How to Build an Aesthetic Physique Best Exercises for Chest Back Shoulders and Legs | Mind Pump 2905

All right fellas, today we're going to talk about how you can sculpt your back, your chest, your shoulders, and your lower body. You know the physique that you actually want, the one that looks great at the beach? We're going to break it down for you. Let's get to it. Let's go. Yeah, let's talk about some bodies. Justin was dying for this conversation. He's like, I can't wait till we get to the studio today. We can talk about building men's bodies. I was about to take my shirt off and I was like, dude, we should talk about this first. You know, this is actually a good conversation. It's going to be aesthetically focused. Okay. That's why Adam's poking at Justin. You're the performance guy. I'm totally aesthetic. But we're going to talk about like the aesthetic point of view, right? Like how do you develop these muscles so that they make the biggest impact visually, right? So we know what they do for function and strength and that's all great. I think that's more important, but nonetheless, most people go to the gym. Let's be honest though. What do most people want? They want to look a certain way. Yeah. And even, and even the people that say I'm in it for health, strength, longevity. Yeah. But they always in that with, and I'd like to look a little better or I'd like to lose 15 pounds or like, so there's tends to be an aesthetic goal attached to almost all goals, almost all. There's always, I mean, it's an overgeneralization, but there absolutely are exceptions to the rule. But I'd say a vast majority of everybody that I train, it's always there regardless. They were motivated because they wanted to change the way they look a hundred percent. And they knew that losing body fat and lifting weights was the path. It just didn't know how to do it. Yeah. And I'm going to just say this and this, this goes without saying, I think everybody who's listening understands this by now, but the, the most aesthetically valuable form of exercise is strength training. So all exercise versus no exercise is good. So all forms of exercise are good. All of them will improve the way you look as you become more fit and healthy. But strength training is quite unique. It's, it's the only form of exercise where I could target parts of my body. I remember, uh, in the old documentary pumping iron, uh, where Arnold Schwarzenegger, he's young, he's in his twenties in this, but he's getting interviewed and he talks about how bodybuilders are like sculptors and how he looks in the mirror, uh, and like a sculptor, he decides where he wants to add more clay and how he wants to shape his body. Strength training allows you to do that. There are exercises specifically for chest and back and shoulders. And for the lower body, there are ways to train your body to where you develop muscle in a way that looks more impressive, uh, visually than other, uh, ways of exercise. And so that's what we're going to kind of focus on is like, okay, what these body parts that we just mentioned, these are the big ones, but what are the best exercises, uh, to develop that aesthetic look that give that look that people really, uh, seek, uh, when they do strength training, you know, you reference pumping iron all the time. And, uh, I don't really, but that scene in particular is one that I appreciate a lot. Um, and I think that the part of it that I think a lot of people don't see is just the patience required to be that sculptor. Um, we want this immediate, uh, you know, result, like I want to build my shoulder. So you want to go in and so you want to just do an exercise or follow one program and see this huge difference. And it just, it takes a long time to do that. And so I have such an appreciation for someone like Arnold talking about that and talking about sculpting the body because it's a, it's an, it's an ongoing process. And when you look back over months and years of, of consistently training, it's crazy how much you can really do that. Like if you can really completely transform the body and how it looks and damn near almost anything that you want, right? Like obviously, uh, you can't train to make yourself taller. Um, but you can't make yourself wider, thicker, thinner, you know, more here, less there. Yeah. And so, you know, that's really, really cool that you have the power to do that through nutrition and consistent, proper training and muscle building. And so I think it's a really cool thing, but I think a lot of people just don't have the patience, uh, for, and the consistency to allow it to develop. It takes time, but, and I will add this, um, you, the things that you have to, um, tackle or contend with when it comes to strength training your body or developing in a particular way is you don't have unlimited ability to recover and adapt. So, you know, we're going to talk about exercises that really add that visual element, the ones that really give that aesthetic look, uh, and what that is all about. But there's a lot of exercises. There's a hundred chest exercises. Why don't you just do all of them then? You know, maybe, maybe these ones over here, which are the ones you guys are going to mention are really good for developing this aesthetic look. Why don't I just do all of them though? And I just do every single exercise I could think of. And that's because you're limited by your ability to recover and adapt. Um, and so you have to pick the best ones and you can't do all of them. You can only do the ones that are best and you have to recover and adapt. You have to give your body that time and ability to do so. Otherwise nothing's going to happen. Also sticking with the Arnold analogy, since you went that way of packing on clay, certain exercises pack on the most clay for you to sculpt and work with. Period. And so, yes, there are, are exercises that are good for chest development. But what happens to a lot of people is they do these small movements or movements that don't pack a lot of clay on that. Sure. It works your chest and it works from this angle or it hits this part or this thing and it's different and unique. But part of sculpting and building a physique like this, the first part is actually packing on a lot of that clay in the areas that you want. And then the sculpting part is that cutting the body fat and leaning out and then it's showing that. Generally speaking, a bigger muscle looks better than a smaller muscle does. And so, and that's generally speaking. Now, when you get lots of muscle size, you're already jacked. Then you can play with like little tiny movements. That's right. But early on. Build muscle. There is, there are exercises that are superior to others when you are trying to bodybuild and sculpt because you want the things that pack on the most clay. And the things that pack on the most clay typically are a lot of the things that, the exercises that we talk a lot about. And I do think this is an important point to hammer home because in the bodybuilding world and the Instagram world, a lot of people follow these pros. And these pros have already packed on so much clay. And what is unique on Instagram where it goes viral are these unique movements. That you've never seen before. That you've never seen or a new machine or a, you know, sideways chest press thing or adding bands and things. There's these novel exercises or movements or things that they're doing. And what people miss is that those people had already packed on a ton of clay from doing the movements that really move the needle. And now they're doing these novel things. And then you have this. And I say this because I was this kid. I was susceptible to this at 20, 22 years old, looking at the, I was always chasing the new creative exercise and the newest thing that was being advertised in the magazine versus sticking to what packed on the most clay and getting strong in those lifts. And that I think is such an important thing to talk about. So let's start with chest. So first off, let's talk about what makes a chest look aesthetic. So obviously muscle, right? So you need muscle on your chest for it to look aesthetic. So a big, strong chest looks better than a small, weak chest. That being said, there is a way to develop your chest to make it look more impressive when you have your shirt off. And this really points to the upper chest. So you can have two chests that are very well-developed, but one chest is much more developed in the upper part in relation to the rest of it. And it gives it a more powerful presence. It makes it look more balanced and it creates a bigger, fuller. Yes. A big, full looking chest because the upper chest is really developed. So what we want is we want an exercise that is a big bang for your buck exercise, but one that also develops the chest in a very aesthetic way. And for me, that's the incline barbell bench press or incline dumbbell chest press. That's a good compound lift, builds a lot of muscle, but it also develops the chest in a very aesthetic way because it focuses on the upper chest. I love this advice because traditionally, the flat bench press is what's been hailed as the best. Not a bad exercise. Yeah. Great exercise. And because of that, so much emphasis has been put on doing flat bench. And many times, I was like this. I'm not sure if you guys were the same way or not, but I neglected incline because it was difficult because I couldn't lift as much. It was heavier. And early years of lifting, I was embarrassed to not be able to put a wheel on the barbell. And so at that time, it took me a long time to get to there on a flat bench. Last thing I wanted to do was throw quarters on and go do the incline bench. So it was something that I neglected for so long, yet that's one of the best ways to build an aesthetic chest. And I remember, I totally remember the year that I made that goal of, okay, no matter how embarrassing it is for me to lift this lightweight on my incline, my goal is to try and get my incline bench press up to what my flat bench press was. And it was the most growth and development and the best my chest ever looked was from that. And then I've never looked back and now it's become the staple is like, I might not flat bench for a really long time, but I never miss an incline. And so what this looks like for you is when you're doing your chest workout, start your workout with a compound lift and make most of the focus on the upper chest. In fact, if all you ever focused on was upper chest, if all of your presses and flies and cable exercises were to target the upper chest, you would develop a very aesthetic looking chest. What's wonderful about what I'm saying, by the way, I know we're talking about how it looks, but there's always this side, and this is just because I'm a trainer, a function. And I will say this, it's also more functional. So you don't really have this kind of negative trade-off where, well, more better aesthetics, worse function, incline pressing in the real world tends to be more functional and healthy for your shoulders as well. I was going to ask you guys, even from an aesthetic perspective, besides just function for like a decline chest press, is there any value really to that? I mean, I see very little. Very little. It's a short range of motion, maybe functionality, but I like dips better. Yeah. For something like that. Dips will be way more. But I mean, for chest, the focus should incline pressing, incline flies, and you're done. That'll build you up. Build your upper chest. When was the last time any of you did a decline bench press? I don't, I don't. Probably in college. I'm trying, yeah, I was probably 23. I always rarely ever did it, because I just, I always needed to do chest. 23, 24 years old, yeah, somewhere around there. And you know what drew me to it? Weird. How much weight you could put. Exactly. That was the only thing that was appealing to me was that I knew on incline or decline bench press, I could press more than anything else. And that was back when that's what I cared about was doing that. After that, the results from it are so minimal. And I agree. I think that if you want to target the lower chest like that, ring dips like you love, or barbell dips, or even the dip machine. Flat bench by itself too will cover a lot of that. Yeah, no, totally. But stick to upper chest exercises to develop an aesthetic looking chest. Troscriptions is medical grade supplements, okay? So the company is run by doctors, by scientists, and they're not just interested in putting together a supplement company. They want stuff that the data shows actually works, and they want to put efficacious doses inside their products. In other words, they're using what the studies show actually works. By the way, Troscriptions is one of the first companies to bring us methylene blue. That's that energy producing compound that works on the brain, feels good. It's non-stimulant, but it does increase your energy. They're the first to bring it. They're the best with methylene blue, but they have many other products. Again, this is medical grade supplements. If you're serious, you want to feel what you're taking. Here's what you do. Go to troscriptions.com slash mindpump. That's T-R-O-S-C-R-I-P-T-I-O-N-S.com slash mindpump. Use the code mindpump and get 10% off. All right, real quick. If you love us like we love you, why not show up by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs, or training gear over at mindpumpstore.com. I'm talking right now, hit pause, head on over to mindpumpstore.com. That's it. Enjoy the rest of the show. Now we get to back. Back's interesting because we say back. When we say chest, we're talking about one muscle, talking about the pecs. When I say back, we're talking about a lot of different muscles. You got your lats, you got your rhomboids, you got your trapezius muscles. You have all the major and minor muscles. You've got a lot of erector spinae muscle. You've got a lot going on there. I don't know why we call it back. We should probably call it lats and something else. Basically what I can't see. Here's the deal. Aesthetic looking backs, there's two things or two components to an aesthetic back. There's width, so how wide your back looks. This is especially important from the front. It makes your waist look smaller. Bodybuilders use something called a front lat spread, but even from the front, if you have a wide back, you see that from the back, obviously, but from the front, it gives you this nice V taper. Then you want thickness and depth and you want upper back development. Nothing looks more impressive, and people will debate this all day long. Bodybuilding made wide backs very popular, but I will say this, in the real world, you take your shirt off, you're at beach, it's the thick upper back development that gives you the aesthetic look. It just looks powerful. A wide back without upper back thickness or thickness, nice lat spread, kind of cool, does not look as powerful or as impressive as somebody with developed traps and that thickness in the back. That comes from rows and deadlifts. I even think that it does more for the V taper. I'll make that argument because you don't move in a 2D world, you're 3D. When you get thicker and your waist is smaller, that's a true, you're like this. From every direction. Yeah, exactly. Getting a wide back might be good for a V taper if you were a flat, if we live in a 2D world, but you're not, you're 3D. If you want that true V taper look or hourglass look where you have a small waist and a wide thick back, it's deadlifting. To me, it's deadlifting. That's one of the most controversial things to me to say that, which is so crazy. I know, people are weird about it. Because the deadlift is a hip hinge movement and there's so much power that's being driven from the hips to do that. I have never met anybody who can deadlift good weight, a lot of weight, and does not have an impressive back. Every heavy deadlifter has that. You get to a place where if you're deadlifting over 400 pounds as a man, and you will have a good looking back. I'll say this too, because obviously bodybuilders are at the peak of aesthetic muscle building. And I've seen bodybuilders with, a lot of bodybuilders, especially at the high level, have really wide backs. But oftentimes you see the thickness that's missing. I've seen powerlifters transfer to bodybuilding and they have to work on back width all the time, because powerlifters do a lot of deadlifts, they have thick backs. But when they're just standing there, when they're lean, they look impressive. Thickness makes your back look aesthetic in the real world. Pursuing the heavy deadlift translates to all the wide back exercises so well too. I never could lat pull down or pull up more weight than when I got really strong with a deadlift. So that's the other part too, that the CNS piece, the just overall power and strength you get from building a big deadlift, not only will build this thick back, but then it will also carry over into all the traditional bodybuilder back exercises that everybody talks about that are so clutch for you. I mean, if you try getting really, really heavy barbell rows and not be able to deadlift very much, you know what your limiting factor would be? It would be that weak ass low back. You will only be able to row so much if you don't have a strong deadlift. Now, if you have a really strong deadlift, that guy can now hold on to a lot more weight and row. It wasn't until I could deadlift over 400 pounds before I could even row over 275 pounds, because I couldn't hold that and row it for multiple reps until I got that strong where I could hold four or 500 pounds. And so the carryover, not only what you get aesthetically from building a strong deadlift, but then what they carry over to the other lifts are incredible too. And so I will die on that hill that the best way to build an aesthetic back is through the deadlift first. I would say your top three exercises, deadlift, your barbell rows, and your pull-ups, and you've got all the bases covered, but the deadlift is going to give you, you get stronger, the deadlift, you'll have a nice looking back for sure. Now let's get to shoulders. Shoulders are interesting, right? It's this three-dimensional muscle. It's got lots of different function, the shoulder joint. Very versatile. Very versatile, complex. Standing shoulder press or standing overhead press will build big shoulders, but you need to do rear flies. Rear flies for that rear delt. When we're talking aesthetics, okay, yes, big shoulders are important, but if you don't have well-developed rear deltoid muscles, which you're really only going to get through something like a rear fly, you're going to have a forward-sloping shoulder look. So you've got the muscle. Very protracted. But it just doesn't look as aesthetic. When you build that rear delt, it gives you the roundness. Everybody thinks it's laterals. Everybody thinks it's side laterals. It's not side laterals. It's rear flies that gives you that cap to your shoulder. So you do your overhead presses and your rear flies, that's going to give you the aesthetic look. There's two big reasons why this is a missing component for a lot of people. One, just pure the lack of it, the lack of focus. So there's a large portion of people that just neglect to focus on the rear delts. And then there's a good portion of the people that actually do focus on the rear delts, but do it improperly. When I think of a lot of the muscles that I had to try to sculpt and build for bodybuilding, the form and technique to developing the rear delts is one of more technical ones because it's hard to not allow the back to overtake the movement. It's a very small range of motion. It's a small range of motion. It looks more like a flying out than it is back. And that movement, to the average eye, when you look at somebody demo an exercise, even if you're not a beginner, an intermediate lifter, and you see someone doing a rear delt fly and you try and emulate that, unless you have a good coach that's cuing you and asking how you're feeling and talking to you, it's tough for you to not allow the back to take over that movement. And that back is a bigger, stronger muscle, so it already wants to. And it'll default to that. And it'll still look mechanically correctly. Yeah, it's not going to develop the rear delts. But it won't. And so it's one of the more technically focused movements. But once you lock in and you figure it out on how to properly do it and hit it, man, and you build those rear delts out, it makes the back look better, the way your shirt sits on you, the whole shoulder cap, your arms now look better because your shoulders are defined and separated. One of the best training seasons I ever went through, I was young when I did this, but I figured that out, was I started my workouts with rear flies. Then I went to overhead presses and my delts changed so quick. To becoming from a weak body part to now, it's been one of my strengths. I would say the rear delt and the standing overhead press, and I really didn't get into the standing overhead press until hanging out with Justin because, of course, he does everything functionally. And actually working up to where I could do a push press. So I could use a little bit of body English to push weight over my head that's never been there before. And there is something to be said about standing up, learning to push more weight than you've ever pushed overhead, and then being able to stabilize it there for a second or two over the head before you bring back down. The combination of those two things played a huge role in my shoulder development. Now let's talk about lower body. So we get to lower body. You want muscle. Don't skip this, fellas. It's so funny. I see now on social media, they'll be asking people, what's a turn-on with somebody's body or a turn-off or whatever? And they get to young ladies and they say, well, what is a turn-off with the guy's body? You know what they all say? Upper body developed, skinny legs. That's like a thing, right? You got to have legs, everybody. Don't skip leg day. But really, two things here. I mean, there's a lot of exercises for lower body, but number one, nothing beats the barbell squat. Nothing beats the barbell squat. It is the king of exercises for a reason. Get good at them. Get strong at them. Do a full range motion. Your legs will look amazing. You throw in a RDL, a Romanian deadlift for the hamstrings and glutes, you're done. Those two exercises right there are going to give you really nice, well-developed lower body. You're going to have great hamstrings from the RDLs, glutes and quads from the squats. You pretty much got it right there. Just get strong. Practice full range of motion too. That should be a part of this journey, where if you can only get to a parallel squat, getting to a place to where you can do a full range of motion, deep squat. I mean, it blew my mind when I finally worked on my mobility and I was able to break parallel on the squats. I noticed I got calf gains from that. I noticed I got more hamstring development from that just by getting my barbell back squat deeper than a 90. More glute gain too. Everything came up from that. Don't be afraid to come back a little bit on weight in order to do that because- Full range of motion. Yeah. I got more development with a lighter weight full range of motion and all those muscles that I did just going as heavy as I could and only getting down to 90 degrees. There's a lot of value in doing that. The other thing I think is that when you talk about bodybuilding, I think it's important to bring up the frequency that you're hitting these muscles too. Twice a week is typically ideal for body parts. What I like to do when we're talking about aesthetics and body, which is kind of cool about splitting the body up in this four-day week upper-lower split is let's say we're talking about right now, all these kind of muscle groups are areas and I really want to develop that. I mean, on one day, I might lead the workout with chest because that's the primary focus. The next upper body day, I might lead with rear delts or shoulders depending on. So what it allows me to do- I love that. So much more flexibility. Yes. It allows me to have that flexibility. Now, if I'm really lagging in a single body part that both days, I'm probably going to lead with that, but maybe I'm somebody who's like, I don't have this massive discrepancy, but I want to develop all that. Well, some workouts I might lead with this muscle group, other workouts I'll lead with that muscle group to really be able to put everything I got into that because that's one of the best things that you can do when you're trying to get strong in a lift is just to purely lead that workout. A hundred percent. So we have a program that's like that. It's a four-day split. It's called MAPS Upper Lower, and it is a bodybuilding workout. It is designed to develop a very aesthetic physique. Again, it's a four-day split. You're hitting the whole body twice a week. We have a men's version and a women's version. The women's version, the programming is a little bit different, but because it's a brand new program, it's 40% off. So if you want to follow something that's written out for you with exercise demos and videos, no guesswork, good programming, go to mapsupperlower.com, use the code launch. That'll give you the 40% off. And you can also find us on Instagram. It's mindpumpmedia. All right. I know you liked that episode. If you did check this one out. How strong should you be? Ever wonder if you're actually strong or at least compared to people like yourself? Today's episode, we're going to talk about that and we're going to help you determine how strong you should be. And also talk about the steps to getting strong as fast as possible. In fact, we're talking about the fastest way to get bigger and stronger all at the same time. I know you say I don't look at night. Yes, it does actually. And I know that you wrote a really complex episode here, but I think Justin's metric has been the one.