is that really all you have in your well?

hey man, you practically put it on a tee for me

Everything you know about fitness is a lie
http://www.mensjournal.com/everything-y ... s-is-a-lie
Gym machines are boring, CrossFit is sadistic, and dieting sucks. Luckily, none of them is essential to being truly fit. Through years of trial and error — and humiliation at the hands of some of the world’s top trainers — the author discovered the secrets to real health.
by Daniel Duane
I hate the gym. At least, I hate “the gym” as imagined by the modern American health club: the mindless repetitions on the weight machines, halfhearted crunches, daytime TV during the treadmill. Such a sad, unimaginative excuse for a life, when I could be out rock-climbing, surfing, or, hell, even just scrubbing the bathroom floor. But I love working out the way I’ve come to understand it, and two big discoveries made all the difference.

First, I realized that we all live in a kind of Fitness Fog, a miasma of lies and misinformation that we mistake for common sense, and that makes most of our gym time a complete waste. Second, and by far the bigger news, I finally figured out what gyms good for and exactly how a man can use them to make himself healthy and fit in the truest sense: strong, capable, and durable in the long-lasting way that doesn’t just ward off chronic disease but actually lets a 35-year-old desk drone carry both of his laughing children up a mountain, simultaneously, and take on serious skiing at age 40, trusting his knees to bend deep and firm.

Muscle withers away if you’re not constantly building it, and muscle withers faster as a man ages. Fading muscle mass gives way to fat gain, stiff joints, stumbling-old-man balance, and a serious drop-off in weekend fun, not to mention self-esteem. But if you fight back right, it can all go the other way. And this means getting strong. The bottom line is that not only can lifting weights do as much for your heart health as cardio workouts, but it also provides you with a lean-muscle coat of armor against life’s inevitable blows — the way it did for my own father, who broke his back in a climbing accident at age 69, spent months in bed, and recovered strong only because he’d been lifting for 35 years.

Not that I haven’t wasted time at the gym like everybody else, sweating dutifully three times a week, “working my core,” throwing in the odd after-work jog. A few years ago, newly neck-deep in what Anthony Quinn describes in Zorba the Greek as “Wife, children, house…the full catastrophe,” I signed a 10-page membership contract at a corporate-franchise gym, hired my first personal trainer, and became yet another sucker for all the half-baked, largely spurious non-advice cobbled together from doctors, newspapers, magazines, infomercials, websites, government health agencies, and, especially, from the organs of our wonderful $19 billion fitness industry, whose real knack lies in helping us to lose weight around the middle of our wallets. Not that all of these people are lying, but here’s what I’ve learned: Their goals are only marginally related to real fitness — goals like reducing the statistical incidence of heart disease across the entire American population, or keeping you moving through the gym so you won’t crowd the gear, or limiting the likelihood that you’ll get hurt and sue.

We’re not innocent. Too many of us drift into health clubs with only the vaguest of notions about why we’re actually there — notions like maybe losing a little weight, somehow looking like the young Brad Pitt in Fight Club, or just heeding a doctor’s orders. Vague goals beget vague methods; the unfocused mind is the vulnerable mind, deeply susceptible to bullshit. So we sign our sorry names on the elliptical-machine waiting list — starting with a little “cardio,” like somebody said you’re supposed to — and then spend our allotted 30 minutes in front of a TV mounted a regulation seven to 10 feet away, because lawyers have told gym owners that seven to 10 feet minimizes the likelihood that we’ll crane our necks, lose our balance, and face-plant on the apparatus. After that, if we’ve got any remaining willpower, we lie flat on the floor, contract a few stomach muscles with tragic optimism, and then we “work each body part” before hitting the shower.

Go one better — I certainly did — by hiring a staff trainer and telling him you’re serious about your once-in-a-while surfing, skiing, or cycling, and that you’d love help designing a “sport-specific” routine. Forget that your trainer knows literally nothing about these sports; he’ll gladly prescribe a whole suite of cool stability-ball “functional fitness” and “core-training” exotica with rubber bands and wobbly Bosu platforms. Maybe it’ll even be fun. After a while, though, when you still can’t tell if anything ever makes a difference, you’ll get bored all over again, quit all over again, and wonder why 21st-century American fitness looks so much like 21st-century dieting, something we labor at constantly while our bodies hardly change.

My own epiphany actually hit me in a roundabout way, over the course of a couple of years — humiliation at the hands of a special-ops trainer, being told I was unfit to bench-press by the 1999 Mr. Olympia — but I somehow bumbled my way into a parallel universe of American fitness, one in which men know exactly how to get strong. And none of it is rocket science. Even more shocking? None of it takes any more time than you already spend working out. Maybe it takes even less.

read the whole thing here
http://www.mensjournal.com/everything-y ... s-is-a-lie

thanks for the deep insight, neckface.

I'd like to look like, super strong. You know, really fuckin buff. That would really teach the guys in the gym a lesson. Finally something to take their eyes off my dick.