Creating Your Ideal Physique

Building your ideal physique is about having a strong mental picture in your mind, of what you want your body to look like, and then structuring your lifts to chisel out the statue clay.

Just like any other task you do in life, the end result is clear. As it should be, because if it were not, you would lack direction and have no way of knowing if you were on the right track. The body is the same way. No I understand if your goal is to just lose a couple pounds and become healthier, then your body image is not you end goal. On those lines, how many times have you heard somebody say that, and then a couple days in, they give up? I can name a few, and I would think you have as well. There is a reason behind that, and that is what I will be addressing here today.

Anything in life, that you must get good at, like math, the guitar, or drawing, there is a journey. Obviously, some people are gifted in those subjects, but even those types did not come out of the womb drawing the Mona Lisas of the world. There is a process and a learning curve. The difference in those people are they had a clear vision on the skill level they wanted to achieve in their mind, and the reason they stuck with it, is because the journey gave them rewards.

We have all heard the saying, "The man who enjoys walking will walk further than the man who hates walking, and ultimately be the one to reach the destination". When there is a clear goal in mind, your brain will release dopamine when there are gains achieved when reaching that goal. This is one of the reasons why weightlifting/fitness is the best anti-depressants known to man. Just doing the thing, heals you!

To tie this into why having the mental image of your dream physique in your mind is so important because you are far more likely to achieve it, when your brain knows that the activity you are doing is getting it closer to what it desires. Thats reason number one, reason number two being is it will affect the way you train.

Personally, I wanted to have an aesthetic physique with a little freak thrown in there. Meaning I want to look at myself and look aesthetic in my proportions but also have great size. This affects the way I train in the weight I use, what parts of the body I train with certain forms, etc. Say I wanted to train for an athletic physique, like a football player, I would train with a lot of compound lifts or even do Cross-Fit. There are reason why certain fit people look the way they do, and why some of it is genetics, a lot of it is the style they implement in training.

To go further into it, if you google "Golden Era Bodybuilders", like Franco Columbo, Arnold, or Frank Zane, and look at their physiques. They all had big chests, capped delts, big arms and in contrast look at bodybuilders like Phil Heath, Jay Cutler, Ronnie Coleman, they were big everywhere. It is one, due to the different drugs they were using, but also their different training styles. Classic physique athletes have that appealing athletic look to them that I like, and when I learn how they achieve it, I copy their training styles.

Their styles focus heavy on the side delts, the "V-taper", which is nothing but the shape of the torso, having a wide back/shoulders and small waist creating V shape. So my training involves a lot of side lateral raise, lat work, and tricep development. Therefore, I do more intensity in those areas to grow them more than other parts. This does not mean I skip out on other areas. I still hammer down on those growing them proportionally, however on the days where I am trying to hit the main points, there is a certain level of focus that I must have on those days.

I will break down a couple of training files in later blogs but for now, think about how you would like to look, and find people who look how you want and emulate. This is super important because it is the fundamental way humans learn. As children we saw what our parents did, and then we did creating neural pathways thus creating new habits and patterns accumulating in the process called learning.

As always, I am rooting for you. Much love, GW.