Aesthetics
The Skinny Guy’s Guide to Building Bigger Abs
It’s common for skinny guys to be lean and still not have abs. That’s because there are two parts to having good muscle definition: body-fat percentage and muscle size. Our body fat percentage is fine, but our abs aren’t big enough.
If you try to search for information about how to get abs, you’ll probably come across one of two recommendations:
- Abs are built in the kitchen, not the gym: The idea is to focus less on building bigger abs and more on getting lean enough to reveal your abs. But many of us are already lean enough. You might not need to get any leaner. You might do better by gaining weight.
- Abs are built with ab circuits: The most popular ab workouts are high-rep, low-rest circuits. Those circuits will absolutely stimulate muscle growth, but they’re needlessly painful, and they aren’t as effective as hypertrophy training.
Neither of these recommendations is great for us. We need to build bigger ab muscles. We need a proper bulking routine for our abs.
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How to Build a Thicker Neck (Even if It’s Skinny)
I always hated how skinny my neck was. When I was at my skinniest, my neck circumference was 14 inches. After bulking up and gaining 60 pounds, it grew to 14.25 inches. Clearly, the compound lifts I was doing weren’t developing my neck muscles.
That’s where neck training comes in. Neck training isn’t common with bodybuilders, strongmen, or powerlifters, but it has a long history in contact sports and martial arts, given that it reduces the risk of concussions, knockouts, and brain trauma. That’s Marco’s area of expertise. Before founding Bony to Beastly, he was training college, professional, and Olympic football and rugby players.
Still, I was skeptical about how effective a neck workout routine could be. That skepticism didn’t last. With just a few months of doing 5-minute neck workouts, my neck grew from 14.25 to 16 inches. We’ve reproduced those results with several dozen clients. We’ll show you exactly how to do it.
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How to Build Broader Shoulders (for Skinny Guys)
Broad shoulders are touted as one of the most attractive features a man can possess. That’s not wrong. You can build broader shoulders, and when you do, it will improve your appearance. But that’s not quite how aesthetics works. In fact, it’s almost entirely backwards. More on that in a moment.
Then there’s the issue of bone structure. The length of your collarbones is largely genetic, and that’s a big part of determining how wide your shoulders can get. If you have a thinner build, it’s easy to assume you’re fated to have narrow shoulders. But that isn’t quite right, either. I’ve added over a dozen inches to my shoulder circumference.
Finally, we’ve helped over 15,000 people bulk up, tracking their progress along the way. If you spend the next 6 months bulking up your shoulder muscles, how much broader can you get them? To answer that question, we tracked our client results. We’ll show you before/after photos and measurements.
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How to Build Bigger Arms (For Skinny Guys)
I’ve managed to bring my arms from 10 inches up to 16 inches. But I got off to a rough start. During my first two years of successful bulking, I gained 40 pounds at 11% body fat, bringing my bench from 65 to 225 pounds and doing chin-ups with 50 pounds around my waist. Yet, despite my progress, I had only added 2 inches to my arms. My arms were still 1.3 inches smaller than average, and the average man doesn’t even exercise!
That’s when I realized my mistake. I was relying on compound lifts to bulk up my arms. When I finally added proper arm exercises to my workout program, my arms quickly shot up to 14 inches, then gradually climbed to 16 inches. Surprisingly, my bench press started going up again. I was finally able to bench 315.
We’ve used these same methods with over 10,000 skinny clients and millions of readers. If you add these methods to your workout routine, you can expect to add around 2 inches to your arms within the next 6 months. That’s what our clients gain, on average.
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How to Build an Attractive Physique
Most men want to have an attractive physique. Few know exactly what that means. When they guess the degree of muscularity women prefer, they’re off by thirty pounds (study). Many have a deeper misunderstanding, failing to connect their appearance to their fitness and strength. Some shun attractiveness, mistakenly thinking it’s superficial. Others are superficial on purpose, thinking it’s the best way to become attractive. That’s never as convincing as the real thing.
We’ll cover the attractiveness research. We’ve spoken to some of the study authors. We also went deeper, testing our hypotheses by conducting our own surveys. We collected thousands of responses for each: survey 1 and survey 2.
But be warned: this article is long. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, here’s a simple trick to improve your appearance: have a drink. It will boost your attractiveness (to yourself) by 50%. This is called “The Reverse Beer Goggles Effect,” also known as Beauty is in the Eye of the Beer Holder (study). It’s not a perfect solution, but it will save you twenty minutes of reading.
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Hollywood Bulking Transformations ARE Realistic for Skinny Guys
There are a ton of articles talking about how Hollywood body transformations are unrealistic. There’s some truth in that. Most guys are overweight. For them, even just dieting down to a healthy body-fat percentage can be surprisingly difficult.
Most Hollywood transformations are coming at it from the other side, though. From the naturally skinny side. From our side. These actors aren’t losing a dramatic amount of fat, they’re building an impressive amount of muscle, and they’re doing it suspiciously fast.
Many of us can do that, too.
Let’s dive into it.
Dive In
The Grey Truth About Skinny Muscle-Building Genetics
There’s a war raging in the natural muscle-building community. The white warriors are fed up with nihilistic blackpill hardgainers who give up on building muscle before they even start. They argue we should set lofty goals and fight to accomplish them, genetics be damned. After all, they started off skinny, too. They worked hard, gritted their teeth through the struggle, and succeeded to such a tremendous extent that they became famous for their physiques.
The dark doomers argue that those with the best muscle-building genetics are the most likely to rise to the top of the fitness industry. These hypertrophy gurus stand there on their genetic pulpits and preach the value of willpower, determination, and discipline, ignoring the fact that their genetics are what allowed their hard work to bear such impressive fruits. Only a very small fraction of their audiences will see that same degree of success, leaving the rest feeling dysmorphic and disillusioned.
There’s truth on both sides. No matter how thin we start, no matter how slender our bone structures are, and no matter if our hardgainer metabolisms incinerate nine-tenths of our calorie surpluses, we can still build muscle. If we progressively overload our lifts, eat enough food, and cleverly adjust based on the progress we’re making, we’ll get results.
But our genetics do indeed influence those results. Even among naturally skinny dudes, we all have different bone structures, different muscles that lag behind, and different muscles that pull ahead, causing us to build bodies that look rather different from one another.
I think it’s important to talk honestly about genetics. Not in an overly pessimistic “blackpill” way. It’s true that everyone can bulk up. But not in an overly optimistic “whitepill” way, either. We all have genetic weaknesses that we need to account for and genetic strong points we can leverage.
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The Ideal Male Body Type According to Women (Survey Results)
We surveyed 423 women, asking them to rate varying degrees of muscularity and leanness in men, as well their favourite muscle groups and ideal proportions. In this article, we’ll go over the results:
- What’s the most attractive amount of muscle for a man to build?
- Do women prefer more muscular upper bodies or lower bodies?
- What proportions do women find most attractive?
- What’s the most attractive body-fat percentage?
- Which muscles do women find most attractive?
- Does neck size affect our appearance?
- What’s the most attractive overall body type?
Here are the survey results.
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Survey Results: What Does the Most Attractive Gay Male Body Look Like?
We surveyed 102 men attracted to men, asking them to rate varying degrees of muscularity and leanness. We also asked them which muscle proportions they found most attractive. Topics include:
- What’s the most attractive degree of muscle?
- What’s the most attractive body-fat percentage?
- Do gay men prefer more muscular upper bodies?
- Which muscles do other men find most attractive?
- What muscle proportions do gay men prefer?
Here are the results.
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Forearm Training: How to Build Bigger Forearms
When you first start lifting weights, it’s a good idea to focus most of your energy on the big compound lifts. Your workouts start with lifts like the squat, bench press, deadlift, chin-up, and row. These are the biggest lifts that build the most overall muscle mass. After that, we add in some isolation lifts. Curls for our biceps, extensions for our triceps, lateral raises for our shoulders, and maybe some exercises for our abs. These train the muscles that aren’t properly stimulated by the big compound lifts.
As you gain weight, build muscle, and get stronger at these lifts, you’ll probably notice that your grip is getting stronger, and your forearms are getting bigger. This is because the rows are training your elbow flexors, the biceps curls are training your wrist flexors, and the lateral raises are training your wrist extensors. They aren’t the main muscles being worked, but since we’re new to lifting weights, they grow.
The thing is, as you continue getting bigger and stronger, you’ll probably notice that your forearms stop growing. That’s because your forearm muscles have gotten both stronger and tougher, and these compound lifts aren’t challenging them enough to provoke any growth.
So how do we get bigger forearms? We train them directly. Here’s how.
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