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In Part I of this article I talked briefly about the very real fact that muscle mass gains slow down dramatically after you’ve been training for a few years and that you’ll eventually need to change your focus from gaining size to creating a more appealing shape if you’re to continue to move forward.

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I mentioned that you’ll need to take a series of photos for an objective assessment of where your strengths and weaknesses lie.  Today, I want to talk about the next steps in physique assessment that will lead to the development in of a program to create your ultimately aesthetically appealing physique.  So let’s get to it.

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Evaluate Your Photos
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Now that you’ve got your photos, the next step in physique is to actually evalate them.  This step is sometimes the hardest as you’ll have to look at your own pictures with an objective eye.  To do this I’d suggest you create the following list on a piece of paper.
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- Upper traps:
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- Front delts:
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- Lateral delts:
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- Rear delts:
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- Biceps:
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- Tricep long head: (Most visible on the underside of the arm in the bicep poses)
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- Tricep lateral head: (Most visible during side tricep poses)
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- Forearms
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- Lower chest:
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- Upper chest
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- Upper back width:
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- Upper back thickness:
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- Lower/Mid back erectors:
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- Abdominals: (Not looking for development here, but amount of leanness.  I don’t believe that exercise will increase abdominal thickness to the point where it matters or makes them look better.)
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- Obliques: (Mostly looking to see if these are overdeveloped and taking away from the waistline.  If there are ”love handles” here you need to adjust your diet not your exercise plan.)
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- Quads:
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- Glutes:
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- Hamstrings:
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- Calves:
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Now go through each photo one at a time and proceed through the list above muscle by muscle for each one.  In some photos you won’t be able to see certain muscles so you don’t need to make a note of this.

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However, in the photos where you can see the muscle, note whether it is lagging, proportional to the rest of your physique, or overdeveloped.
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In the end, you should have a clear picture of what needs to be addressed, what needs to be maintained, and where you can hold back.
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Summarize Your Results
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At this point, I like to create the following two columns to pull everything together so I can make sense of all the comments and notes I made above.

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Physique Strong Points – In this section list all of the muscles that are well developed and need little additional work.  These will be the spots you deprioritize in your training.
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Physique Weak Points – In this section you’ll identify the weakest points from your list above which should tell you where you’ll dedicate most of your efforts.  My goal is usually to identify the top 1-2 in most need of need attention.  These will be the spots you prioritize in your training.

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Special note:  I don’t do physique assessments with novices until the end of their first 3 months (even up to 6 months) of training.  During this time we work out movement limitations and establish the basics of lifting before proceeding to this point.

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During this time it is assumed that everything needs work and that understanding the basic lifts is more important than prioritizing certain muscle groups.  Besides, if you’re a rank novice you should but putting on mass very easily.  If you are not, you’re doing something wrong and you need to READ THIS.

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Calculate Your Ideal Waist Measurement
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I recently picked up a tip from John Barban’s product The Adonis Effect that the ideal waist measurement for males is approximately 45% of your height in inches.

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In other words, a guy who is 5’10 (70 inches) would calculate his ideal waist measurement like this:

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70 X 0.45 = 31.5 inches

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Frankly, I’m not sure if I totally agree that this is an exact number, but I think it serves as a great guide.  Record your height and calculate your ideal waist measurement.  Now measure your waist and write down the actual measurement as well.

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Establish a Priority

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At this point you have all the information you need to start making a decision about your next steps in your physique planning.

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If your waist measurement is more than two inches above the calculated ideal waist measurement you are going on a fat loss plan.  For the most aesthetically appealing physique there is some research to suggest that women find men most attractive when our shoulder circumference is 60% greater than our waist.  And since we know it is easier (or at least faster) for advanced trainees to drop fat than gain muscle, this is your target.

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While this is really worthy of another post I’ll write soon, I did swipe the waist to shoulder ratio idea from The Adonis Effect as well.  If you want to learn more you can scoop up your own copy HERE.

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If your waist is within two inches of the ideal target you can proceed towards tackling the problems above with few changes in your diet, but make sure you keep monitoring your waist at least every two weeks.  If it breaks from the two inch window of ideal, you need to reel it in.

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Now that you’ve done that…you’re ready to create your training program.

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I’ll be back Friday with Part III including some suggestions for how to bring up the lagging groups you’ve identified and how to program differently based on whether you’re in a fat loss or muscle accumulation (I prefer this term to “bulking”) phase.

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PS:  Don’t forget to share this if you’ve found it useful.  Thanks!

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Note – Part 3 can now be found HERE.