Katie Crewe, CSCS, doesn't recommend making goals based purely on aesthetics. Instead of focusing on how your body will look, zone in on how your body will feel and how it can perform. "I have no problem with people who want to make changes aesthetically to their bodies," she said. But physical changes can come slowly, especially for some people, she explained, while others "are very genetically blessed" and might see changes more rapidly.
Plus, there are going to be times in your life when priorities shift and you can't be as consistent with your schedule, Crewe said. "If you start to feel really badly about yourself because you see small physical changes, it's very discourageing," she told us. However, performance-based goals are exciting and they'll even help you get to your aesthetic goals as well along the way, she said. For instance, "if you have goals of gaining muscle size and then you have performance-based goals of increasing the weights that you're using and pushing hard on an exercise, you're going to see [physical] changes by reaching those performance-based goals."
It's not that you won't see aesthetic changes at all, Crewe said, it's just "the idea that you're sort of seeing your body in a different way, appreciating it in a different way, and you're not being so fixated on just physicality. And I find that, that makes people stick with stuff a lot longer, when they start to feel good about themselves and what they're able to do and what they can accomplish."