Devlin Brown at the water cooler: Why you should prioritise function over form

Q: How should I measure my progress: how I look in clothes and in the mirror, or how I feel and perform in the gym or on the road?

Form versus function, the great dilemma that drives us all mad. When you feel better you tend to look better, and if you look better you tend to perform better — but that is not always the case.

I have always been an advocate of training for function, and allowing form to follow. What is the point, I would argue, prancing up and down the beach if you can’t squat, run or jump? What is the point, I would ask, of looking the part but being unhealthy inside? And that is quite possible when chasing aesthetics over everything else.

I vividly remember talking to a champion physique competitor one day during a break from a photo shoot. This young man was the envy of almost every male I knew, his body was nothing short of beautiful. He was struggling with blood in his urine, he told me, it was very dark, he said. I cringed listening to him, knowing that he was pushing his insides to the point of breaking, only to have an outside that was being held up as the grand ideal.

On the other hand, if you wish to find studies that link exercise to longevity, you can cherry pick. They are all over the place, such as a large study published recently in the journal Circulation.

Called “Long-term leisure-time physical activity and all-cause and cause-specific mortality: A prospective cohort of US adults”, the study polled 116,000 US adults over the span of 30 years. It is noted in the study that any combination of medium to high levels of vigorous exercise — from 75 to 300 minutes a week — and moderate exercise — from 150 to 600 minutes a week — “can provide nearly the maximum mortality reduction”, which the study says is about 35%-42%.

Ordinarily, this is where I would draw some acerbic analogy between the appearance of a functioning economy when you drive through pretty Joburg suburbs outside load-shedding hours, only to know the truth: the belly of the beast is broken, infrastructure holding on for dear life, with pipes bursting and fuses blowing hourly.

But then Eusebius McKaizer died suddenly. A man, in his prime, dropped in one fell swoop. I didn’t know him well. We had interacted during philosophy tutorials at Rhodes University, he watched some of my physical theatre shows at the National Arts Festival, and we worked together — briefly — at Business Day about a decade ago.

One sunny evening, after a challenging diary meeting, he walked over to me in the garden of the old Avusa building in Rosebank. “What is an actor doing at a newspaper?” he asked. “Acting,” I answered.

Death knows no routine. It knows no clock, and defies logic. His sudden passing made me question whether minutiae matter. We get twisted into knots arguing about high-intensity interval training as opposed to long, steady-state cardio, morning training over evening training, weightlifting over bodybuilding, chasing targets on the squat rack or on the road as opposed to targets on the scale and in the mirror. Yet, any one of us could be silenced by the great and final slumber at any moment.

And yet, after a few days, my perspective changed. Of course minutiae matters. But let us also understand that while we do our best to improve our health and longevity, we are only human and there is little point in adding stress to something that should be fun, freeing and life-enhancing.

What a gift it is to live — even during stage 6 load-shedding. Never remind me that I wrote that, please. My sincere advice is to train for function — work on mobility, aerobic and anaerobic fitness, include resistance training and do your best to eat well and limit vices.

The proof is in the science: it will most likely make your life better, and — God willing — longer. Let form follow function. If you are mobile, fitter and stronger, and eat well, I can make one promise: your body composition will change and that will alter the tape, scale and mirror’s opinion of you.