The Ideal Female Body Shape (According to Men)

This article is about the ideal female body according to men. I’m writing this because women read my article about the ideal male body according to women, and they wanted me to do the same for them. That article went into the science of beauty, but it was also based on thousands of survey responses from women, who rated photos and illustrations I drew.

So, I did the same for women. Over the past fifteen years, I surveyed thousands of men from cultures all around the world. You can see the results of one of those surveys here. Different cultures sometimes prefer slightly different things, but I’ll focus on what was universally preferred across all of them.

Some of these findings might surprise you. Most women have a fairly good idea what other women prefer, but they aren’t nearly as good at guessing what men find most attractive.

This article is long, so I understand if you don’t want to read the whole thing. Here’s a quick and simple trick to make yourself instantly sexier: have a drink. It will boost your attractiveness (to yourself) by 50%. This is known as the Beauty is in the Eye of the Beer-Holder effect (study). You don’t even need to have a real drink. The participants who drank the placebo beer got the same attractiveness boost.

If you’re looking for a longer-lasting improvement, or perhaps one that other people would notice too, that’s what the rest of this article is about.

Important Caveats

I’m sure you already know this, but you aren’t just your body. It’s somewhat of a myth that men are more superficial than women. They care about more than just how beautiful you are.

If you want to know how important your hips are, think about how much you care about a man’s height. If you care deeply about how tall a man is, know that some men feel just as strongly about your waist size. If you don’t care about height, it’s also true that some men couldn’t care less about your waist.

For another example, think about whether you would be physically attracted to a body that’s frail and underweight. A minority of women don’t care, but most women prefer men who are strong, coordinated, and physically able. Men feel the same way when looking at your hips.

Usually, beauty is more important earlier on in a courtship, less important later on. But it never stops mattering. When I surveyed married people, the vast majority of them said that improving their appearance improved their marriages. Taking good care of yourself is always attractive.

If you think men are crazy for trying to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, when what you actually prefer is a guy who looks athletic, there’s a flip side to that, too. The vast majority of men aren’t looking for a Kim Kardashian figure. In one of my larger surveys, 93% of men said they preferred women without cosmetic procedures. The average man prefers women who look healthy, athletic, and feminine in a more natural way.

Physical attraction is somewhat binary. If you look physically attractive enough, you’re attractive, and men will be attracted to you. If you become extra attractive, it might make you more popular on social media, and it might open up some extra opportunities, and you’ll probably wind up with a more physically attractive man, but that won’t necessarily improve your life very much.

Angelina Jolie wouldn’t be as famous if she was less attractive. Her exceptional beauty gave her opportunities other women couldn’t ever have. However, you don’t need to look like Angelina Jolie to have your pick of great guys, marry an amazing man who thinks you’re beautiful, and have him find you sexy on your 50th wedding anniversary. Exceptional beauty won’t save you from romantic hardships, either. Angelina Jolie has been divorced three times.

By far the more important thing is to reach that baseline level of attractiveness where men look at you and feel, “She’s attractive.” You don’t need to be anywhere close to perfect for men to feel that way. The average man thinks the average woman is beautiful. If you get into great shape, you’ll almost certainly be much more beautiful than average.

Most men don’t look at women critically, trying to find weak spots. If your butt is too small but you have a great waistline, most men will look more at your waistline, less at your butt, and they’ll think you’re attractive anyway. Or vice versa.

What Makes a Woman Beautiful?

The Ancient Roots of Sexiness

Sexiness is rooted in signals of health, youthfulness, and femininity (study). Historically, the men who were drawn to healthier, younger, and more feminine women were more likely to have healthy children who would then go on to have more children, thus passing on their aesthetic preferences. Those preferences have been refined over tens of millions of years, rooted in the most primordial parts of our brains.

For example, having wider hips relative to your waist indicates more subcutaneous fat (healthy fat), less visceral fat (unhealthy fat), and greater femininity. It’s also the shape most women develop during puberty and lose after menopause, giving it a strong association with fertility. And it suggests you aren’t currently pregnant or recovering from a pregnancy.

These preferences aren’t unique to men. Women are attracted to male bodies in a similar way, to a similar degree, just with different criteria. Men are fertile for a longer part of their lives, so signs of youthfulness are less important (but still a factor), whereas signs of strength are more important. Most women are most attracted to taller, stronger, healthier, and more capable men.

These preferences aren’t unique to humans. Peahens do the same thing when they choose to mate with the peacock with the most beautiful tail feathers. Those beautiful tail feathers make it immediately obvious that he’s male, has good genetics, is strong, and has access to an abundance of resources. Peahens who are able to mate with those peacocks have healthier children who are more successful at mating, and so their preferences are strengthened with every new generation.

What makes people different is that most of us choose to settle down into monogamous relationships. That means, compared to other animals, we tend to put less emphasis on genetics and beauty, and more emphasis on other factors that make someone a great partner and parent.

That’s just as true of men as women, by the way. 80% of the men I surveyed said their dream was to have a lifelong marriage with someone they love.

So, it could be that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Kim Kardashian look too fake—that they aren’t actually emitting the right visual signals—but it could also be that they look psychologically unbalanced. Most women don’t want to be with a man who obsesses over his appearance or takes dangerous drugs to get excessively muscular. Men feel the same way about women.

On the other hand, in my latest survey, 62% of men and 67% of women said they find people who work hard to keep themselves in great shape more attractive than people who are naturally in great shape. This isn’t supposed to be effortless. It just isn’t supposed to be obsessive, either. There’s a balance to it.

The Three Female Body Types

The vast majority of women have a body “type” that somewhat fits into one of these three categories:

• Naturally Thick: The naturally thicker woman might be on her feet all day and doing a few workouts per week. But maybe she has a large stomach and an eager appetite, and it all goes right to her thighs. She might be trying harder than anyone to lose weight, but it’s a struggle.
• Naturally Thin (more here): The thinner woman may have a slender bone structure, a small stomach, a meagre appetite, and prefer endurance exercise that keeps her fit but doesn’t build much muscle. She may even be trying and failing to gain weight.
• Natural Hourglass: Some women have naturally broader shoulders, narrower waists, and wider hips, with a tendency to store more of their fat in their butts, thighs, and breasts. That can make it easy to have a shapely figure, even without much effort or exercise. Some of these women also have intuitively better nutrition habits and/or more of an interest in sports. If you grew up doing gymnastics, you’ve got a long history of exercise pulling your body in this direction.

All three of these women might be in great health. All three of them might put the same amount of thought and energy into health and fitness. None of them are overweight, underweight, or skinny fat. They might have 30%, 25%, and 20% body fat, all of which are equally healthy. They just have slightly different bone structures, carry slightly different amounts of muscle, and have slightly different body fat distribution patterns.

However, when I surveyed 600 men, 78% of them chose the hourglass figure in the middle. She has the combination of a small waist and wide hips. She has a healthy amount of body fat, and it’s also stored in healthiest places. She also looks quite athletic, with strong legs and an athletic upper body.

All three women might be in great shape, but the woman in the middle is the one who is the most conspicuously healthy, youthful, and feminine. At a glance, she appears to be in the best shape.

Don’t focus too much on her specific body, though. What matters more is what it signals. She could have a slightly thicker waist, much wider hips, and way stronger muscles, giving her more voluptuous curves. She could also be thinner, more like a Victoria’s Secret model. As long as she looks impressively healthy, youthful, and feminine, it will still send all the right signals.

The Benefit of Looking Extra Healthy

There’s another nuance to add. The thicker woman has a more common body shape. Most women lean towards being overweight. For example, in the United States, 68% of women over the age of twenty are overweight or obese (reference). However, that body shape is also the least preferred. She isn’t even overweight, and yet she still only got 9% of the votes. There’s more supply than demand. It will be harder for this woman.

The thinner woman has a less common body shape. 13% of men thougth she was the most attractive, and it’s possible less than 13% of women have that body shape. There might be more demand than supply. I suspect it will be easier for her.

The woman in the middle definitely has the greatest advantage, though. 78% of men prefer her more athletic figure, and it’s rare for women to be in such impressive shape. That means she’ll have a wider variety of men to choose from, giving her more freedom and making it easier for her to find someone she likes.

Sometimes, it makes sense to appeal to a niche. If you’re super into sports, you might want to dress in a sportier way so that you appeal to men who would love to do sporty things with you. Your appearance would be a useful filter. That makes sense. It makes less sense to reduce your choices over something that has nothing to do with your personality. That filter would just make things harder.

Getting into better shape opens up your options, attracting a wider variety of people from every niche, including the niches you care about the most. Most painters prefer women who are in great shape. So do most researchers, computer programmers, and Formula 1 racecar drivers. Getting into better shape removes a filter, giving you a much wider appeal.

I’d watch out for creating other accidental filters. If you get noticeably cosmetic surgery, you may find yourself attracting guys who are unusually fixated on beauty, or who take steroids, or who also get cosmetic surgery. That isn’t necessarily bad, but make sure that’s the sort of filter you want.

Men can fall into that same trap. A guy might hear that women find wealth attractive, so he starts flashing his money around, and he starts attracting women who are unusually obsessed with money. That may or may not be what he wants.

Genetic and Cultural Differences

There’s more than one way for a woman to be healthy, youthful, and feminine. You can have thinner or thicker bones, a longer or shorter torso, or wider or narrower collarbones. You can be shorter or taller, curvier or slighter. You can be of any race, with eyes and hair of any colour. Breast size doesn’t matter very much, either.

Our circumstances can shift our preferences. For example, when resources are scarcer, people tend to prefer partners with more body fat. After all, people with greater reserves of energy on their bodies are better able to thrive during famine. So, you might find that poorer cultures, or poorer people within a culture, prefer women with bigger butts and breasts (study, study, study, study, study, study).

There are also beauty signals that are preferred by almost everyone (study, study). Almost all men from almost all cultures throughout almost all of history prefer women with narrow waists (relative to their hips), wider hips (relative to their waists), radiantly youthful skin, long hair, an athletic amount of muscle, and proportionally larger butts and thighs. I’ll go deeper into all of that.

For example, almost every man would agree that Aomi looks way better after building more athletic hips and thighs. It isn’t that her specific body, body-fat percentage, or bone structure is perfect, or that she has the exact right amount of muscle. Rather, it’s that she moved in the right direction, making a change that almost everyone agrees is an improvement.

Some Women Have It Easier Than Others

Every body type has different struggles as they try to get into better shape. A naturally thin woman will benefit from building muscle, and she’ll probably have trouble eating enough food to gain weight. On the other hand, a naturally overweight woman will look better if she gets down to a healthy body-fat percentage, but losing weight can be tough, especially with all the high-calorie foods that are so readily available.

It’s also true that some women have an easier time building an attractive figure. Some women have naturally wide hips, small waists, and broad shoulders simply due to their bone structure. They might also have a genetic tendency to store more fat in their thighs, breasts, and butt, with less around their stomach, giving them an hourglass figure even if they don’t eat well or exercise.

Much of what may seem to be genetic is also greatly affected by lifestyle. People who exercise and eat better diets become leaner and more muscular, but it goes much deeper than that. For instance, good exercise and nutrition habits also reshape your fat storage patterns, causing you to store less fat in your waist and more fat in your breasts, thighs, and butt (more on that here).

For another example, regardless of their race and skin colour, healthier women have more radiant skin (study). A higher intake of vitamins and minerals (good nutrition habits) and higher levels of oxygenated blood (from being fit and healthy) turn your skin redder and yellower, giving you a youthful “glow.”

The Most Attractive Female BMI

Most Men Prefer a Healthy BMI

According to most women, the ideal female body is quite thin. Most women prefer thinner body types, less muscular development, and lower body fat (including a smaller butt and thighs). Women with a passion for fashion often develop a preference for even thinner body types, sometimes to the point where it stops being healthy.

Men are attracted to healthy women, but they mistakenly assume women prefer unhealthfully big steroid guys (from my survey here). In a follow-up survey, 99% of women said they would rather date a guy who didn’t take steroids. The same is true the other way around. Women are attracted to healthy men, but they mistakenly assume men prefer unhealthfully thin women.

Just like some men fall into the trap of “more muscle is more manly is more better,” some women assume “more slender is more feminine is more better.”

The Healthiest BMI

According to most health organizations, the healthiest BMI is between 18.5–25, but that advice is somewhat outdated, especially now that the benefits of strength are more wellknown. Most experts are starting to nudge their BMI recommendations upwards, recommending that women bump up their BMI by building more muscle.

The best study we have is a large meta-analysis with data from over 5.8 million participants (study):

• Underweight (<18.5 BMI): Being underweight definitely isn’t healthy, but there’s a bit of reverse causation at play. It isn’t just that being skinny makes you sick, but also that being sick makes you skinny. The most serious diseases often cause dramatic weight loss. That might be why men prefer the look of women who aren’t skinny: they look healthier.
• Low-Normal Weight (18.5–22.9 BMI): Until recently, this was considered a perfectly healthy weight, but now it appears that weighing a little more is even healthier, especially when the extra weight comes from muscle and healthy fat (as opposed to belly fat).
• High-Normal Weight (23–25 BMI): This now seems to be the golden zone. This is the BMI range most strongly associated with the best health and longevity.
• Low-Overweight (25–27.4 BMI): This is about as healthy as having a high-normal weight. There’s no significant difference. You’re overweight, yes, but it’s actually healthier than having a low-normal weight. As long as you don’t have excessive belly fat, I wouldn’t worry about it at all.
• High-Overweight & Obese (27.5+ BMI): This is when the extra body fat starts to harm your health and longevity. It starts off as a small downside, and then risk shoots way up as your BMI crosses 30, venturing into obese territory.

You can check your BMI here:

My surveys have found that men tend to prefer a BMI of around 23, give or take a couple of points. That’s true when showing men my drawings, and also when asking them which female celebrity has the most attractive physique.

How Important Is Your BMI?

BMI is quite important. Some studies even find it to be more important than a woman’s waist-to-hip ratio (study). This makes moving towards a healthy body weight a really good first step.

BMI has a problem, though:

• The Skinny Fat Problem: It’s possible to have a perfect BMI of 23 while still being over-fat, under-muscled, and out of shape. More on that here.
• Muscle is Heavy: You may have an overweight BMI of 28, but with more of your weight coming from muscle, giving you larger glutes and thighs, rather than a larger waist. This is healthy and looks great. It’s just that it’s relatively rare, so it isn’t captured very well in studies like this. Most women with a BMI of 28 are over-fat, not impressively muscled. More on this in a moment.
• Belly Fat is the Problem: If you have more of your fat stored in your waist, it can be unhealthy and look unattractive even at lower body weights. On the other hand, if you have a small waist with greater amounts of butt and thigh fat, with larger breasts, then you can be healthy and look great, even at higher BMIs (study). More on this in a moment.

So, BMI might give you an idea of which direction the scale should move, but body composition, proportions, and health are important, too.

You can see that Erica looks quite a bit better in the after photo, even though her BMI is the same. The extra muscle and leaner waist make her look much fitter and healthier. Her skin is less pixelated, too.

The Most Attractive Female Body-Fat Percentage

Most Men Prefer Healthy Body-Fat Percentages

With body fat percentage, it’s not as simple as leaner being better (survey). Body fat isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially in women. If you can’t see your abs in the mirror, you might care, and that’s okay—there’s nothing wrong with wanting abs—but men probably won’t even notice.

The Healthiest Body-Fat Percentage

Most people—male and female—really like femininity, and more feminine women tend to have more fat. Men tend to be at their healthiest with 10–20% body fat, with more athletic men often falling within the 10–15% body fat range. That’s quite lean. Women tend to be at their healthiest with a body fat percentage of 20–30% (study):

• Under-fat: <19% body fat
• Healthiest and most attractive: 20–30% body fat
• Over-fat: >31% body fat

Can You Be Too Lean?

Some female athletes are very lean, but that often comes along with health problems, such as amenorrhea. Fertility is one of the signals of being sexually attractive, so it makes sense that men wouldn’t prefer women who are so lean that it reduces their fertility.

Men like boobs, butts, hips, and thighs. They don’t mind softer waists or lower levels of muscle definition. They like the look of some facial fat. Women often like the look of leanness in themselves and other women, but it’s rare for men to prefer it.

Do Men Find Cellulite Unattractive?

Cellulite is more common than most women think. Most female influencers have some degree of it; it’s just that they choose clothes that hide it and post photos where it isn’t obvious.

Cellulite is the dimpling created by body fat pushing up against your fascia. A good way to think of it is to imagine stockings around your legs. Men have fascia more like regular stockings, so it’s rare for any dimpling to show through. Women have fascia more like fishnet stockings, so it’s very common for dimpling to show through.

You can reduce the appearance of cellulite by getting leaner. However, even when you’re quite lean, there can still be enough fat to cause some cellulite sometimes. Plus, the healthiest and most attractive place to store fat is in your hips and thighs, so you wouldn’t exactly want to be super lean there anyway.

You can also reduce the appearance of cellulite by building muscle (guide here). The more muscle you have in your hips and thighs, the thinner your fat will be spread, reducing cellulite. This has the added advantage of making your butt and thighs bigger and stronger, which is great for your health and will make you look even better.

Most women don’t like having cellulite, but most men we surveyed don’t notice or care, especially when it isn’t extreme. Most men find feminine traits in women to be attractive, and cellulite is caused by a feminine amount of fat stored in a feminine area, pushing out against more feminine fascia. As long as you don’t have an unhealthy amount of body fat, cellulite shouldn’t harm your appearance.

The Most Attractive Female Body Shape

What’s the Most Feminine Body Shape?

Most men prefer women with a more feminine body shape. Fit young boys and girls tend to be built like string beans: they’re narrow everywhere. But as soon as puberty hits, male and female body shapes diverge, often quite dramatically.

Men are shaped by testosterone. Strong healthy men with high testosterone are shaped like V’s—big broad shoulders, lean stomachs, small hips. Women tend to find that v-taper body shape attractive because it signals masculinity, strength (broad muscular shoulders), and health (a small, lean waistline).

Women are shaped more by estrogen. This creates a more hourglass figure, with a small waist, wide hips, and more fat in the breasts, hips, and thighs. It still helps to be strong, though. The top half of an hourglass is a V-taper. You still want athletic upper body.

Now, at this point, you might be thinking, “But I’m a grown woman, and I’m still a bean!” Some of that may come from your bone structure, which we have no control over, but probably not as much as you think. For example, here’s Aomi’s three-month progress update:

She started off looking quite thin, without any dramatic curves. With a few months of lifting weights, eating a healthy bulking diet, and living a healthy lifestyle, she developed a far curvier figure.

The Most Attractive Waist-to-Hip Ratio

The healthiest and most attractive waist-to-hip ratio for a woman is 0.7 (study). Here’s what a 0.9, 0.7, and 0.6 waist-to-hip ratio looks like, so you can see the difference:

You could look at just the width of your hips and waist (as shown above), and many studies do that. But the depth of your hips matters just as much (study). To factor in both, measure your waist circumference at the narrowest point and your hip circumference at the widest point. That will give you the best idea of how attractive your waist-to-hip ratio is.

Don’t fixate on the exact number, though. Instead, try to work towards what the number represents. In this case, you want strong glutes and legs, an athletically lean waist, and some butt and thigh fat (study).

How to Improve Your Waist-to-Hip Ratio

You have some control over where your fat is stored. Being out of shape, eating a poor diet, and living an unhealthy lifestyle can cause more fat to be stored in your belly, with proportionally less fat in your hips and thighs. You can reverse that by eating a better diet, doing cardio, and trying to get enough sleep most nights:

You have far more control over your body composition. The best way to get a thinner waist is to lose weight in a healthy way, while eating a good diet and doing plenty of exercise (including cardio). The best way to build bigger hips is to build more muscle in your glutes and thighs from progressively overloading variations of squats, deadlifts, and hip thrusts. This gives you quite a lot of control over the shape of your figure.

The Most Attractive Butt Size

Why Do Men Find Women’s Butts So Attractive?

A woman’s hips and butt are arguably her most attractive areas. For instance, most research shows that men care more about butt and hip size than breast size (study). Researchers have also tracked eye movements to see where men look. They found that more often than not, when looking at a woman’s body, a man’s gaze tended to rest on her butt (study).

Your butt houses the biggest and arguably most important muscles in your body: your glutes. Because your glutes are such big, powerful muscles, they tend to grow proportionally bigger than all of your other muscles, even if you aren’t trying to emphasize them. Your thigh muscles (quads, adductors, and hamstrings) are the next-largest muscles in your body.

Having a bigger butt and stronger thighs shifts your centre of gravity lower, which can be great for certain sports. You may have noticed that quite a few female athletes have especially impressive glutes, quads, and hamstrings:

So it could be that men find butts attractive because they’re such a great indicator of health and athleticism. However, that probably isn’t the full story.

Women tend to store proportionally more fat in their butts. Even if you get lean enough that you have a small waist with a flat stomach, you’ll probably still have quite a lot of fat in your butt. That’s especially true for fitter, healthier women, especially after puberty and before menopause.

Butt fat isn’t like belly fat. It doesn’t interfere with organ function, increase inflammation, or cause diabetes or heart disease. It’s healthy to have some fat reserves, and your butt and thighs are the healthiest places to store that fat.

You can live off those fat reserves during a famine. You can also use that fat to maintain fertility, fuel a healthy pregnancy, and produce breast milk—even during a famine. Butt fat is also particularly high in DHA, an important nutrient for fetal brain development (study). No wonder, then, that men find women with larger butts sexier—it’s a great sign of your health, resilience, fertility, and ability to have smart and healthy children, even during hard times.

Interestingly, when times get harder, big butts get sexier. It seems that men have an intuitive understanding that when resources are scarce, they should be looking for more resilient women—women with larger butts.

How to Build a Bigger Butt

Lifting weights is by far the best way to build a bigger butt. Squats, deadlifts, and hip thrusts (and the many variations of those exercises) can make your butt much bigger, rounder, firmer, and higher, giving you a much larger hip circumference.

If you’re naturally thin, you can’t build bigger glutes out of nothing, so it’s also important to gain weight. I would try to gain that weight leanly, building muscle without gaining much fat. But even if you do gain some fat, it will be while eating a healthy diet, doing plenty of exercise, and living a healthy lifestyle, which means proportionally more of that fat will be stored in your hips and thighs, and so it will probably improve your appearance.

Can You Have a Butt That’s Too Big?

If your body-fat percentage is outside of the healthy range (over 30%), and if you store more of your fat in your butt, then it’s possible that it could be too big. Your butt isn’t the problem, though. It’s good to store more of your fat in your butt. That’s the healthiest place to store it. The problem is just that you have too much fat overall.

If you have a healthy body-fat percentage, with proportionally more fat stored in your butt, or especailly large glute muscles, then that’s probably an asset.

If your hip circumference is more than about 1.4 times the size of your waist (giving you a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7), then your butt is probably big enough to look maximally attractive to men. An even bigger butt might look equally good, and it might appeal more to some men, but it probably won’t make you more attractive overall, on average.

Are Women With Small Butts Attractive?

The idea of building an attractive physique is to build a body that’s strong and healthy overall. You don’t need to build a disproportionately large butt to do that. It’s perfectly fine to give all of your muscles equal emphasis in your workout program. That will still look great.

It’s also okay if you’re leaner, with less fat to bump up your butt size. As long as you aren’t unhealthfully lean, and as long as you aren’t storing proportionally more of your fat in your stomach, then that should be fine.

The Most Attractive Breast Size

What Makes Breasts Attractive?

Men like breasts of all sizes. Research shows that men are more than twice as likely to glance at your breasts before looking at your face. Breast size isn’t an important attractiveness factor, though.

The most common Google search that men make about breasts is: “I love my girlfriend’s boobs.” Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, an economist and data analyzer, commented, “It is not clear what men are hoping to find from Google when making this search.”

What’s more important than breast size is the youthfulness of your breasts (study, study). You can improve your skin elasticity by eating a nutritious diet, doing cardio, and lifting weights. You can also make sure you aren’t getting too much sun or smoking. And you can try to maintain a healthy BMI and body-fat percentage.

How to Make Your Breasts Firmer

Most women’s breasts lose some firmness after being pregnant, larger breasts tend to sag at younger ages, and every woman’s breasts fall as the years continue to pull down on them (study). I’ll cover youthfulness in more detail in a moment.

It seems, from my experience, that building a stronger chest and taller posture can make your breasts seem fuller and firmer. It’s common for clients to remark on the change:

I suspect what’s happening is that when you build more muscle in your chest and stand with a taller posture, you’re pushing your breasts out further and raising them up higher, making them appear larger and firmer. It could be that building muscle fills out your skin a little more, too.

How Much Muscle is Attractive on a Woman?

Do Men Like Muscular Women?

Men tend to love the look of strong, fit, and athletic women, whereas women often prefer the look of thinner women. That’s true in the research (study, study), and we’ve found the same thing in all of our surveys.

Some studies have found that thinner women are more attractive, but they were measuring thinness of the waist. Even there, stronger women with bigger hips and glutes were rated as more attractive.

The illustration of the “strong” woman above is what most men find most attractive. The illustration of the “thin” woman is what women find most attractive.

The male ideal lines up better with what’s healthiest. That isn’t because men are wiser, it’s because people in general are better at picking up signals of health in the opposite sex. Men often strive for bodies that are too lean and too muscular to be healthy, and women often strive for bodies that are too thin to be healthy.

Being thin can be healthy, especially in women with smaller bone structures. Endurance athletes can live long and healthy lives, even if they’re thin. But having more muscle is even healthier (study):

• Greater strength, athleticism, and bone density: I suspect this goes without saying, but building muscle makes your muscles, bones, and connective tissues stronger and tougher, making you more capable and helping to prevent injuries. It also improves your coordination, mobility, and overall athleticism.
• Better insulin sensitivity and blood sugar regulation: Muscles store some of the sugar you eat as glycogen, which they use as fuel during more intense activities, such as lifting weights and sprinting (study). That means the more muscle you build and the more you exercise those muscles, the more blood sugar they soak up, which is fantastic for your health (study, study).
• Better posture. Lifting weights is great for improving your bone density (study), connective tissue strength, stabilizer muscle strength, and posture.
• Longer lifespan: Gaining muscle reduces all-cause mortality, increases longevity, makes you look more youthful, and improves your quality of life as you age (study, study, study, study).
• More brainpower: Strenuous physical activity (such as lifting weights) stresses your brain, promoting adaptation and growth, improving your memory, focus, and ability to learn new things (study).
• Better mood: Gaining muscle reduces anxiety, wards off depression, improves mood, increases confidence, and gives you more energy (study).

Are Broad Shoulders Attractive On a Woman?

Men prefer women with broader, stronger shoulders. Frailty isn’t a beauty feature. Health and strength are. The classic hourglass figure is characterized by broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and strong hips. It’s a healthy and athletic physique from head to toe. If you took away the broad shoulders, you’d be left with an Erlenmeyer flask.

It’s perfectly fine to emphasize your glutes, but you still need a good mix of overhead pressing, push-ups, and lateral raises to build nice shoulders.

Can a Woman Be Too Muscular?

It isn’t possible for the average woman to ever become too muscular. Your genetics will limit you before you get to the point where you look too bulky, at least in the eyes of most men. You would need to take drugs (like steroids) to overcome your natural limit. Maybe don’t do that.

For most naturally thin women, becoming too muscular isn’t a concern and never will be. Their slender bone structure won’t let them build so much muscle that it ever starts to seem excessive.

Here’s an incredibly strong woman with a naturally thin bone structure. As you can see, even though she has incredible muscular development, she isn’t bulky or musclebound:

Even for naturally muscular women, more muscle can still be attractive. Here’s Jessica Buettner, a famous female powerlifter with remarkable genetics and world-class strength. She’s one of the strongest and most muscular women in the world. Most men still think her figure looks amazing:

But you don’t need to get maximally muscular everywhere. It’s pretty common for our naturally more muscular female clients to say they’re happy with the size of their arms, back, or shoulders. And that’s perfectly fine. Weight training leaves plenty of room for personal preference.

For example, Reetta told us after just a couple of months of lifting weights that her back was “finished.” It was as muscular as she ever wanted it to be. Here’s how that looked:

At that point, we switched to maintaining strength in her back and began focusing more on other areas that she did want to work on (like her lower body).

Should You Emphasize Your Glutes?

Most women have a natural inclination to focus on their glutes and thighs. That isn’t wrong. Building bigger glutes and thighs is great for your health, looks great to everyone, and gives you a more feminine body shape.

I drew women with different butt sizes and surveyed a thousand people to see which body shape they preferred. Most men (and women) chose the woman with the biggest butt as the most attractive. There’s some nuance to it, though. Almost everyone found the bodies in first and second place attractive (68% and 71%), whereas far fewer people found the woman with the bigger lower body attractive (53%).

It seems that the most attractive female body shape is athletic from head to toe with an extra-large butt. To me, that suggests that we should focus on overall muscle and strength, and then—optionally—give the glutes an extra boost.

You can build your quads with squat variations (which are amazing for your glutes) and your hamstrings/adductors with deadlift variations (which are amazing for your glutes). That will give your glutes about twice the volume of your other muscles. And then you could add hip thrusts on top of that, boosting your glutes even further:

Do Men Like Women With Muscular Arms?

Strong and toned arms are a great beauty feature. Most men prefer women with balanced and athletic physiques, including muscular arms. That’s been true across every survey I’ve run, whether using photos or my own drawings.

For example, when given the choice between a woman with bigger legs and a woman with bigger arms, 68% of men chose the woman with more muscular arms. I think what’s happening here is that the woman with stronger arms still has proportionate legs, giving her a physique that looks healthier and more athletic overall.

Your arms get trained by pressing and pulling movements (like push-ups and rows), but you can emphasize them even more by adding biceps curls, triceps extensions, and lateral raises, which target your biceps, triceps, shoulders, and most of your forearm muscles.

How to Build Muscle

The best way to build muscle is with hypertrophy training, which means “growth training.” It’s designed to make your muscles bigger, and bigger muscles are stronger muscles, so it’s also incredibly good for getting strong. Some people call it bodybuilding, but bodybuilding is a specific type of hypertrophy training. All bodybuilding training is hypertrophy training, but not all hypertrophy training is bodybuilding.

Hypertrophy training is arguably the healthiest type of weight training, which is why it’s the default type of training recommended by most health organization. When you see the World Health Organization recommending resistance training at least twice per week, they’re talking about hypertrophy training.

A good hypertrophy training program looks like this:

1. Weight Training: It’s possible to build muscle with bodyweight exercises, resistance bands, or other gadgets, but you’ll do far better with some combination of weights, exercise machines, and cables. If you want to do it at home, I recommend getting a pair of adjustable dumbbells. You can do our full transformation program with just adjustable dumbbells.
2. Progressive Overload: Write down how much weight you lift, how many reps you get, and then try to do better next time. Always try to outlift yourself. If you can do that, you can be confident you’re building muscle and gaining strength.
3. Compound Exercises: Most of your muscle growth will come from getting gradually stronger at the big exercises, such as: squats, Romanian deadlifts, push-ups, and rows. You can do those exercises with a barbell or dumbbells. What matters is that you push hard now and lift even more weight next time.
4. Isolation Exercises: Most of your growth will come from compound exercises, and some of your muscles (like your glutes) will get fully stimulated by those compound exercises. But you can also target specific muscles with isolation exercises, helping them grow faster.
5. Proper Workout Programming: A good hypertrophy program will have you doing 5–30 repetitions per set, taking those sets close to failure, resting 1–3 minutes between sets, doing 3–8 sets per muscle per workout, and training each muscle 2–3 times per week. That might sound complicated, but it can be done with just 3 full-body workouts per week, each taking less than an hour.
6. Extra Glutes (If You Want): Hip thrusts and glute bridges are perfect for that.

Here’s a free beginner hypertrophy training routine. You can do it in your living room with adjustable dumbbells, in your basement with a barbell home gym, or with a full gym membership:

The Most Attractive Female Posture

How to Develop Strong, Youthful Posture

Posture is linked to strength and athleticism. You can develop a stronger, more athletic posture by following a good workout program, gaining strength in a variety of movement patterns, improving your mobility, and making your postural muscles stronger:

When doing our muscle-building program, we had Cecile doing some extra exercises. Before lifting weights, we have a warm-up routine to improve hip and shoulder mobility. After lifting weights, the program has a couple of core-strengthening exercises.

Her situation was a little bit more exaggerated than usual, but it’s common for women’s hips to tilt forward, belly to stick out, shoulders to cave inwards, and neck to jut forward. It’s common with men, too. That’s the postural pattern people develop from living sedentary lifestyles and/or having poor strength in their postural muscles.

How to Showcase Feminine Posture

This may sound strange, but men find it attractive when women arch their lower backs (study). You probably know what I mean. It’s the arch women develop when they’re especially healthy and athletic. It’s common with female sprinters and track athletes. It’s the arch that gets exaggerated when you wear high heels. It’s the arch you see all over social media:

It’s unclear why men men prefer this specific 45-degree lumbar curve. Researchers have speculated that perhaps it’s sexually evocative, hints at greater fertility, or is the ideal posture for managing the extra weight of a pregnancy.

Some women naturally have a posture that gives them more anterior pelvic tilt, and that probably isn’t a bad thing. It might even be a good thing, especially if it’s paired with a posture that looks strong and athletic overall.

Youthfulness

Why Youthfulness Matters

Youthfulness is attractive because the men who were attracted to the most fertile women were more likely to have more children, passing on those preferences. Most women become fertile during puberty and reach peak puberty at around 22 years old. Fertility holds relatively steady until 30, and then it starts to decline gradually. That decline accelerates at 35, and is quite low by 40. Most women go through menopause around 50.

That means women are usually at their most physically beautiful when they look about 22 years old, when they appear to be at peak fertility. There isn’t a huge difference between looking 18 versus 30, though, because both of those ages look very fertile. Men will tend to prefer the woman who’s closer to their own age.

There’s a sex difference here. Men lose their fertility with age, and their sperm quality degrades, but the loss of fertility isn’t as dramatic. Men hit their peak physical attractiveness fairly young (about 26 years old), and it declines from there, but most women don’t care very much.

That’s a huge part of why the beauty industry is so oriented around all kinds of different creams and potions to keep women looking young, whereas your typical man’s beauty routine consists of rinsing his face with water every morning, if he has time.

But then on the other hand, male strength and prowess matter quite a lot, so that same man who doesn’t care about wrinkles will head to the gym or do martial arts training for 1–2 hours, trying to maintain a high level of athleticism as he ages.

How Important is Youthfulness?

Youthfulness is one of the main drivers of beauty, but you aren’t competing against (much) younger women. Men are looking for a woman to marry and stay with forever, and most men are most attracted to women who are only slightly younger than them. If a man is 50 years old, he might prefer a 40-year-old woman who looks young for her age, but he’s unlikely to prefer a 22-year-old.

Guys like Leonardo DiCaprio exist, forever dating women in their early twenties, but most men think that’s creepy and weird, not aspirational. The average man wants a great woman he can grow old with. Even among celebrities, when Brad Pitt remarried at 50 years old, he married Angelina Jolie, who was 39. Younger, yes, but not 22.

Women are usually at their most physically beautiful when they look about 22 years old, but men aren’t just attracted to beauty. Most men are looking for a woman to marry and stay with forever, and most men are most attracted (overall) to women who are only slightly younger than them. If a man is 50 years old, he might prefer a 40-year-old woman who looks amazing for her age, but he’s unlikely to prefer a 22-year-old.

Guys like Leonardo DiCaprio exist, forever dating women in their early twenties, but the average man wants a great woman they can grow old with. Even among celebrities, when Brad Pitt remarried at 50 years old, he married Angelina Jolie, who was 39. Younger, yes, but not 22.

How to Look More Youthful

What’s tough about beauty is that men are looking for true indicators of youthfulness, and it’s imposisble to look younger than women who are decades younger. The good news is that you can look remarkably young for your age by living an especially healthy lifestyle:

• Lifting weights: Gaining muscle and strength gives you an athletic body composition and posture, keeping you youthful and healthy. You can maintain an impressive amount of muscle into your seventies. Lifting weights also improves skin elasticity and reduces wrinkles. It adds a few years to your lifespan.
• Cardio: Getting fitter makes you biologically younger when you’re first getting into better shape, and then it slows your rate of aging as you keep yourself in good shape. It improves your energy levels, gives your skin a more radiant glow, reduces wrinkles, and improves skin elasticity. It can add many years to your lifespan.
• Diet: A nutritious diet rich in protein, healthy fats, fibre, vitamins, minerals, and polyphenols is great for maintaining skin collagen and skin health. It can shift more of your fat to your butt, thighs, and breasts, with less around your waist. It helps ward off every disease. It slows your rate of aging and increases your lifespan.
• Lifestyle: You can avoid excessive drinking, smoking, and drugs. You can wear sunscreen, and maybe put on some vitamin A cream before bed. You can drink plenty of water. And you can try to get to bed at around the same time every night, giving yourself at least seven hours before you need to wake up.

If you do a good enough job at all of this, you can dramatically slow your rate of aging. Most women lose muscle as they age, but you can build more. Most women gain fat as they get older, but you can lose it. Most women’s fitness gets worse, but yours can get better. Most women’s posture weakens, but yours can grow stronger. If you keep your skin healthy, it will stay firm and smooth for decades longer than average.

How to Build a More Attractive Body

We go into extensive detail in our Bony to Bombshell Program, but here’s a quick summary of the basics:

• Move the scale in the right direction: If your BMI is too low, start by gaining some weight, focusing on building muscle and getting stronger. If your BMI is too high, start by losing some weight, trying to get stronger while burning fat. It’s important to lift weights while doing this so that you gain/maintain muscle mass.
• Lift weights: Hypertrophy training is by far the most powerful way to build a balanced and athletic physique. You can give that physique some extra oomph with some extra glute emphasis. I recommend lifting weights and/or using exercise machines, with some bodyweight exercises mixed in (like push-ups and eventually chin-ups). This will help you gain muscle and strength, and it often causes simultaneous fat loss. It’s especially important if you’re trying to gain weight and build muscle.
• Do cardio: This can be any type of cardio you like, including jogging, the elliptical, or group classes. If that’s too intimidating, you can start by going on a brisk 20-minute walk every day. The purpose of cardio is to get fitter, but it will also help you burn fat, especially in your waist. It’s especially important if you’re trying to lose weight and burn fat. If you want to focus on building muscle right now, it’s okay to save cardio for a few months from now.
• Eat enough protein: Once you’re stimulating muscle growth with your workouts, you need to eat enough protein to support muscle growth. I recommend aiming for about 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day if your goal is to transform your figure as fast as possible.
• Eat a good diet: You don’t need to follow a diet with a particular name, but if you did, the Mediterranean diet is the one with the most evidence behind it. There are lots of good diets out there, though. I have vegan clients and carnivore clients. Lots of things can work. By default, though, I recommend eating lots of fatty fish, lean meat, yogurt, cheese, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans, lentils, whole grains, olive oil, cocoa, coffee, tea, herbs, and spices. (The Bony to Bombshell Program has a recipe book that makes this easy.)
• Get enough sleep: Sometimes it’s impossible to get enough sleep. I have a kid, and I’ve been stressed, and I’ve worked long hours. It’s possible to do this even if you aren’t getting enough sleep. But sleep as well as you can. Turn off screens an hour before bed. Try to get to bed at the same time every night. Try to give yourself 7+ hours almost every night. Don’t drink caffeine in the late afternoon or have alcohol after dinner. Make sleep a priority. It will give you more energy and motivation, make the exertion of exercise feel good, slow down your rate of aging, and enhance muscle growth and fat loss.
• Take care of your skin: The basics are lifting weights, doing cardio, eating well, getting enough sleep, keeping yourself strong and fit, and being mindful of getting enough but not too much sun. Vitamin A cream (retinol/tretinoin) before bed can help, especially as you get into your thirties (but don’t do it while pregnant). Having a morning whey protein shake with 10 grams of collagen (hydrolized/peptides), a few grams of camu camu (for the vitamin C), and 5–10 grams of raw cocoa powder (for the polyphenols) should help a little more.

If you’d like our help, check out the Bony to Bombshell Transformation Program. We can help you build muscle, burn fat, and improve your health and appearance in every way, holistically, from the inside out.

The program includes personal support and feedback from us. We’ll take a look at where you’re starting, give you a plan, help you track your progress, and give you help along the way. That’s how we guarantee great results.