You have been training hard and eating clean for a while now to be and look more muscular. It’s been weeks, months, maybe even years. And yet, you aren’t looking as good as you wanted. Sure, gym light, a pump, in a tank top, and you look jacked.
But the moment you put on a hoodie or even a t-shirt, average joe. What is that ? How can you train so hard at the gym and not look more muscular ? Look jacked as hell ?
Well, quite a few things can hinder that, and quite a few things can fix that.
Let me help you look (and get) more muscular in 8 easy steps.
Get Lean but not too Lean to look more Muscular
This may comes as obvious for most, but the less fat you got covering your body, the more we will be able to see your muscles.
However, there comes a point where being too lean actually hinder your appearance.
Firstly, being shredded (or ripped) means that for most natural lifters, you will have to be sub 8%BF. In itself, it’s already quite a low point who comes with a lot of potential health hindering things (mood, sleep quality, hormones, stress, recovery,…).
Second, for any lifter but especially natural ones, being shredded means you will also look deflated; your chest, glutes, back, arms, everything will feel “empty”, and less massive, depleted. Sure, you got more veins and muscle definition, but you will look more like a freak, and only feel and look great under great light and with a pump basically. Remember, for normies, you are already jacked and shredded at 12-15%BF, keep that in mind.
Thirdly, your face will also look different. You will have a more tired and sickly look going on than a healthy, glowy one. Just check out the “death face” of many athletes when on a bodybuilding stage and you will understand. That terms comes from the deep, peeled, skull like features the face takes at the end of a hard cut to show all the muscle definition. Don’t fall in that trap.
In order to look more muscular, stay at a reasonably low but healthy body fat range, 8-15% for men, about 18-25% for women. That will be the perfect sweet spot to be lean, have great definition, but still be healthy and not be deflated and sickly.
As you are doing fat loss, there will come a point where something weird happen. You will lose only 1 or 2kg, and boom, immediately look way better.
I call that, “the magical kilogram”.
It’s this one where your physique takes a 180° turn and start to really look jacked, cold, pumped, in the gym, outside the gym, naked, clothed, everywhere, everytime.
That’s where you want to stay or slightly go under as a good rule of thumb.
Improve your Features to look Jacked
Next on the list to look more muscular, we are going to talk about your features. Meaning beard and bodyhair.
You most likely want to show off your great physique, and you actually have to be mindful of these to optimize your looks.
Firstly, bodyhair can hinder muscle definition by simply covering the separations between them. Take a look at chest hair, thighs hair, stomach, calves,… Sure, it can give a very manly look (often called bear mode), which is great to actually hide how fat you are, but it works well in clothes, not at the beach or for a photoshoot.
By simply shaving them, you can massively improve how well you look. No need to wax, as it can be greatly damaging and stressful on the skin, an electric razor will be just fine.
Do not get me wrong, in itself, being hairy isn’t bad, it’s actually quite masculine, many women love it, I guess it’s just some social norms that think it’s unclean or distasteful. Personally, I always appeal more to women when I rock my winter body and let the body hair grow.
As for the beard, we are going to be a bit more specific, as it all have to do with your head size and structure.
To take my example, I already have a pretty big head, and a big forehead. So a beard too big or wide and too long will not only make my head as a whole look bigger (and thus, my body smaller), it will also chip away at my yoke mass, mainly, the neck and traps.
For someone that isn’t training them (bruh), who cares, but for someone like me who trains his neck hard, it’s a bit of a shame as it’s one of the top best way to immediately look jacked (we will see later how and why).
Thus, you will need to have a trimmed, properly groomed beard, not too long, not too short, to enhance both your face and your whole body.
How do you determine that ? Simple : the bigger and wider your jaw (or lower third of the face) is, the less you should grow your beard, the smaller it is, the more room you have for a longer beard.
Hairstyle to appear more Muscular
Next onto the list, your hair. And yes, they are key to make you look jacked and better overall.
Alike beard, having them styled incorrectly can result in a bigger head look and thus smaller body. So, there isn’t much to actually do about them but two things : shaving bald, or growing them ultra long to then style them accordingly.
Firstly, shaving your head bald will be kind of a “reset” switch to improve your whole silhouette, as your head will be at his smallest, and thus better balance your whole body. If most top athletes bodybuilders are bald, it’s not just out of genetic male pattern baldness, but also because it makes you look immediately bigger and enhance your muscle features. When they keep their hair, it’s a very short, military like buzz cut.
Secondly, about the long hair look, it’s kind of a cheat code to look more jacked.
You see, if you are handsome, long hair will make you look even more handsome. If you are average, you will develop a very good and unique style. And if you are ugly or disfgured, don’t feel left out, you will look even more intimidating than you can possible be already. Just take a look at the pictures below to check it for yourself. You can also take a portrait picture, and edit different hairstyles on different apps to confirm my point.
That being said, long free hair will make your head look extra large and possibly hide a lot of your upper body muscles, so you need to style them in buns, ponytails or braids. There are literally dozen and dozen of variations so don’t be afraid to look the same if you want options !
To sum it up, either shave bald, or keep a military short buzz haircut, or grow them extra long.
Take care of that Skin to look better
Skin quality is key to look better. Already touched a word about it for your face here, but it stands for your whole body. The better your skin tone catches light, the better and more muscular you will look.
Skin is an organ, and is essential for us to live and survive; without it, UV rays would destroy us, we would be in a septic environment like state, any bacteria or micro organism could enter our body and wreck havoc. Furthermore, it is part of the emunctory organs, meaning, the ones that “detox” your body on a daily basis.
With the liver, guts and kidneys, your skin also have a function of pushing out and away the things that either useless or harmful for you. It does it via pimples and sweat, meaning that, the more (up to a certain point) and better you sweat, the better your skin will look.
Furthermore, the better you sweat, the more likely you are to be active, meaning, using your body and muscles. That also mean that exercising is a great way to improve your skin look, and not only by sweating more but also by improving overall circulation, which will help to deliver essential nutrients everywhere around your body and better maintain your tissues, from bone to skin.
In short, strength training is awesome and you kill two birds with one stone by regularly doing it.
Improve your V-Taper to improve your whole body
Now onto more practical advice to immediately look more muscular. The V Taper.
The V-Taper is key to look more jacked since it improves your whole body appearance. Mainly, it focus on building a torso in a v shape, as dramatically as possible.
Why do super-heroes, comic book characters and video games protagonists look so good ? Because they have a great v-taper, that catches the eyes, immediately give a strong and attractive look and better emphasis whatever they are wearing.
To improve your own v-taper you need to focus on everything making you wider, including the deltoids (mainly the lateral portion), the lats (and teres major) and the arms, while keeping the waist (mainly obliques) as small as possible.
This means that your training needs to prioritize overhead and incline pressing, along with a healthy dose of pull-ups and rows, with some icing on the cake isolation wise, with curls, extensions and shoulder raises, mainly lateral and rear delts focused.
As for the waist, you need to keep the fat at bay (come back to the first part of this article), avoid oblique focused ab work and work on your vacuum.
I created my Waist Training Guide ebook and speak extensively about this point inside. Consider buying it to support my work and get your old school era like shaped waist.
Get a thicker Yoke to look Jacked
Along with a great V-Taper, a well built yoke will immediately make you look more muscular.
The yoke is composed by the neck, upper traps, deltoids and upper chest muscles. Basically everything making you look more intimidating and powerful, hence why some call it “The Power Look”.
Think about all anti heroes and villains you may have seen in video games, comic books, movies etc. The heroes are very well built, aesthetic and got that v-taper, but the villains are massive, even more powerful and mean looking. That’s thanks to their huge yoke that instantly create a more compact, thicker look.
To get it, simple, focus building these muscles and don’t be afraid to look outside the box. Things such as neck training with a neck harness, odd lifting, strongman training, etc, are all fantastic tool to build it. Have you ever seen a strongman with tiny traps and delts ? Me neither.
Bigger extremities to look more Muscular
By bigger extremities, I am talking about distal muscles. Put more simply, the further away the muscles from your center line or gravity center are huge, the more you will look jacked.
Think neck (yes, him again), forearms and calves.
How do they help ?
Simple : everything away from your core region that is big will give the illusion of huge members and thicker appearance. Those muscles also often come with heavy loads and power training, hence why we know by sheer instinct that some gent with a thick neck, meaty forearms and balloons like calves is not to be messed with.
Furthermore, nothing can hide these muscles, no bodyhair, no clothes, nothing. If you wear a t-shirt, big veiny forearms and a robust neck immediately pop out. If you wear shorts, or a slim fit jean, or a jogging, implant-like big muscular calves will immediately pop. Even boots such as Dr. Martens or rangers can’t hide them !
To grow them, simple : train them, prioritize or bias them (curl and pull with a neutral or pronated grip) and don’t let genetic be your excuse for not having them bigger. Even with thin joints, any ounce or gram of muscle you will put on these areas will drastically improve everything we talked about, and since most of you never trained or undertrain them, progress will come, and fast. Very fast.
Look more Muscular via Posing
Finally, the last tip I have for you to look more muscular is to actually learn how to pose.
That way, you will learn to present yourself and your body as best as you can to highlight your strengths and hide your weaknesses. For pictures, photoshoots, videos, stage or even just to flex in the gym, that’s THE way to optimize everything you can to showcase the best physique ever you can pull off.
Sounds like cheating ? Maybe, but that’s literally the essence of bodybuilding, sculpting the most close to perfect body as possible, and showing it as well.
As a posing coach, I have already helped quite a lot of gym bros get more confident and proud of their achievement regarding their body evolution, and how well they can now present it.
I propose 1 on 1 video lessons as well as a package for the most dedicated that want to truly master the classic physique posing way.
If you wish to do this alone, just be ready for a lot of repetition, repetition, repetition, and a lot of videos to watch to see what the best of our sport did.
And that’s it for now, you have everything needed to better yourself very fast and with results that will be coming fast.
Thank you for reading,
If you are ever interested in working with me, feel free to check what I can do for you here,
See you soon,
Hersovyac.
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