UrbanUpdate

I’m short. There, I said it. At 5’6,” I have never been picked first at basketball—or any sport, really—and I am sometimes eclipsed by women in heels. I do, however, have one HUGE advantage, along with the roughly 30 percent of adult male Americans also under 5’8”: we can lift more weight than tall guys, proportionally. Take that, human skyscrapers.

With less height and arm reach, I don’t have to work as hard or move as much as, say, Kristaps Porzingis on a bench press or a squat. Less work equals more weight and more weight equals more muscle. But here’s where being short sucks again: Instead of making us look all ripped, like Brad Pitt in fight club, too much muscle makes us look like a swole version of Dopey from the seven dwarves. Standing five-foot-eight and 200lbs might get you on an NFL practice squad, but anyone off the field will wonder what happened to your neck.

Instead, aim your body's ability to lift efficiently at workouts that will both build muscle and create the vertical lines—like the coveted D'Angelo bone—so you look taller. (Note: workouts cannot actually make you taller. Sorry.) Here’s how:

Keep your body fat below 12 percent

A belly makes you shorter because it adds width to your midsection and, in essence, cuts your body in half. Instead, aim for a flat stomach and a small waist so you can lengthen your torso and—voilà—look taller.

If you want to melt your fat ASAP, make sure to eat clean 85 percent of the time and try intermittent fasting—say, a couple days spent doing juicing only—to jump start things. Once your body fat is under 12 percent, you can slow up or stop increasing the weights you're working with, since you're not looking to—as the guy who grunts loudly in the weight room would say—add mass.

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Use total-body exercises

These are a short guys best friends at the gym: squats, deadlifts, presses, rows, and pull-ups. Since you’re structurally built to lift a lot of weight, why mess around with 17 different kinds of curls that only work your biceps? Total-body exercises will improve your strength, give you a lean and athletic frame, help you burn more calories, and make you look like you know what you’re doing in the gym. (Related: when was the last time you saw a genuinely athletic guy at the gym using the leg press machine? That's what I thought.)

Pull more than you push

Most guys do more pushing exercises (bench presses, chest flies, military presses, and squats) than pulling exercises (pull-ups, inverted rows, dumbbell rows, and deadlifts) because those are the exercises we know work our glory muscles, and no one has ever asked, "How much do you row, bro?" But pushing exercises also tighten your chest muscles and will kill your posture if that's all you do. I've been wrong before, but I'm pretty sure that hunched shoulders and a jacked-up spine aren't turn-ons for women.

Fight this imbalance by doing twice as many pulling exercises as pushing exercises. This is how you get you keep your body symmetrical, and get a tall—well, tall as we're gonna get—and neutral posture. Other useful exercises include chest stretches, band pull aparts, and face pulls, which are a real exercise and not something, I swear. Seriously.

See?

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