Posts by Shane Duquette
The Ideal Male Body: Which Bodies Did Women Rate As the Most Attractive?
We wanted to figure out which male body types women would find the most attractive, as well as which body types men thought women would find the most attractive. To do this, we ran an informal study, surveying over 1000 people to see which bodies they preferred. The results surprised us.
We created several photo arrays and asked women to rate which male bodies they found the most attractive. Then we asked men to guess which bodies the women had picked. It quickly became apparent that most men were trying to build bodies that women didn’t even find attractive, let alone ideal. (We’ve since confirmed these results with a second survey using illustrations instead of photos.)
There were some surprises for women, too. For example, when we asked women which celebrity had the most attractive body, the most popular response was Ryan Reynolds. However, when we cropped his head off and placed his body in a line-up, they told us he was overly lean and musclebound.
On the other hand, Brad Pitt’s headless body (as Tyler Durden in Fight Club) performed incredibly well in the photo arrays, being rated extremely attractive by both men and women, showing some overlap between male and female preferences. But what was so special about this particular body type?
After all, Ryan Reynolds is only slightly leaner and more muscular than Brad Pitt, and yet those tiny changes made a dramatic difference (for the worse). Women thought that Brad Pitt looked strong and healthy, whereas they thought Ryan Reynolds looked like a fitness model, assuming he must be obsessed with his appearance.
Along with covering which male bodies and physical traits were rated as the most attractive by women, we’ll also cover which physiques men found the most impressive and what level of leanness and muscularity guys were most eager to achieve.
Read MoreMarco Athletics (Beta)
Marco’s the man. He’s been a huge fitness/health asset to us and he’s helped us in our quest to pack on a lot of pounds — 45lbs to be exact, if you add up Jared and I’s muscle gain. As a personal trainer you’d be hard pressed to find better… and no one does presses harder? I can’t really figure out how to make that joke work. So here’s what we did:
After several rounds of thumbnails and sketches we made him this awesome logo of a runner (okay the runner did look a bit like a prancer). I raised the concern that it might look a little dandy for his football playing target audience. He agreed. I went back and created this really great leaping man. We then decided to opt for just the legs. Marco deals with athletics and performance more so than aesthetics and bodybuilding, like we do. We felt the legs better conveyed the athletic nature of his services without putting too much emphasis on the glory muscles.
From there we built him a website with a lot of wicked features and integrated it into WordPress so he could update it himself and blog his heart out. What you really need to do to see how genius this website is is get yourself into the exclusive members area with the instructional vidoes. How? Shoot him an email.
Try it out here: http://marcoathletics.com/
Branding Matters – A Peak Into the Fascinating World of Behavioral Economics and Consumer Psychology
Pepsi and Coke both claim that taste tests prove that their product tastes better. So who’s lying? Pepsi outperforms Coke on taste tests—but only the blind ones. When the loveable Coca-Cola branding is visible Coke crushes Pepsi. Something’s fishy, right? Turns out Coke actually tastes as good as it does because of the branding. Strip the branding from it and people get less enjoyment out of it. In steps Pepsi, with inferior branding and a superior drink and poof: things get baffling. I know it sounds ridiculous, I know. And here’s another weird one: energy drinks work better the more expensive they are. Even with identical products (with identical bottles and branding), when an energy drink is labeled as being more expensive people get a higher high from it. Simply messing with the price tags on something can influence how effective it is. Scarily enough, the same holds true for medicine. Read More
Ideal Male Body Survey: A Few Fun Minutes Of Your Time Will Really Help Us Out
Update: the results are in! Check ’em out.
We’ve been posting about health, fitness, rapid fat loss, HIIT, weight training and adding lean muscle mass to your frame. We’re pretty passionate about it. We like the results, we like the process and we even like the science behind it. What we’re trying to figure out now is what do you guys have as an end goal? What do women want in a man when it comes to their body, health and fitness? What are men striving for when they change their diet and head to the gym? Who’s the top dog? Ryan Reynolds, Brad Pitt, Ollie Sykes, Bob Harper? Zyzz? Arnold? Ronnie Coleman? Frank Zane? In order to help you get there we need to find that out.
Bodybuilding: Lean to Mean
If you’ve been reading our fitness blog I know what you’re thinking: “Uh oh. Foxhound with their shirts off again.” Yep. Our first official bodybuilding photo-shoot has become our second official Foxhound-team-effort-photo-shoot (if you missed our first one, the grad shoot, it’s right here).
So what makes this one special? Well. It took a lot of work, mostly in the gym. The photo-shoot itself was also rather tough. Flexing isn’t as fun as our smiles make it seem. But that’s the test of a true bodybuilding pose, right? Can you hold it while smiling. So we tried our best to smile our hearts out. A lot of effort went into the poses themselves, too. There are a lot of particulars to each pose.
The photography is probably what you’re curious about though. They aren’t HDR photos and they aren’t painted—in fact, they aren’t even touched up! We got this effect by combining four things: Dynamic lighting, olive oil, boosted clarity (Adobe Lightroom) and Jared’s Photoshop sharpening algorithm. I know everyone paints on muscles these days, and it’s more or less accepted. But this isn’t 300 or Twilight, this is our attempt at a legitimate bodybuilding shoot, so we tried to keep it real. We didn’t brush on muscles with make-up, we didn’t paint them in Photoshop, we didn’t selectively boost shadows—we didn’t even remove pimples or smooth out pores. This is us . . . albeit well lit and covered in oil.