How to Build the Most Attractive Body, According to Science

Men's Training Priorities vs. Women's Preferences00:00

Most men have no direct clue about what women actually like. Men sort of guess and infer, and if we're being really unkind about it, sort of hallucinate what they think women actually want. Because other guys are guys too, most guys just end up training to impress other guys. Maybe what the ladies say they like isn't exactly what they choose on dating sites, in clubs, but they do idealize a guy, on average, that has at least six differences from the guy most guys are trying to look like.

Reasons Men Train00:30

Guys train for all sorts of reasons. Maybe you got bullied in elementary school, middle school, and high school. Some guys train for the art of having an amazing physique or to get super strong. Some people train for health. In reality, it's mostly vanity. At the end of the day, in the back of many of our minds, we're at least a little bit training for female attention.

Science on Training Priorities01:32

From the published literature so far and from a massive million workout RP hypertrophy app data set, what guys are training for is sometimes really far off from what women say they actually like in guys. The RP hypertrophy app data shows men highly prioritize the following muscles almost completely evenly: chest, biceps, triceps, shoulders, and back in that order. Men emphasize their forearms as the sixth highest priority after back, but at half of the average priority of the first five upper body muscles. Legs and abs were way, way behind.

230,000 training programs from RP app users don't paint just a guess of a picture. RP folks are nerdier and more nuanced than the average lifter, so the average non-RP gym guy is training upper body even more and legs and abs probably even less than the RP cohort. Mealey's direct gym observation work from the published literature points in the same direction. Newsome's broader participation data supports large sex differences in muscle strength and behavior, and Dirkey et al. show that men's own male muscle preferences are not the same as women's.

Women's Stated Preferences04:00

In the most comprehensive research done on this topic to date by Durkee and colleagues, women rank obliques, glutes, abs, biceps, and shoulders as the muscles in men that, when bigger than the others, create the most attractive physique. The study asked over 1,700 men and women how muscular they found different male muscle groups most attractive.

Women's stated preferences in order were: obliques (number one), then glutes, abs, biceps, shoulders, triceps, calves, delts, quads, pecs, lats, forearms, and dead last, traps. Women liked some upper body muscle, especially biceps and shoulders, but the very top of the list was obliques, glutes, abs, biceps, and shoulders. In other words, lean waist, visible core, decent arms and shoulders, and training glutes.

In the RP hypertrophy app data, chest is number one, triceps are number three, back is number five, but glutes are way down at number nine. There's some overlap, especially with biceps and shoulders, but there's also a pretty big mismatch.

Limitations of Stated Preferences06:00

Durkee's study is about stated preferences, not actual dating behavior. Women taking boxes on a questionnaire is not the same thing as who they actually date or sleep with in the real world. Other research by Sell and colleagues shows that women's ratings of men's bodily attractiveness are strongly predicted by how physically strong those men look. It's not that women hate upper bodies, far from it. But if we take the Durkee data seriously, what women say they like is not just gigantic chest and back. It's more like strong, lean, athletic, good arms and shoulders, visible abs and obliques, and training glutes.

Why Guys Miss the Mark07:00

Guys train upper body, and especially chest and triceps and back, way more than women seem to say they prefer. They don't train glutes or abs nearly enough. When men train, even to explicitly appeal to women, most men have no earthly direct clue about what women actually like. They sort of guess and infer, and if we're being really unkind about it, sort of hallucinate what they think women actually want.

The number one neural network component they likely use to reason about what women like is what they themselves want to look like. Almost no guys actually slowly reason their way into choosing muscle groups to train. Guys go into the gym and blast upper body, period. When you ask them why, some of them will say "For the ladies." A very well-established idea is that guys actually just train to impress themselves in the mirror.

Because other guys are guys, too, most guys just end up training to impress other guys. When you have 22-inch arms and a chest that can stop a bullet, most girls are just confused and maybe a bit scared, while you get approached by more guys at the gym than you can shake a stick at. Guess who prefers massive upper bodies on guys the most? Gay guys.

Studies on Gay vs. Straight Training Preferences09:00

A 1997 study surveyed lifters entering five gyms, one of which was a gay men's gym. If men train to attract women, then men who aren't oriented toward attracting women should train differently. But they didn't. The gay gym men put the same disproportionate share of their session into upper body training as the straight men. Their training style essentially tracked being a man, not sexual orientation. Orientation in that study was inferred from the venue, not directly asked, and the sample was quite small.

Ten years later, Swami and Tovee had gay and straight men rate photos of real male bodies. They measured waist-to-chest ratio, essentially how V-shaped the torso is, a broad chest and shoulders tapering into a narrow waist. For both groups, that ratio was the single biggest driver of how attractive a man looked. More than overall size, more than body fat, and gay men rewarded stronger V tapers significantly more than straight men did.

In the RP data, if we look at the muscles that men actually emphasize against what women rate as most attractive on a man, the correlation is basically zero.

Stated vs. Revealed Preferences11:30

In economics and in social psychology, there's an interesting tidbit of insight about the differences between stated and revealed preferences. What people say they like and what they actually like can be somewhat different, especially based on how, when, and in what format they are asked and how actual revealed preferences are determined.

Maybe what the ladies say they like isn't exactly what they choose on dating sites, in clubs, at school, in libraries, and at work. What women actually seem to prefer, their revealed preferences, are not the same as their stated preferences. This is especially true when the study stimuli are actual DEXA scans, whole body images, and 3D body models or body composition manipulations rather than just telling which muscles you like on a sheet of paper with no pictures of how guys actually look.

In those cases, women prefer guys with narrower waists, broader shoulders, arms that match the shoulders, and legs, especially glutes, that aren't completely missing from the equation. These are still stated preferences as truly revealed preferences are who women actually date or hook up with, but actual bodies are way closer to revealed preferences than muscle words on a page with no context.

Six Key Differences Women Prefer14:30

Women don't actually find the guys with narrow shoulders but the biggest glutes and worship him. But they do idealize a guy on average that has at least six differences from the guy most guys are trying to look like:

• While women like a broad-shouldered man, they don't value massive pec thickness nearly as much as most guys do
• While women love a nice V taper, they don't value massive back thickness or width like most guys do
• Women love muscular arms, but once men's arms are big enough to match the rest of them, even bigger arms no longer have more appeal
• Women do in fact like perky, round, visible glutes on men
• Women love developed abs and especially lower obliques. That place where the obliques V-shape into the groin absolutely drives them insane. This is more diet than training, but a few sets of side bends with only one dumbbell per side at a time, not in each hand that balances itself out, might not hurt
• Skinny legs actually are a turn off to enough women to matter. So while you don't need to look like an IPF super heavyweight squatter in the lower body, registering straight zeros in the quad, ham, and calf department won't be ideal

Training Recommendations16:00

The goal for training to attract women isn't to stop training your upper body. It's more like training your lower body and abs a bit more, and your chest and back thickness perhaps a bit less. More balance, less freaky over developed upper body.

If you want to train to attract gay men, getting freaky big all over and especially thick in the back, delts, arms, and chest will pay massive dividends. You don't have to train to appeal to women. Training to look how best pleases you will likely give you so much confidence that this confidence alone will get you more female attention than training exclusively for the ideal female pleasing physique and feeling kind of meh about it.

Constantly looking at your male model body in the mirror and knowing that you sold out your masculine identity for female approval makes me sick to think about. But if you really like to look like what the ladies like to touch, then getting leaner and hitting your abs a bit, hitting your legs and glutes a good bit, and focusing on shoulder width and decent back width plus some solid arm work is probably the way to go.