I would say you need just enough "ego" to maintain honor and respect of yourself. Anything else, that makes you narcissic is incredibly bad.
I personally lift, just to be able to punish anyone who make any attempt to my respect and to the respect of the people I love.
I take a lot of care to not go narcissic, and have a cult of my body, like a lot of people.
Tone of people, influenced by rap music, and common materialist conceptions, thinks that bringing the animal in yourself is actually the way to be a man. It's even adviced in case of self defense. I personaly think that being a man is first spiritual. Physical strengh is just a matter of practical use. You could take the exemple of knight. A knight is not a knight/man because he's strong, he's a knight because he's noble. Noble, at the origin being high spiritual virility. Strengh is just an appearance that complete inner spiritual virility. Today, there is only the appearance remaining. So there is nothing worth. Evola explains it very well.
If you're lifting just to motivate your ego and complete anything related to what is considered "alpha", then you're literaly worthless, in the sense that you have no interior virility, just plain apparence. That's the same thing with woman that goes on full appearance, because they don't even know what a real woman is, and how to model themselves internally.