UNLOCK NEW POWER

It doesn’t matter what size or shape you are – tall, short, broad, wiry, lean or stocky. What matters is maximising your potential. Use this expert guide to adjust your training and find the untapped power, strength and possibility in every body

It doesn’t matter what size or shape you are – what matters is maximising your potential. Our expert guide is on hand

Trainer Jon Flake could see it the moment that Jalen McDaniels started trying to drop his 6ft 9in frame into a crouch. McDaniels, a professional basketball player, was beginning a workout at the Peak Performance Project facility in Santa Barbara, California. The gym frequently works with NBA players and Flake, the lead performance specialist, has seen plenty of bad squats. “For many tall guys, the squat goes wrong in one of two ways,” he says. “Either they push their butt too far back, or they push their knees too far forward.” McDaniels was fusing the two, and in this moment, he looked as if he was crammed into an invisible clown car.

This wasn’t McDaniels’s fault. He hadn’t set up in a squat position that properly took into account his long limbs. Flake spotted this and handed McDaniels a trap bar, which instantly took stress off the player’s upper back and helped him to keep his torso upright. After that, McDaniels started doing reps flawlessly, because he was performing a move custom-built for his body. “It’s always about finding the exercise that best suits the athlete,” says Flake.

That task is never easy, no matter what the receptionist at Fit for Less tells you, because your body is more than just your height and weight. Different combinations of limbs and torso length handle exercises in different ways. You may be better built to squat than McDaniels, but his long legs set him up to dominate the 20-second AirBike intervals that may leave you gassed. Identify both the advantages and disadvantages of your body type and you can unlock muscle-building potential while avoiding frustration.

The study of these body proportions is called anthropometry, and it is rarely optimised for the gym. It first came to prominence in the 1880s, when the French biometrics researcher Alphonse Bertillon, who worked in the Paris police records department, began cataloguing limb lengths and other data of suspects and criminal offenders for identification purposes. The goal of anthropometry is to break down body measurements beyond height and weight, chasing nuanced data on such things as the lengths of your torso, arms and legs. This data is most commonly used in ergonomics, aiding in the design of objects such as chairs and tables.

The closest that muscle-heads came to anthropometry was in the discussion of body types, or somatotypes, which first appeared in the

1940s. Set forth by the psychologist and physician William Sheldon, the somatotype system categorised people as ectomorphs (tall and lean), mesomorphs (athletic and strong) or endomorphs (heavy and round). His theory was that your body type dictated how easy or hard it would be to build muscle and lose weight.

Numerous experts have debunked Sheldon’s theories, yet we still think in body types. Thanks to pop culture and social media, many of us grew up with the perception that a strong body meant Arnie biceps and Chris Evans abs. If our arms were longer or skinnier than theirs, we assumed we’d never crush it in the gym. Many still believe these ideas but they shouldn’t. Every body is equipped to pull off great feats of strength. The key is learning to train with exercises matched to your body type.

That’s why anthropometric training can be life-changing. Fitness experts credit the late Canadian kinesiology professor David A Winter with connecting the dots between limb length, exercise performance and forging strength. In his influential

1979 book, Biomechanics of Human Movement, he analysed data from research on cadaver limb lengths and started linking it to the way the body moves. His insights gained traction only with forward-thinking trainers, even though limb length can make a 100kg barbell deadlift a breeze for one person and a nightmare for another.

Jon Flake and a handful of trainers are starting to incorporate these ideas in their work. Make a few training tweaks based on your limb measurements and you can optimise key exercises and avoid nagging injuries at the same time. There are five key combinations of arms, legs and torsos that can significantly affect the way you lift and move. Understand them and you’ll put yourself on the path to major gains.