Judging books by their covers

Today I stumbled upon the blog of a man who had lost 270+ pounds. A fantastic achievement, to be sure. He had gone from looking like a distorted balloon of a man to a gruff, stylish looking badass. However, he also mentions that the only exercise he did throughout the entire weight loss process was walking. No lean muscle building!

After coming from a place of high bodyfat, its hard for me to judge what is normal human physique and what is supposed to be ‘athletic.’ When I was first starting out losing weight and working out, one of my goalposts was ‘to see muscles in my arms’. I even would do wrist curls and things, thinking I needed to build muscles to create these forearm striations to look all badass. (goal has long since been achieved, I attribute it to low bodyfat anyway) Now this man who has lost 270 pounds, I look at him, and see his big burly forearms, and think ‘damn, dude looks strong’, but read that he has done no strength training exercises at all in the 2 years he spent losing weight….it shakes me up a little bit. You can almost never tell someones physical strengths by their body. This is something important to keep in mind.