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Have you ever watched an elite athlete at the top of their game and admired the formidable form of their finely-tuned bodies? Have you ever marvelled at the muscularity of male gymnasts or swimmers, or cast a longing eye over the curvaceousness of female volleyball or hockey players?

While these athletes have all most likely hit the gym at one time or other, their form is predominantly a result of function.

While many of us might hit the gym specifically in pursuit of better buttocks or bigger biceps, athletes vehemently strive to go higher, faster and stronger. These Olympian ideals are performance-based pursuits that do not depend on how the body looks, but rather upon what it can do.

Their buttocks and biceps reveal themselves in all their chiselled glory in elite performers almost entirely as a bonus, while the real prize remains that gold medal, new personal record or hard-earned spot on the team.

In others words, they possess bodies that have been trained and prepared for the specific rigours of their sports. By repeating the natural functional movements required to play their games, they develop aesthetics most of us only dream of, despite our reliance on machines, gadgets, techniques and supposedly advanced concepts specifically designed to make us look good.

To make matters worse, the millions of gym hopefuls working out and paying gym fees around the world in search of more beautiful bodies suffer notoriously high drop-out rates.

Where are we going wrong? Can we learn anything at all from our well-formed athletic counterparts? Maybe it’s high time we fought for function, not form, and added some sparks to that flailing motivation that seems to abandon us just when we need it the most. Here’s one solution: challenge-based training.

If motivation is not your forte, then you have little to lose by trying something new. To introduce some real challenges to your training, we need quests that are specifically measurable and objective, not open to interpretation and subjective.

It is high time we fight for function, not form

We could argue all day about who looks best, but nobody can argue with one 100 metre sprinter crossing the line before another, or one weightlifter lifting more weight than another.

We might not be interested in gold medals or places on national teams, but we can all share in the joys of overcoming challenges and setting new personal records just as athletes do.

Stop worrying about buttocks and biceps for a while and attacking your own self-motivation in the process. Organise your training around a handful of carefully-selected challenges, and let the only thing you attack be your own personal bests.

During your next visit to the gym, try these challenges out for size and record your results. The first challenge will test your cardiorespiratory endurance. Preparing for it will improve your fitness and burn stored body fat. If you have access to a treadmill or running track, run a mile and record your time. On an athletics track a mile would be exactly four laps.

Aim to finish in under eight minutes. If you can finish in under seven, consider yourself seriously fit, or in under six, insanely fit.

Roger Bannister was the first man to run the mile in under four minutes. He pushed the boundaries of human achievement, so why not follow in his footsteps and attempt to tear down your own limitations?

If you have access to a Concept 2 indoor rower, you can enjoy similar results by testing your 2,000 metres time. Set the console for a set distance of 2,000 metres and watch the metres count down as you row. Aim to finish in under nine minutes.

Well-trained athletes can score under seven minutes. Since this machine is found all over the world, you can check national and international rankings online, and see how you measure up.

Next up, for upper body development, we shall call upon good old-fashioned push-ups and pull-ups. Try for maximum repetitions inside 60 seconds. Push-ups are a popular physical fitness test in police and military forces around the world. Recruits in any self-respecting force are normally expected to perform a minimum of 30, so set this as your own benchmark.

For pull-ups, consider the average man can barely perform one, so start strengthening up on the lateral pull macine and start working those pulling muscles. Ten is the target.

Preparing for the upper body challenges will stimulate growth in your upper body muscles and improve functional upper body strength.

Finally, the deadlift. The deadlift is the final event contested in the sport of powerlifting and is a measure of how much weight you can lift off the floor once. It is a good test of full body-functional power, and preparing for it will target all the muscles on the back side of the body, includng the lower back, and the legs.

You will also learn the safest and most efficient technique for lifting objects in everyday life.

Deadlifting your own body weight should be your initial target. Deadlifting double bodyweight would be respectable for a well-trained athlete, while lifting three times your own bodyweight would be a supreme feat even for highly competitive strength athletes. Make sure you keep your back straight throughout the performance of this exercise.

For push-ups, pull-ups and deadlifts in particular, professional guidance on performance techniques is strongly advised.

Organise your training around practising and preparing for these challenges, and schedule your subsequent attempts at least three weeks apart. Send in your results for feedback.