Muscle-Building Tips
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"This means that physical traits that imply the presence of "mating qualifiers" are important for increasing your stock with the ladies."
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5 Nutrition Mistakes You're Probably Guilty OfPeople have a tendency to treat training for a “look” differently than training for an athletic or a strength goal. The truth is, whatever your fitness goals are, it is important to structure your program in a way that allows you to meet those goals in the shortest time period possible.
You have a tremendous variety of tools available to you, and it’s sometimes easy to forget that not all methods are effective for all goals. Athletes training for their sport practice some highly specific drills; training for fat loss requires adjustment of nutritional strategies; powerlifters work on becoming skilled and efficient in their primary lifts.
Given these examples, it’s easy to see that none of these scenarios would really benefit from using strategies intended for the others. So, if your goal is simply to build a lean, symmetrical and attractive body -- the ultimate male body -- the obvious solution is to gear your diet and training structure toward those goals.
1- Focus On Building An X-Shaped Physique
When it comes to being physically attractive to the opposite sex, it’s important to understand that certain body dimensions are visually important from an evolutionary perspective. That’s why you should focus on creating what we call an “X-shaped physique.” Developing such a body will automatically make you more attractive to women while making you more imposing to men.You see, our progenitors credited desirable traits like strength, productivity and virility to corresponding physical attributes. While societal needs may have changed in a way that no longer makes it necessary to have the characteristics to succeed, to a certain extent, we carry our ancestors’ tastes. This means that physical traits that imply the presence of “mating qualifiers” are important for increasing your stock with the ladies.
To that end, an X-shaped physique means broad shoulders, a narrow waist and strong, well-developed calves. For broad shoulders, focus on core movements that allow for maximal recruitment, such as the push press and some isolation exercises to focus on the medial delts and increases in width, such as lateral raises.
A narrow waist is primarily the result of a low level of body fat, obviously. However, it is important to understand that the muscles around your waist respond to weight training in much the same way that all other muscles do: by growing. So while it isn’t necessary to avoid certain exercises completely, train with the caveat that you should avoid rotational exercises with either a heavy weight or high volume. The goal, overall, is to develop a waist-to-shoulder ratio of about 1.618 -- the Golden Ratio.
Now, as for strong, well-developed calves, these are not easy to come by. Calves are a notoriously stubborn body part to grow, so I recommend training them multiple times per week. Work your calves first in your session, not last. By focusing on these muscles and building a physique more in line with what our ancestors considered desirable (and let’s be honest, we still do), you are on the road to a sexier body.
2- Push Less, Pull More
In keeping with the above ideas, the goal of training for sexiness should clearly include balance and symmetry. This means that not only should you train the right way, but also that you need to make a concentrated effort to avoid training the wrong way.As men, we’re highly visual creatures. As trainees, this translates into becoming highly focused on mirror muscles -- that is, those you can readily see in any mirror. In general, guys tend to do a lot more work on muscles like chest than back. I cannot begin to describe the drawbacks of this mentality. With specific regard to appearance, lopsided training that focuses on anterior (front) muscles over posterior (rear) muscles usually leads to pretty ugly imbalances. In addition to this being a great way to get yourself injured, it can lead to a round, forward-shouldered look that is not the goal of any training program I’ve ever heard of.
More muscle-building tips from expert John Romaniello, next...
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