Bri­an Chin Le­ung

The key to sculpt­ing a great physique (male) is to bear in mind that you would like your body to ap­pear well-pro­por­tioned. How many times have we heard women make fun of men who have big up­per bod­ies and skin­ny legs? These men are giv­en names such as sno-cone, bird legs, crab legs etc. Like­wise, if you are a man with a frail-look­ing up­per body, some women may want to call you a pi­rate, be­cause it looks like you buried your chest; noo­dle arms or Mr No Shoul­ders may al­so be fair game. Mod­ern man, in many ways, is still very pri­mal. We have the beast, with hairy chest, em­bed­ded deep in our psy­che, hence we cling to con­tact sports like box­ing, karate, rug­by etc. Most nor­mal women al­so want their men to look mas­cu­line.

I don't think there are many women out there who want to be seen with a man who has small­er shoul­ders than them­selves, or with a man who has a small­er waist­line. I train some fe­males, who al­ways com­ment, that a man must act and look like a man! That does not mean you need to have a body­builder-type physique; most women ap­pear quite hap­py to have a man that is trim, lean and de­fined with just enough mus­cle.

Lay­ing the foun­da­tion

Ac­cord­ing to most fit­ness ex­perts, the sil­hou­ette of the clas­sic male physique, if seen in a dark­ened door­way, with a light shin­ing be­hind, should re­flect broad shoul­ders, a trim waist and no­tice­ably mus­cu­lar legs. In oth­er words, the sil­hou­ette would look like an X. This means that lay­ing a good foun­da­tion would re­quire you to first work on your shoul­ders, waist and legs. Of course, this in no way in­fers that you must ne­glect your chest, back and arms.

It's just that, like putting up any good build­ing, you must first en­sure you have a prop­er foun­da­tion. There are two ba­sic com­pound move­ments that can help you achieve this X look very quick­ly. They are the clean and press and the free squat. The clean and press places strong em­pha­sis on both your shoul­ders and core, while the free squat ef­fec­tive­ly gives you strong, well-shaped legs and has a gen­er­al, an­a­bol­ic (mus­cle build­ing) ef­fect over the en­tire body.

Oth­er body parts

Af­ter you have laid down your foun­da­tion, you are now go­ing to put up a struc­ture, of such fine pro­por­tions, that it could be­come the en­vy of any myth­i­cal Greek God. Try to work each mus­cle group, very hard, at least twice per week, us­ing a split-rou­tine sys­tem. Here are some ex­er­cis­es I would like to sug­gest:

• Chest – Flat bench press, in­cline bar­bell press and fly­es.

• Back – Chin-ups, bent over bar­bell rows, seat­ed pul­ley rows.

• Bi­ceps – Straight bar­bell curls, al­ter­nate dumb­bell curls and supinat­ed chin-ups.

• Tri­ceps – Ly­ing tri­ceps ex­ten­sions, nar­row grip bench press and dips be­tween bench­es.

• Shoul­ders – Clean and press, dumb­bell press, lat­er­als, frontal rais­es and shrugs.

• Legs – Free squats, dead lifts, leg curls and calf rais­es.

While aer­o­bic train­ing such as run­ning, bik­ing etc, is great for your car­dio­vas­cu­lar sys­tem, to change your body shape, you must en­gage in some form of weight train­ing. With weight train­ing, you can have a lot of fun ac­tu­al­ly sculpt­ing and shap­ing var­i­ous parts of your body such as your legs, shoul­ders and back.

Keep Train­ing.

Bri­an Chin Le­ung is a cer­ti­fied per­son­al train­er