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Jeremy Ethier just released a video about bulking with fake transformations, incorrect scientific references, and a strange accusation against me. I suspect Jeremy’s intentions are good. I think he’s trying to give people realistic expectations. However, I think it’s wrong to use fake transformations as an example of “realistic” results, especially when he’s incorrect about what’s realistic.

I’ll link the studies he references, and you’ll be able to see right away that they suggest the opposite of what he says they do. I’ll also go through his bulking recommendations, explaining why they’re wrong and don’t work very well for skinny guys.

The accusation is stranger. Jeremy put on a wig of my haircut and attacked a couple of the claims I’m known for making:

• Claim 1: I gained 20 pounds quite leanly in 3 months. Jeremy says this is physically impossible without steroid abuse, and therefore I must be lying (or abusing steroids). This is false. I’ve done it myself, I wasn’t the first, and I’ve had quite a few skinny clients get similar results. They tend to be tall and underweight.
• Claim 2: It’s realistic for the average skinny guy to gain 20 pounds quite leanly in 6 months or less. Again, Jeremy claims this is physically impossible. He says it takes at least a year for a skinny beginner to gain 10–20 pounds of lean mass naturally. This is false, and in a way that’s much easier to show, since it’s fairly common for skinny beginners to build muscle faster than that.

I made a video response, but I want to go a bit deeper in this article, including answering all of the common questions I got after posting the video. I answered 400 comments underneath the video, and I’m happy to answer more—that’s my favourite part of YouTube—but I think it would pay to go into greater detail here.

Note: bulking slowly is perfectly fine. The gains you leave on the table won’t rot. You can have them later. However, Jeremy Ethier’s video was “The Fastest Way to Gain 20 Pounds of Muscle Naturally,” so that’s what this article is about.

I remember what it felt like to be a skinny guy who wanted to bulk up fast. If that’s what you want, too, then I want to help you do it properly.

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.