5 Steps to Build a PERFECT Male Physique

There are certain proportions that make a man appear more manly attractive and stronger. This has been called The Divine Proportion, the Golden Ratio, or the Adonis ratio, and it’s a concept that has been observed further back than the time of Leonardo da Vinci, with as many drawings depicting the ideal proportions of a man. It’s based on numbers associated with the Fibonacci sequence, and essentially, when applied to the male physique, it’s having shoulders that are 1.6 times the circumference of the waist.

Contrary to a lot of modern bodybuilding ideals, it’s not just about looking as bulky or as muscular as possible, and a more natural look is preferred over a more unnatural hulk-like look that’s only achievable with steroid use. There are certain exercises, eating habits, and routines that you can use to achieve and maintain this perfect male physique. This is why undoubtedly the first step is to take a close look at your diet.

I mean, if your waist is a key measurement for the ideal masculine frame, then you already realize that eating pizza, ice cream, and junk food every day isn’t going to get you to the body that most people innately find attractive. You want to get and stay lean, and the best way to do that is to primarily eat real single-ingredient foods while avoiding processed foods, refined grains, and sugar.

Some great examples of natural single-ingredient foods that you should be eating include all green vegetables, as well as non-starchy vegetables like cauliflower, carrots, and bell peppers. You can have fruit like berries, apples, watermelon, and avocados. It also includes protein sources like chicken breast, ground turkey, fish, shrimp, eggs, lean ground beef, pork tenderloins, and lean cuts of steak like top round. If you’re a vegan, you could have things like seitan and tofu instead. And you can also have filling carbohydrates like oatmeal, brown rice, potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, beans, black bean pasta, and quinoa. And of course, you can add some oils for your fats to make your food taste better. The top three that I recommend include avocado oil, olive oil, and coconut oil.

Now, if you stick predominantly to these types of real foods and you make it a priority to get 0.7 grams of protein per pound of body weight daily in combination with lots of vegetables, you’ll naturally move towards a slimmer waist that’s more in line with the golden ratio. If you just stick to natural foods, you’ll most likely not even have to track your calories due to the fact that these foods are naturally filling and nutrient-dense.

Next, let’s move on to the exercises that you should be doing because there are really only a few key exercises that you definitely need to develop an attractive masculine-looking body. The first one is going to be pull-ups, or alternatively, you can do lat pulldowns. Either one of these exercises will target your rhomboids, your lats, and your biceps. Developing your back muscles will give you a wider V-taper appearance for your upper body. And both exercises are pretty straightforward. You’re just pulling yourself up to the bar with your chest out and your elbows tracking down and back, or you’re pulling the bar down to your upper chest with similar form.

Next, you’ll want a push exercise like bench press or dumbbell press, where you’ll lay back, lower the weight to your chest while keeping your elbows at roughly 45-degree angles to your body, and then press back up. This is going to work your chest, shoulders, and triceps, again helping you develop that dense upper body look. If you’re currently trying to get started and you’re searching for the perfect upper body workout routine, stop. Literally, take pull-ups or lat pulldowns and superset it with bench presses or dumbbell presses. So perform nine heavy sets, doing presses and pulls with a three-minute break at the end of each set, and you’ll have an effective upper body workout.

There are obviously many other exercises you can do, and you can make your workout significantly more complex, but it can also really be that simple. And if you’re currently trying to get started, simplicity is key to actually get going.

Now, even though the golden ratio for men mostly focuses on the upper body, you’re still going to want to work your lower body to look proportional. There’s also an ideal waist-to-hip ratio, which for men is under 0.95. So your waist should be at least 5% smaller than your hips, and squats are one of the best exercises to help you develop your glutes, quads, and hamstrings. If you’re not used to performing squats and you’d like to nail down the form quickly, start with a bench behind you, then sit your hips back and down to the bench while your chest stays pointed towards the mirror. Don’t let your lower back round, and actually concentrate on sitting down on the bench rather than squatting. It’ll make getting the right form down much easier.

Once you master the form, you can remove the bench and perform regular squats. Lunges and Bulgarian split squats are also great exercises to incorporate into your leg workouts. And both of these can be done simply by spreading your feet hip-width apart, then taking a big step forward and dropping your back knee to the ground before coming back up again.

If you don’t currently have a leg workout, combining three sets of each of these exercises with a three-minute break in between each set can provide a very simple yet very effective lower body workout.

Lastly, you’ll want to do some work on your side and rear delts to give you a wider shoulder appearance. The best exercises you can do for these include lateral raises to your sides and bent-over reverse flies. For both of these, you would just keep a slight bend in your elbows and raise your arms to your sides.

To keep things super simple, you can do bench press and lat pulldowns on day one, squats, walking lunges, and Bulgarians on day two, and then lateral raises and reverse flies in combination with abs on day three. Then, take a day off and repeat the three-day cycle again, doing nine total sets each day.

Just to be clear once again, this is a very simplified, straight-to-the-point routine that can definitely help you start to develop the muscles you want for a more attractive male physique. But the only way it works is if you follow the next step, which is to ensure that you’re upping the weight load used for all these exercises over time. It doesn’t matter if you can only bench press the bar when first starting out. You have to work on upping the weight to trigger the effects of progressive overload. The only way you’re going to redefine the appearance of your body is by forcing your body to change. Your body prefers to stay exactly the way it is now. This means that you’ll only add muscle mass if you challenge yourself consistently.

You can also focus on increasing reps, but there are a few reasons why I recommend focusing on weight load over reps. Mainly, it comes down to your endurance capacity. If you get up to 15 to 20 reps with a given weight load, there’s a big chance that fatigue will hold you back much more than if you just focused on weight load. That fatigue can make it feel like you’ve gone to failure when you actually haven’t. When using heavy weights, failure is pretty obvious. You simply can’t lift the weight anymore without taking a break. The type of fatigue that high reps cause can also lead to very poor form towards the end of your sets. So while reps are an option to focus on, it’s much more of a direct path to look at the bar and try to add five more pounds than last week.

Of course, you’re not going to be able to add weight sometimes for weeks and maybe even months when you start hitting plateaus. But the goal in your mind always needs to be to progressively increase the weight that you’re using over time. A good rep range to stick to is 6 to 10 reps, and a simple way to know when it’s time to increase the weight is when you can complete nine to ten reps. After upping the weight, your reps will naturally drop. So let’s say you were doing nine to ten reps. After you up the weight, you might drop to six reps before hitting failure. Now the new goal is to work your way back up to nine to ten reps with the new weight load, and then repeat that cycle over and over again until you’re lifting significantly more weight than what you can handle right now.

That’s a very simple and streamlined path for muscle growth. Next is recovery, and really there are two key things that you need to know for optimal recovery. First, you need to prioritize sleep. The studies that we have on sleep and how it affects muscle growth and fat loss show that sleep is an extremely important factor when it comes to your results. You want to try to get at least seven to nine hours of sleep per night to optimize your hormones, your body’s ability to lose fat, and repair and grow your muscles.

To optimize sleep, you ideally want to try to go to bed at the same time each night, and you want to sleep in a quiet, cool environment that’s blacked out. The other thing you want to do to ensure optimal recovery is to give your muscles at least 48 hours of rest before training them again. If you set up your routine the way I talked about earlier, so push-pull on the first day, legs on the second, and shoulders and abs on the third, followed by a day off, you’ll have at least 48 to 72 hours of rest before hitting each muscle again. This simple routine will still allow you to train each muscle twice a week, which is proven to be far better than doing it just once a week when it comes to stimulating muscle growth naturally.

Finally, the last step is supplementation, which is essentially the cherry on top. Contrary to all the supplement ads and the fitness influencers that try to sell you supplements on Instagram, I want you to understand that supplements will only increase your results by something like 5% tops, which does matter, but it’s not going to handle the whole equation for you. Most of your results are going to come from your consistency with your whole foods diet, your workout program, and applying progressive overload.

The main natural supplement that can give you a big boost in terms of performance, strength, and muscle growth is creatine monohydrate. You can simply take 5 grams of creatine every day, and it’s proven safe and effective by a wide range of studies dating back to the early 1900s. The only other supplement that you may want to consider taking is protein powder if you struggle to get 0.7 grams of protein per pound of body weight daily.

So those are the five super-simplified steps that you need to take to improve your male physique and move closer to the golden ratio, with step number five being more of the cherry on top, and the first four steps being the most important. Of course, there are many other more in-depth exercises, dieting techniques, and training strategies that can help you as well.