Style Matters

Style is the intentional made visible. Not decoration laid over the work — the mechanism that keeps the work happening.

We live in a culture that treats this as obviously false. Pick one outfit and wear it every day. Isolate the variables that move the metric and discard the rest. How a thing is done gets subordinated to what it produces. The manner in which something is done is filed as superfluous.

Style comes from the Latin stilus — the pointed instrument used to cut letters into wax. It was first the tool. Then, by extension, the mark the tool left behind. Then the manner of the person holding it. Style was never a word for decoration, it was the instrument that makes the impression, and then for the impression itself.

Which is what it still means. What I wear and how I do a thing is a signature in a world that would prefer I go unsigned.

When your style is well represented, the doing of the thing carries a pleasure that reinforces the doing of the thing. The signature and the act become the same event. You impress upon yourself first.

This is one of the most replicable outcomes from adherence research and yet we are dissuaded from developing it. Williams and colleagues ran subjects through a single bout of moderate exercise, measured nothing but how it felt, and checked back six months and twelve months later. Affective response predicted who was still training. It outperformed self-efficacy. It outperformed stated intention. A review of the literature found the same result across study after study (Williams et al., 2008; Rhodes & Kates, 2015).

The inverse is easier to feel than to cite. Put someone in a piece of clothing that fits badly and watch the attention that should belong to the task get spent on being perceived instead (Fredrickson et al., 1998). Everyone knows this from the inside. The finding is that it runs both directions.

Nobody remembers the name of the man who was practically correct.

Style, for me, is a meta concept. It's how I assemble a session — the intent, the exercise selection, the rep scheme, the loading implement. But it is also what I wear while doing it, what I'm listening to, and the room I want to be standing in to do the work.

Those last three dictate the first four. They are more important than what I am trying to accomplish.

The reason is not complicated. I want the session to feel like mine, because a session that feels like mine is a session I will run again or follow up on. Whatever adaptation I'm after arrives on the back of repetition, and repetition arrives on the back of sensation. Get the order wrong and you have an optimal program nobody executes.

When someone asks me for a rep structure or a list of exercises to solve a problem, I can already see the ceiling on any answer I give. A practical answer will not let them express the thing they feel deficient in.

Even the goals that look most superficial — get leaner, get bigger — are usually mismatched reflection. The person doesn't feel that how they look represents how they feel internally. Or, more arguably, the person wants to change how they feel inside so they attempt to from the outside. The body has become an unsigned document, and we feel it in the reflection of others — they are unimpressed. Within fitness, people are asking for a program because a program is what the culture sells, it's a very practical list of instructions, but what people want is a signature. What we need to teach is how to use their own hand.

You cannot prescribe that. You can only share how you do it, because style is not replicable, despite how hard we try.

It takes no skill to criticize how someone exercises, and we are inundated with it by people who want training to happen in a small number of approved ways. I watched someone mock Conor McGregor for using an Arnold press — he doesn't need supination to build shoulders, the argument went, so the choice is illiterate.

The critic could be correct. He doesn't need it. He liked it, so he did it, and he will do it again next week. And people have heard of McGregor because he found a way to do something so much that he became one of the best in the world at it. And I can't even recall the name of the person who criticized him, even though he was practically correct.

The practical question is not about exercise or reps. It's in how you can make this interesting so that you'll still be doing it in ten years. Style is how that question gets answered, which makes style the most practical thing on the list.

The people still training at sixty are not the ones who found the optimal program. They're the ones who found a way of doing it that felt like themselves.

"Better to Be Nothing Than a Liar"

I took this argument further than an essay can with Tanner Guzy, a men's appearance strategist — a job description most men would tell you they have no use for. That claim is the interesting part. Nobody actually opts out. You either choose your signature or you inherit one.