What does it mean to be strong?
This is an almost impossible question to answer, seeing as there are so many different muscles in the body. No one person is stronger than any other person: they’re only normally going to be stronger on specific lifts or in specific muscles. Heck, you might have the strongest ear muscles on this side of town!
But when it comes to looking strong, this is much easier to define. When we’re sizing up another guy as competition, there are certain parts of the body that our eyes will be drawn to and that will give them the illusion of more size. And of course, these are the same body parts that women look for when they’re trying to figure out if a guy is a physical presence or not.
The good news for us is that we can use this information to ‘hack’ their perception of us and make ourselves appear larger than perhaps we really are. Train the right muscles and you can be more economical in your attempts to look massive. Here’s what you really need to focus on.
Triceps
A lot of guys will spend ages working their biceps because they want to get big arms. And this is understandable because their arms are a body part that will be on show in short sleeves and that women often look for.
The mistake is thinking that the biceps are the secret to getting those bigger looking arms! In reality, it’s actually the triceps that do all the heavy lifting in this regard. That’s because triceps are supposed to take up 2/3rds of your arms width.
And most of us already train our biceps a lot in our daily lives while lifting things or climbing. We rarely train triceps! So get on it and you’ll see your arm instantly swells and looks a lot bigger.
Deltoids
Your deltoids are your shoulder muscles and these all too often get overlooked as well. If you build massive deltoids, then your arms will look wider at the top and there will be much more definition where your bicep and tricep meet the shoulder. This creates the illusion of a much bigger arm and if you look at any celebrities, you’ll notice they always have great delts.
What’s more though, is that your deltoids are also partly responsible for making you look wider. You can’t make your shoulders wider because they’re bone. But bulk up your medial (side) deltoids and you’ll be able to pad them out on either side.
Traps
The traps come up on either side of your neck and if you ever look at drawings of the Hulk or any other muscular monster, you’ll notice that they’re always disproportionately large.
So if you want to look like a muscle monster yourself, these are the muscles you need to focus on. The great news is that most people ignore them, which makes them very responsive to training. Just do a few shrugs daily and they’ll explode!
