So last night I was perusing youtube when I come upon a video about how to win any fight. Now me coming from a background of martial arts though my practice these days is mostly shadow boxing I always like to see different ways of laying the smackdown even though I would distill effective combatives as “Poke his friggin eye out”

Anyways this video was put out by a guy who is a “male image consultant” and tells guys how to act, dress etc. to maintain a certain image. Now personally I kind of like my image because it is representative of my true self. To have an image that isn’t yourself to me is stupid and it’s not a good representation of you if that isn’t you. Anyways…

As I’m going through his channel I come upon a video that talks about “building a massive chest” and me being a curious sort of fellow with some more time to burn I watch the video…and then I heard it

It’s not how strong you are. It’s how strong you look like you are.

As you can probably guess I take a bit of issue with this. First of all there are sensors in our brains that they still don’t quite understand but they are able to sniff out a faker. Two studies talk about this. I discovered these when I was checking up on the research that Adonis Effect was based on.

Human adaptations for the visual assessment of strength and fighting ability from the body and face

and

Adaptations in humans for assessing physical strength from the voice

The first study took some pictures of men’s faces and the audience was able to determine who was strong and who was a wimp just from their face alone. How could this be? Some mysterious thing in our brain.

The second study had people guess who was strong and who had the muscle and might of a wet noodle from people playing telephone with pipes and that sort of thing. They were able to guess who was the badass from their voice as well. How could this be? That brain thing again.

This is supposed to go back to the theory that when it came to evolution and way back in the day we introduced ourselves as Ogg and Grok, dudes had to know who was a badass so they wouldn’t mess with him “Touch me and I’ll sue wasn’t a threat back then.” and girls wanted to know who can give them strong babies and who would be able to lay the smackdown on a sabertooth tiger should it threaten his offspring and lady.

So apparently it’s not how strong you look that really matters after all. The best part is you can have both worlds if you train for it. As Aurthur Saxon did, train for strength and the shape will take care of itself. Admittedly you can use different methods of measurement to you can make sure you are balanced and give you an idea of what needs more attention but if you aren’t getting stronger…well that’s a shame.

And also, who the hell wouldn’t want to become strong either? You want to have muscles that when it comes time to test their power they got nothing to back it up? If you saw a Lamborghini wouldn’t you be disappointed if you discovered it was only sporting 150 horse power? Strength is useful for all sorts of things and it’s less vain…which can help with that whole image consulting thing.

You want a cool image? Be strong, lean, fit and all that stuff that comes with it. At the very least you’ll be able to pick up more then just girls.

Related posts:

1. what rep ranges for best for building muscle?…apparently they are all the same…please
2. “Gaining Strength vs. Getting Ripped”
3. The Biggest Loser Strength Kit. Are you kidding me?
4. strength and weakness
5. The reason low reps with heavy weight are better for “muscle toning” then high reps are.