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Let’s imagine you’re bulking, trying to build muscle leanly. You’re getting heavier, filling out your clothes, and your muscle measurements are increasing. That sounds good, but your waist is getting bigger, and your stomach seems a little softer. How do you know if you’re gaining muscle or fat?

Or let’s say you’re recomping, trying to build muscle and burn fat at the same time. How can you know that it’s working? What signs of muscle growth and fat loss should you look for?

Same with cutting. You need to know if you’re losing muscle or fat.

The temptation is usually to use a BIA bathroom scale and let it estimate your body fat percentage. That doesn’t work. It isn’t even close to accurate enough to be useful. You could get an InBody scan at the gym or a DEXA scan. Those are more accurate. But they still aren’t nearly accurate enough.

There are far better signs of muscle and fat gain (or loss). This can be cheap and easy, too. You can do it at home right now.

I’ve written articles on how to build a more aesthetic physique and which body type women prefer. I’ve made videos about it, too. Some of the articles have had millions of readers, and some of the videos have gotten hundreds of thousands of views. Most of them are based on my surveys of thousands of women, but I’ve also spoken with some of the top researchers.

Recently, those videos have pulled in some of the blackpill/looksmaxxing crowd, who have very different ideas about what women prefer. And that’s great. One of their ideas is that getting bigger and stronger doesn’t actually help that much, arguing that a man’s face and height matter far more than his body. FaceIQ is known for this, but it’s a common idea.

Most research shows that women care far more about how physically capable a man is than about how tall he is. Height is helpful, but mostly because taller guys are often bigger, stronger, and healthier. If a shorter guy can get stronger than the taller guy, women will usually prefer his physique. I have a full article about that here.

Enter the gymcel. Whenever I mention how powerful being powerful is, the blackpillers bring up the gymcel meme, arguing that being muscular only helps if you’re already attractive in other ways. There’s a hint of truth there, actually. But it’s not quite what most men think.

A recent study found that 56% of young steroid users are doing it to improve their appearance and look more attractive (study, study, study). If you’ve been lifting weights for a while, that might sound strange. It’s well-known in the lifting community that steroids won’t make you more attractive. I’ll go through all the evidence in a moment, including some of my own data.

When I first started lifting, this idea of using steroids for aesthetic reasons came from Zyzz, who died at 22 years old. The torch was picked up by Jo Linder, who died at 30. Nowadays, the idea is coming from the blackpill and looksmaxxing communities, propped up by guys like Clavicular and Road to 1%.

My 17-year-old niece told me that two of her male friends had recently started taking steroids to improve their dating lives. It didn’t work, which they found confusing. Women like muscles, so why aren’t the bigger muscles helping?

It’s tricky. Women do love muscular men. Getting stronger is perhaps the single best thing you can do to improve your appearance (study). Strength is dramatically more attractive than being tall or lean. And steroids make you look stronger, so how could it be that they make you less attractive?

There are a few different reasons, some sneakier than others.

We often think of height as being attractive in and of itself. It’s common to think that height is attractive because it’s masculine, or because it makes guys stand out in a crowd, or because it signals good genetics. That isn’t the best way to think about it.

Women’s preference for tall men was formed back in the primordial crucible, back when strength was the difference between life and death. Stronger men were able to muscle their way into positions of leadership, claim more resources, and offer better protection to their loved ones. That’s the main reason height is attractive—because it gives a hint at a man’s physical capability.

If that’s true, it raises an interesting question: is it more important to be strong or tall?

Also, is it even true? The blackpill looksmaxxers have a different theory.

When something is as universally attractive as height, there’s usually a biological root to it. Culture can try to weed it out, or fertilize it, but it seems that most women are born with a genetic predisposition to find height attractive, kind of.

Height isn’t directly attractive. Rather, it’s attractive because it indirectly signals other traits, such as strength. And if we use the example of strength, that means:

1. If you’re tall but weak, you won’t get much of an attractiveness boost from being tall.
2. If you’re short but strong, your physique can be even more attractive than a taller guy’s.

Kind of. There are a couple of exceptions.

I had a horrible experience with a BIA scale when I first started bulking. I’ll tell you the story in a second. That made me curious, so I delved deeper into it, trying to figure out what had gone so terribly wrong.

That bulk was 15 years ago, and I started writing about the inaccuracies of BIA scales eight years ago.

Now, there’s a new trend of fitness influencers tracking their body fat percentage with DEXA scans. Jeff Nippard are Jeremy Ethier are the most famous examples. They’re using the scans to track their progress more objectively. I get the appeal of that, but DEXA isn’t very good at tracking changes in body composition.

Tracking your body composition with BIA scales or DEXA scans is usually a mistake.