Kayla Bonkowski made a shift in her training orientation at some point after she started CrossFit, and she has been trying to describe it accurately ever since. It was not a single decision. It happened gradually, and she only recognized it in retrospect. She stopped thinking primarily about what her body looked like and started thinking primarily about what it could do.
The shift sounds simple. It is not. Most people who train carry both orientations at once and manage the tension between them — sometimes they are training for the barbell, sometimes they are checking the mirror, and the two goals pull in different directions more often than the fitness industry acknowledges. Kayla Bonkowski has written about this from her own experience, which is the only place it makes sense to write from.
What the Two Goals Actually Look Like
Training for appearance means organizing your program around outcomes like body composition, muscle definition, and body fat percentage. The workouts, the diet, the recovery — all of it is calibrated toward looking a specific way. The metric of success is the mirror, the scale, or a photograph.
Training for performance means organizing your program around what your body can do. Lifting heavier. Moving faster. Sustaining higher output for longer. Completing a workout you could not have completed a month ago. The metrics are functional — times, weights, skill mastery, competition results.
These two things are not opposites, and Kayla Bonkowski is not arguing that they are. A body trained for performance tends to look strong, because it is strong. But the orientation matters because it changes what you optimize for on the days when the two goals conflict — when the recovery you need for performance would mean eating more than an appearance goal allows, for example, or when the training that would push your performance would look different from the training that would maximize a certain aesthetic.
The Shift and What Drove It
For Kayla Bonkowski, the shift toward performance came from competition. When you are getting ready to stand on the floor at a CrossFit event in Michigan, the question of what you look like becomes secondary very quickly. What matters is whether you can sustain a two-minute effort at near-maximum intensity. Whether your overhead squat holds up when you are already tired. Whether your aerobic capacity is developed enough to let you work instead of survive.
That reorientation is useful even for people who never plan to compete. The question “what can my body do?” is more motivating and more sustainable over time than the question “how does my body look?” Performance goals have clear feedback — you hit the number or you do not, your time improves or it does not, you could lift the weight or you could not. Aesthetic goals are fuzzier and more subject to the kind of perceptual distortions that make people feel bad about real progress.
The Harder Part
Kayla Bonkowski wants to be honest about something: making this shift is harder than describing it. Aesthetic goals are culturally dominant. They are what most fitness marketing reinforces. They are often what brought people to the gym in the first place. Releasing them — or even just deprioritizing them — requires confronting a set of values that are deeply internalized and that will not simply disappear because you decided to care more about performance.
What Kayla Bonkowski has found is that the shift does not require abandoning aesthetic concerns entirely. It requires making performance the primary lens and letting the rest follow. When performance is the goal, the behaviors that support it — consistent training, adequate nutrition, recovery, skill development — tend to produce a body composition that is healthy and strong. The appearance outcome becomes a side effect of the performance work rather than the thing being chased directly.
That reordering is subtle but significant. Training in Macomb, Michigan, she has had this conversation with people at different stages of their fitness practice, and the ones who make the shift tend to stay in it longer and feel better about the whole thing. The work is the same. The relationship with the work is different.