Bony to Beastly’s finally cookin’!

Marco Cooking Bony to Beastly Eat More

Update: I’ll leave this post alive, but beta was a complete success. Read the full Bony to Beastly story here, and check out the finished program here.

The holidays are over and our skinny man’s muscle manual is coming along well. We’ve got a lot of the content written up, a ton of great recipes, and this weekend we’re filming instructional videos that will explain the workouts. Stay tuned!

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The Ideal Male Body: Which Bodies Did Women Rate As the Most Attractive?

guys-girls-ideal-body-survey-results

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.

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Marco 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

4HB – Cheap Adjustable Kettlebell for Workouts

We made a quick video putting together the T-Handle for two-handed throws as shown in Tim Ferriss’s (check out his blog here) new masterpiece, The 4-Hour Body. Kettlebells are a great workout for your posterior but it can quickly become expensive as you buy new, heavier weights or adjustable sets. This is a DIY kit simply made of typical plumbing items that can be taken apart and transported, assembled quickly, and is cheap. Read More