What body type are you? Body type can be described as somatotype. Your natural physique can play a big part in your results. So, is your body type helping or hindering you? Do you find it easy to build lean muscle or do you remain skinny?
Are you always struggling to shed body fat and cant seem to achieve effective weight loss? Are you lean no matter what you seem to do or eat, and you find you always have an athletic physique?
Well, your body type is probably something to do with that.
What Body Type Are You?
3 Basic Body Types – Somatotypes
Three basic body types exist in humans. Described as somatotypes, whether you are predominantly ectomorph, mesomorph or endomorph morphology will have an influence on your physique and sports performance, and how you should approach both your nutrition and training.
Traditionally the build of the endurance athlete, ectomorphs are generally tall and thin, slim limbs and typically would look increase strength and size, and to maintain body weight whilst performing endurance exercise.
Relying highly on the fight or flight (sympathetic nervous system) ectomorphs have a high metabolic rate, and are generally well able to tolerate carbohydrates in their diet.
This results in making any muscle gain through weight training very difficult (but not impossible!)
Mesomorphs are more naturally muscular and athletic looking, and they see more rapid adaptations to exercise, fat loss and muscle gain.
Testosterone and growth hormone play a large part in this adaptation and combined with a moderately high metabolism mesomorphs are reasonably tolerant to carbohydrates in the diet.
If you are a mesomorph you will have rapid adaptations from high intensity workouts.
Endomorphs are more heavily influenced by the hormone insulin and do not deal well with carbohydrates in the diet.
A slow metabolic rate with low calorie needs and insulin sensitivity makes them more likely to store body fat and so effective weight loss is a challenge and needs co be considered very carefully for long term success.
Their physique is generally rounder and with a tendency to store fat. As a result general training goals might include weight loss in order to maximise health but also self image.
Match Your Goal To Your Somatotype
Your training goals and nutrition plan should reflect your body type for best results.
Considering your physique and parameters such as your fat free mass, your power to weight ratio, and your BMI and how they each affect your performance.
I am not an advocate of being super lean all of the time but if you do have 10kgs of excess body fat, its best to try to shift it. After all, we all like to look and feel good, be health, and have life in general is easier if you are a normal body composition.
You should not concern yourself with factors such as height as they are beyond your control. However, if you do have a poor posture you might gain an inch or two by addressing excessive spinal curvature.
Making yourself long through good technique and through good postural training plan will certainly be advantageous in terms of injury prevention. Did you know that back pain in sedentary adults costs the UK billions of pounds each year. Keep your spine in great shape with postural exercises and you’ll feel the benefits.
In addition, a major risk-factor to osteoarthritis in the knees is obesity. If you are an endomorph, and you are struggling to lose weight effectively or reach your ideal weight you will be at risk of osteo-arthritis. Take the advice from these pages and see the extra weight melt away.
In conclusion, you will have elements of each body type but may well identify with one over the others.
Don’t be alarmed at being pigeon holed as say, an endomorph – you are not doomed to hold extra body weight, you just need to be a little bit more careful with the nutrition, plus exercise to lose weight!
Equally, if you are an endomorph but want to stack on some lean muscle, you’ll just have to work that bit harder and eat really good quality and plentiful supply of nutrients. You’ll get there! We all have different goals, which are achievable with correct training and nutrition.
Well, thats it for today, I hope it was useful. Any questions – please do comment below. Also share if you like it. I’m off for a workout.