How Your Body Type Affects Your Fitness Goals

What Role Does Your Body Type Play In Your Fitness Level?

There are so many factors to consider when it comes to fitness, burning fat, building muscle, or losing weight. Your genetics play a massive role in your body composition and the effectiveness of your fitness plan. You can see the role genetics play in the kind of body type you have.

There are three different body types, and they play a huge role in determining how well and fast you reach your fitness goals. The ease with which you lose weight, burn fat or develop muscles depend heavily on your body type. It explains why you can begin a fitness journey with someone else, and notice different results even though you started at the same time, ate the same foods, did the same exercises.

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The three different body types are ectomorph, endomorph, and mesomorph. Each body type has its unique characteristics, strengths, and weakness. That is why you must first know what body type you have to tailor a workout and diet plan better suited for it.

1. Ectomorph body type

Characteristics: Long and lean, delicate frame, similar build to a marathon runner, fast metabolism, low body fat, finds it hard to build muscle and fat.

Training: Because it is harder for you to gain muscle and weight, try more exercises with compound movements, as against isolated movements. This is because you use more muscle groups in those exercises.

For example, doing bench presses engages your chest, shoulders, and triceps muscles at once. In contrast, a bicep curl will only target your bicep.

However, even though your primary focus should be on exercises with compound movements, don’t completely shun isolated movements. You can use them to finish your workouts or as accessories.

Nutrition: You can get away with eating pretty much anything, including carbs. However, like with everything else, eat in moderation. Eat a lot of complex carbs, as they keep you fuller for longer and push protein to grow your muscles. Examples include brown bread, brown rice, and whole grains.

2. Endomorph Body Type

Characteristics: Wider and shorter body, stocky build, stores fat in the lower half of their bodies, has more muscle but accompanied by fat, has the best strength advantage, difficult to stay lean, and slow metabolism.

Training: Because it is harder to lose weight, you can shock your body into burning more fat with intense aerobic exercise. Include more HIIT (high-intensity interval training) and LISS (low-intensity steady-state cardio) in your workouts to target your whole body, instead of specific areas.

To increase your metabolism, include hypertrophy (muscle building with heavy weights and fewer reps) with conditioning. Your metabolism kicks up this way, even hours after exercising.

Nutrition: Because it is easier to gain fat than others, your diet needs to be stricter. Eat fewer complex carbs, altogether avoid simple carbs like white bread, and increase your intake of protein and healthy fats.

3. Mesomorph Body Type

Characteristics: They are the middle of the other body types, so possess attributes of both. Athletic, broader shoulders, rectangular-shaped, strong build, well-defined muscles, medium-sized joints/bones, lose and gain weight quickly, build muscles easily, can be lean and muscular simultaneously.

Training: Because it is easier to lose weight and build muscles, you do not have to go insane on heavyweights to achieve your results. You can lift moderately and still pack on muscles. However, you are not entirely immune to fat/weight gain, so add some aerobic exercises to get your heart racing and blood pumping.

Nutrition: A mesomorph typically needs more calories than any other food type due to the higher ratio of muscle mass. Muscle weighs more than fat, and you need more calories to maintain them. Your diet should contain equal amounts of protein and healthy fats, with a moderate amount of complex carbs.

Can you be a combination of two body types?

Absolutely. It is possible to be a combination of two body types, sharing both characteristics. However, one would be dominant over the other. Hopefully, this post helps you discover what body type you fall under, so you can get the best out of your fitness results.