5 Steps to Build a Perfect Male Physique
If you want to build the perfect male physique, you need to work hard and consistently towards it. But what is the perfect male physique? The answer can vary depending on personal preferences or cultural differences.
Historically, ideals of male attractiveness have included characteristics such as muscularity, height, and a well-proportioned body. In recent times, there has been a greater emphasis on muscularity and a toned physique, often associated with low body fat percentage and visible muscle definition.
It’s important to note that the idea of the “perfect” physique is subjective and can lead to unrealistic expectations or body image issues. It’s more important to focus on maintaining a healthy lifestyle, which includes regular exercise, a balanced diet, and overall well-being. Always strive for staying healthy
However, if you want to know how to build a perfect male physique, we will take a few assumptions to let you know how to achieve it. If we look back in history, DaVinci’s sketch of the Vitruvian man and based on the Fibonacci sequence, it is understood that the perfect male physique is someone having:
- Shoulders 1.6x broader than waist
- A more natural look (lean muscular), instead of a hulk-like look that is only achievable with steroids
While it might sound simple on paper, achieving that might be difficult and Max Posternak shared what he believes to be the 5 steps to build a perfect male physique.
5 Steps to Build a Perfect Male Physique
If you are serious enough about changing how you look to try and build a perfect male physique, these are the steps you should take.
1. Focus On Your Diet
As usual, the diet is the foundation of everything in fitness and how you look. Since the waist measurement is part of the perfect male physique, you know you cannot have love handles and belly fat hanging around and the best way to tackle that is through taking a closer look at your diet.
If you want to get lean, ditch processed foods, refined grains and sugar in favour of single-ingredient food and eat enough protein. If you do this, you most likely won’t even need to track your calories and achieve a slimmer-waist look.
How Long Should You Diet to Get a Six-Pack?
2. Choose the Correct Exercises
To develop an attractive masculine-looking body, there are a few key exercises you should be doing regularly.
- Pull-ups or lat pulldowns – target your lats, rhomboids, traps and biceps
- Bench press or dumbbell press – target your chest, shoulders and triceps
- Squats – develop your glutes, quads and hamstrings
- Lunges or Bulgarian split squats – another bodyweight exercise for the lower body
- Lateral raises and bent-over reverse flyes – this will increase your shoulders and how bigger you look
Posternak suggests doing a 3-day cycle of the exercises above.
- Day 1 – bench press and lat pulldowns (or pull-ups)
- Day 2 – squats, walking lunges, and Bulgarian split squats
- Day 3 – lateral raises, reverse flyes, abs exercises
- Day 4 – rest
Repeat this cycle over and over to gain muscle in the right areas to start looking like the perfect male physique.
3. Progressive Overload
Progressive overload is another key component to achieving the perfect-looking male physique. This is a fancy way of saying that you should keep challenging your body during your workouts. For most cases, that means incrementing the amount of weight that you lift every once in a while. If last week you did 100 kilos on the bench press, maybe next week you can go for 110 kilos for the same number of reps and sets.
However, there are other ways you can apply progressive overload that is not bound to the amount of weight you are lifting, but rather the tempo, sets, reps, or form. See it in more detail in the link below.
4. Optimise Sleep
Sleep is an extremely important factor when it comes to building muscle and recovering from workouts. You want to get 7-9 hours of sleep every day to optimise your hormones, the ability of your body to burn fat, and to grow and repair muscle tissue.
5. Supplementation
Supplements are not mandatory for most people as they will only improve your results by around 5%, Posternak says. But if you are striving to build a perfect male physique, then you should take a closer look at supplementation. The main natural supplement that can give you a boost to your performance, strength and muscle growth is creatine monohydrate.
