b2b: Legends membership

There's a myth that aesthetics comes from emphasizing certain muscles, creating the illusion of broader shoulders and a narrower waist. It's the idea that keeping your traps smaller will make your shoulders more square, or that having smaller core muscles will make your shoulders seem broader.

It's a myth because people see right through the illusion. It's smoke and mirrors, lighting and angles. Aesthetics is about looking strong, fit, competent, and radiantly healthy.

I've surveyed thousands of men and women, having them review photos and illustrations. We've consulted with celebrities to help them improve their appearance, and with top athletes to help them improve their performance.

• Having a higher shoulder-to-waist ratio is consistently rated as being more attractive by both men and women, but that doesn't mean your shoulders are disproportionately important.
• You get the same results when you factor out the shoulders, using the chest-to-waist ratio instead. That suggests that the lats and chest are equally important.
• But the effect is even stronger when you forget about proportions and look at strength directly, measuring how strong people are at random upper-body exercises like biceps curls, crunches, chest presses, and rows.

No matter how you measure it, genuine strength is rated as most attractive. Not on any particular exercise or in any particular rep range, but overall.

We can delve deeper:

• Radiant skin: Your skin glows with a healthy vibrance when you build a dense web of capillaries that deliver nutrient-rich blood throughout your body. It gains a youthful elasticity with good exercise, a healthy lifestyle, and proper skin hydration.
• Posture: Building a strong, fit, and mobile physique helps you sit and stand with a more athletic posture, giving off the impression that you have more energy (because you have more energy).
• Leanness: The more muscle growth you stimulate, the more of your calories get directed towards building muscle, and the fewer are left to be stored as fat. Perhaps more importantly, the better your overall workout routine is, the more visceral fat you'll burn, giving you a leaner waist with healthier organs (even if your overall body fat percentage stays the same).

Your inner health shines outward. Building stronger bones supports more muscle mass. Getting fitter makes your organs age more slowly and your skin look younger, with fewer wrinkles and a warmer tone. Healthier mitochondria produce more energy.

However, there are four major caveats.

1. Upper body strength matters more. Our aesthetic wiring is deep in our primeval brains, coming from an ancient time when men ran through the Savannah, wielding spears, wrestling and raiding, carrying their prizes home on their backs. That's why upper-body muscularity is so aesthetically appealing.
2. Overall fitness is still important. Building a big-legged "X-frame" physique is a modern bodybuilder thing, but it still pays to be fit and athletic overall. Our ancestors carried their strong upper bodies around on athletic legs. A low-volume, minimalist approach to leg training is perfect for that, especially if you combine it with cardio.
3. You can still emphasize certain muscles. This program works your shoulders quite hard, and you'll be much broader by the end of it. It's just that we're also training the rest of your upper body, taking a more balanced approach.
4. You don't need to be perfectly balanced. Athletes are known for having especially cool physiques, and their physiques are seldom balanced. Swimmers are all shoulders. Gymnasts are all lats, abs, and biceps. Powerlifters have impressive chests, traps, and butts. You can build your own physique. It just needs to be rooted in strength, health, and athleticism.

This program includes cardio. I know some of you guys are already in great shape. You're already doing awesome. You can keep doing the cardio you already love, keep playing the sports you already play.

But if you aren't doing any cardio right now, there's a whole new world of benefits to unlock. We'll ease you into it slowly and easily. We'll give you plenty of options, and we'll fit it into your lifestyle, no matter how busy you are.

Cardio doesn't need to be complicated. If you do it right, it can be relaxing, enjoyable, and invigorating. It's optional, but we highly recommend it, and we'll teach you exactly how to do it.

We'll show you how to eat a balanced diet. You can eat low-carb, low-fat, or plant-based. It's okay if you have allergies or IBS. Different people prefer and benefit from different ways of eating. But whatever you eat, you need to give your body the nutrients it needs without overdoing it on the things that aren't good for you.

We'll also show you how to get RESULTS with your diet. We'll show you how to build muscle, or burn fat, or do both at the same time.

• Bulking isn't sustainable. It's a temporary increase in calories to support muscle growth. But keeping that muscle is sustainable.
• Cutting isn't sustainable. It's a temporary restriction of calories that causes fat loss. But maintaining that leaner physique needs to be sustainable.
• Body recomposition isn't sustainable, either. At a certain point, you'll run out of extra fat to burn, which means you'll run out of energy to fuel muscle growth. But again, maintaining a strong and lean physique needs to be sustainable.

The foundation of the diet will be balanced and healthy, and then we'll show you how to turn the dial to emphasize whatever goal you're after. By focusing on good exercise, nutrition, and lifestyle, you'll build muscle leanly and healthfully and with a vibrant glow, or burn fat while improving your skin elasticity and fitness.

At the end of each three-month program, we'll evaluate your progress and goals, and we'll give you a plan for the next three months. Here's what those three months might look like:

As the months go by, your progress will add up, giving you a dramatic and sustainable transformation that looks good, feels good, and adds years to your lifespan.