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John Barban

So I’m waiting at a stop light and I notice what appears to be a big guy walking down the sidewalk. There are a bunch of cars in the way so I can only make out his calves, and his hands. Calves are pretty big, and hands and forearms also appear to be a good size.

I can catch the rough tempo and style of his gait, and then it hits me. I can’t tell if this guy is overly fat, or overly muscular. As the cars start to move forward it is revealed to me that the man walking down the street was probably in his mid 50’s, hadn’t seen the inside of a gym in 30 years and was approximately 100 lbs overweight.

Big Fat or Big Muscles?

The troubling part is that he walks and moves exactly the same way as the power lifters and bodybuilders from our gym. I wonder if I walked the same way when I was chemically enhanced and weighed 250lbs pounds…possibly, but I can’t remember and nobody ever mentioned anything to me…I certainly hope not.

It’s taken me a long time to get over my need to be bigger and now it just looks silly when I see normal guys eating and training their way up to be as big as this overweight man and ending up looking and walking just like him too.

Hollywood Hero’s go lean.

The new wave of Hollywood comic book action hero’s also helps with this point. Ryan Reynolds, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Hugh Jackman etc. The key to the look each guy has is that they’re muscular but also very lean.

During is prep for his role as Thor, Chris Hemsworths trainer explained that the marvel people wanted him to get his shoulders as wide as possible to give him that heroic looking shoulder to waist taper.

Don’t cover muscle with fat.

All the muscle in the world won’t do a thing for your look if it’s covered in fat. In fact, the more muscle you have mixed with a high bodyfat level the bulkier and fatter you’ll end up looking. Unfortunately many guys will be so afraid to ‘lose muscle’ they’ll let the best years of their life go by being fat in a desperate and futile attempt to build more and more muscle for some non existent day in the future when they think they’ll finally be ‘big enough’ to start stripping away the fat.

It’s sorta like buying a ferrari and then leaving it in a garage for the entire time you own it, never getting in it or every letting it see the light of day. This to me is the similar to spending countless hours in the gym trying to build muscle but all the while concealing it under a thick layer of fat. What is the point?

Excessive bodyfat will always obscure and cloud your ability to tell how much muscle you really have and how well your effort in the gym is paying off.

[Ed. Note: John Barban is a former Strength & Conditioning coach and author of the Adonis Index workout for men, the Venus Index Workout or women, and the Anything Goes Diet weight loss program. He has also spent 10 years developing and consulting in the sports supplement industry bringing dozens of muscle building a fat loss supplements to market. With the Adonis Index, John has enabled men to generate instant attraction from women by obtaining the perfect body measurements. To learn more about the Adonis Effect click here now.]