A Look At What Makes A Body Ideal
Leonardo Da Vinci proclaimed that “there is harmony in proportion.”
A quick scan of Instagram reveals that there seems to be plenty disharmony afoot using Leo’s logic.
In classical architecture, painting and sculpture, the human body and it’s proportions were reflected and venerated as an archetypal ideal of man and woman. Da Vinci even proposed mathematical formulas pertaining to the ideal masculine physique such as a man should be the same size as 7 lengths of his foot.
Any idea what the ideal masculine or feminine shape is these days? Should there be an ideal shape in the first place?
Most definitely, there isn’t.
The thing about classical sculpture and painting is that they didn’t have a diverse cohort; they just had Western Europeans to look at en masse.
Us human’s have traits that are selected based on the environments our ancestors grew up in.
My dark skin was deselected in favour of light skin so that I was still able to produce vitamin D in the Northern European wintery climate my ancestors lived.
It can take a long time to evolve something fundamentally different from everyone else, but only a short time to pass on sexually selected characteristics like height, hair colour or skin colour.
So if there is no ideal shape, why are we having this virtual conversation?
Whilst there is no ideal shape, there are components we can train that are ideal for you personally, based on bettering your posture and reducing your chance of pain and injury.
These also happen to relate to, wait for it, the classic ideal of beauty and aesthetic proportions.
Let’s take a look (p.s. most of these relate to training):
- The chest should not be over developed when compared to the shoulders, lest the shoulders look too narrow.
- If you have yourself an over developed chest (especially lower chest) and under developed shoulder (especially through the rear and side of your shoulder) you almost certainly will be having yourself some shoulder pain and headaches. Shoulders that aren’t properly trained laterally and posteriorly give a clue to such things as poor muscle recruitment, bad breathing patterns, and lack of understanding about the fundamentals of training with weights.
2. The neck should be narrow and the shoulders should be wide.
- Once again this gives a clue about overuse, this time in the upper traps. Almost certainly this person has poor breathing patterns, postural habits and muscular activation patterns.
3. FOR MEN — the upper arm (flexed) should be the same size as the calf. Again this points to a symptom of over training one area and under training another. Genetics play a heavy role in calf development, but so does conscientiousness. Train your calves.
4. There should be symmetrical proportions.
- Again this references not overtraining one area versus another. An out of balance musclular system can lead to an increased chance of injury and pain.
5. Waist size should be 86 % of pelvis size.
- This one isn’t from classical sculpture days but the number was devised by the former 1950's Tarzan and Mr. America Steve Reeves. Clearly this is a reference to a health related metric of not having too much body fat. Increased body fat is associated with increased morbidity and mortality.
Leonardo said that “when painting the body, artists should conceive a painting from the inside out.” Meaning that attention should be paid to human anatomy and physiology in order to capture perfect form and movement on the canvas.
Trainees can also conceive of their bodies from the inside out.
When approaching training, questions should be asked such as :
- How should I be breathing?
- What order should my muscles activate in?
- To which position should the segments of my body move?
- Which muscles do I need to train more to create a more resilient physiological architecture?
- What movements do I need to practice and improve?
These are some basic question’s a very good coach or gym goer asks and finds answers to.
If you have the intention to get a good body, you don’t necessarily need to study the Statue of David. But you should be looking to reconcile the goals you have, with what your body needs in order to work better.
Beauty happens to be more pragmatic than we might think.
A beautiful body, is one that works really well.
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I teach people to become their own trainer and nutritionist.
