Jeff Nippard is one of my favorite fitness YouTubers and has been over 10+ years. That’s because he uses a lot of scientific evidence to support his claims in the videos. He’s head and shoulders above many other gurus who simply make claims. He recently released an epic video revealing the findings of his survey of 50,000 people to determine various questions related to whether working out actually improves your dating life.
I recommend watching the video to get the details, but if you’re strapped for time here’s a summary:
- Survey Conducted: Jeff surveyed 50,000 people to gather opinions on muscle mass and attractiveness.
- Bench Press and Romantic Success:
- Strength Distribution: Most surveyed men could bench press around two plates per side, considered intermediate strength.
- Correlation with Partners: Data showed that men who could bench press more tended to have more romantic partners, with those benching four plates having an average of 16 lifetime partners.
- Possible Explanations: Jeff suggested that stronger men might be perceived as more attractive and that steroid use could increase libido. But he admits these are just theories because correlation doesn’t mean causation. It could just be that working out more lead to more confidence and more approaching, and confidence is what really gets girls.
- Age Factor: Jeff wanted to account for age since being older means you have more exposure to women over time. He hypothesizes age isn’t a huge factor because of his audience demographic. While older individuals might naturally have more partners, the surveyed age group (18-34) suggested that strength itself correlated with partner count and age had less effect.
- Strength vs. Relationship Satisfaction:
- Women and Strength: Women who were stronger also had more partners, showing that strength is a predictor of partner count for both genders. Both genders showed a linear correlation.
- Body Fat and Romantic Satisfaction: Body fat levels had no impact on the number of partners but did affect romantic satisfaction. Shockingly, those who had a very high body fat percentage versus low body fat percentage did not have more or less sexual partners on average. Higher body fat linearly correlated with lower long-term romantic satisfaction, especially among women.
- Muscle Mass and Long-term Relationships:
- Muscularity Levels: Muscularity was positively associated with the number of partners and likelihood of being in a relationship. More muscle increased the likelihood of being in a relationship by about 20%.
- Correlation, Not Causation: Once again, the. video emphasized that correlation does not imply causation, as confidence might also play a role.
- Women’s Preference on Muscularity:
- Survey Results: Women preferred a moderate level of muscularity (level 3) over extreme muscularity (level 5). Only 10% found the highest muscularity level most attractive, whereas 41% preferred level 3.
- Men’s Goals vs. Women’s Preferences: Many men aimed for higher muscularity than women preferred, with 33% of men desiring the highest level of muscularity. This is a big finding because it shows that a lot of men overshoot and believe they need to be much more muscular than women prefer. Plus, the highest level of muscularity requires steroids, which has many health trade-offs, so this should be good news that you don’t have to go that route.
- The Most Important Factors for Attractiveness:
- Kindness and Intelligence: Jeff looked into other evolutionary biology studies and found that there were other traits beyond muscularity and masculine looks or testosterone that mattered a lot more. Studies indicate that kindness and intelligence are rated higher than physical attractiveness by most people.
- Misconceptions About “Nice Guys”: This one’s more of an opinion by Jeff, but it makes sense. The perception that “nice guys” are unattractive stems from associating niceness with neediness and desperation, not kindness itself. If you can be kind without having those low-value other traits, it will pay off. He does back it somewhat with a study that found that only 7% of women chose the jerk over the nice guy when various traits were displayed about both groups.
- Physical Attributes:
- Strength and Mating Success: Strength and muscularity were found to be the most significant physical traits related to mating success in his survey, although once again, they account for only a small percentage of overall romantic success.
- Non-Physical Attributes: Personality traits like kindness, intelligence, and confidence play a larger role in attraction and relationship satisfaction.
- Conclusion:
- Importance of Inner Qualities: While physical fitness and muscle can contribute to attractiveness, inner qualities such as kindness, confidence, and intelligence are crucial for long-term romantic success.
- Personal Development: The video emphasizes the importance of self-improvement in both physical and personal attributes to enhance attractiveness and relationship satisfaction.
My Reaction And Thoughts
Overall, I thought this was one of my favorite videos by Jeff. He’s straightforward and points out that many men work out to attract women. While he admits it shouldn’t be the only reason you work out, it’s important not to beat around the bush. Men and women both work out because they know it’ll help them with their dating lives. I don’t think it’s something one should hide. It’s fine, it’s normal, and it’s good (to a degree) to look and feel healthy and attractive. Why not address this goal directly in a video for once?
Now, some comments do point to the fact that this survey and video is pseudoscience and not real science because some biases aren’t controlled for. One self-proclaimed data scientist posted paragraphs, and the long story short is that he claims that survey responders could have lied or exaggerated, saying they had more partners or can lift more weight than reality. There’s some truth here. I don’t know how scientists control for lies in a survey, but there’s always the chance that some people lied or have faulty memories, especially when you survey so many people. Nonetheless, I still think the findings were valuable enough. I may not take them 100% with accuracy, but I feel like the trends are still directionally correct.
Other comments point out that he surveyed his gym-loving audience, which means they’re already biased towards liking to work out and muscular people. Jeff makes a quick nod to this in the video, so it’s not like he’s unaware, but he doesn’t control for this. Once again, I’m not too perturbed. Even though there is some truth to this point, I’m still happy with this video because I believe the findings are still directionally correct. Maybe they’d be one or a half standard deviation less in their muscular preferences if the general public was surveyed. And I’ve also seen other studies and surveys done on this, and the findings are very similar.
Now, the famous YouTube channel More Plates More Dates posted a comment saying that he was “vindicated,” This would, at first glance, make sense because the data seems to support the claim of his channel name. However, if you watch the full video, while the video does show a correlation with more muscles leading to more partners and more romantic satisfaction, Jeff makes the insightful point towards the end that focusing on just these external traits is like focusing on a small piece of an entire pie. There are more impactful factors, like kindness, confidence, and intelligence that matter. To some, this may be obvious, and it’s second nature for them to work on all these areas. For others, I’ve seen them over-index or focus on just one thing, like muscles, thinking it’ll solve everything. And it may get them far if they get really good at that one thing, but it probably won’t get them as far if they had more going for them. As the woman towards the end of the video says, if he’s dumb or doesn’t have any values, it’s a no. No matter how muscular he is.
It’s funny how the pendulum swings because seven or eight years ago, what was popular on YouTube were these pick up artist videos by gurus like Real Social Dynamics who taught that looks don’t matter at all and it’s all about “game”, which is hard to define but it’s kind of a mixture of your charisma, personality, social skills, humor, and ability to talk and charm women. A lot of people believed that, but hopefully, we’ve gotten to a better understanding of everything where we realize that looks, hygiene, and fashion do matter to an extent, but so do social skills, intelligence, confidence, and other things. You can’t neglect one area to an offputting level and expect to do well. It was also funny because the gurus from RSD claimed that they had bad looks, but they were average looking, and would often play around with their fashion and style, trying out scarves and random stuff, so there’s the perception of who they thought they were versus their actions.
One thing I liked about the video was Jeff pointing out that the quantity of sexual partners someone has isn’t always the best indicator of success. He claims that what people really want is romantic satisfaction (a.k.a. quality of long term relationships), and so that score should be the better measure of success. Deciding the right metric to measure is so important in life and business.
Now, to be fair, I don’t think it’s accurate when he claims that 100% of people really want romantic satisfaction over quantity. I’ve hung around a lot of young men, and when there’s no filter and they don’t have to be politically correct, some of them are measuring themselves by how large is their number. I’ve never pressed them on it and asked them why. But it’s not rocket science. If I had to infer, the larger amount signifies a more difficult conquest to achieve, but also more proven consistent success and expertise in the skill. Put another way, a dating coach who charges you a lot of money who only has a handful of partners may be seen as less credible because he could have just gotten lucky and these could’ve been with low-quality, desperate partners. As a customer, you would be less trusting that this person has a consistent system for himself, let alone something he can teach his students versus someone with a higher count.
That said, I can see how for most people, especially women and those who are older, they tend to have dating goals that correlate more with Jeff’s metric of romantic satisfaction. It’s good he included the results behind both metrics.
I really think he should do a part 2 to this video because there’s more questions and metrics he could pull forth that would allow us to dive deeper. For example, if we’re not going for quantity, we might need a metric for quality. He should add a metric for attractiveness of their partner. Now, I understand that “quality” is subjective and/or there’s a lot more factors beyond looks that make a man or a woman a quality catch. The assumption that looks are all that matter is another common young men’s mistake I see often; it’s rampant because I still see and hear many of them labeling or rating girls from 1 to 10 purely on their looks. So, Jeff could add a few more metrics to measure the quality of a partner, but that would make things more complicated and multi-dimensional. To keep it simple for now, he could just add one measure for quality of partner to see if more plates lead to better dates. Even this one dimension could get complicated, as a more attractive partner can be split up into multiple metrics, such as facial symmetric, hip-to-waist ratio, general health, hygiene, energy levels, or style and fashion. I’ll leave the rest of this problem up to Jeff to solve.
I believe this added metric is important because I’ve heard many men who say their dating goal is to improve the quality of the women that they can date. Some make the false assumption that when a man needs dating help, he can’t get anyone. That’s only sometimes true. In other cases, I’ve seen that it’s often that they’re just not satisfied with the level of women they can currently get. It’s a very common struggle that dating coaches try to solve. And once again, by quality here, they’re not always just referring to looks, although this is often a key part of it. It could be job title, personality, economic level of life, mental health, intelligence, etc.
That’s right. Not all men are the same and just want something short-term, some do look for more than just looks and are ready for a long-term relationship. It’s important to acknowledge the young men who aren’t, but it’s important to differentiate the different mating goals out there.
The first half of the video, nonetheless, does support the claims that lifting and working out to get more muscular beats not doing it all. If you learn nothing else, you should still:
- work out at least twice a week, to get to the second out of the five levels of muscularity in the diagram shown in the video. Because a third of women seemed to like that. This seems achievable without having to kill yourself in the gym and with your diet.
- hitting chest a lot and focus on increasing your pec strength, as this seems to be the muscle group most correlated with success. We don’t need to emphasize this too much since people hit chest a lot already. *Also, he never mentions if he surveyed people for every other muscle group. Or if chest was the only one or one of a select few that were surveyed. If it was the latter and they left out other key muscle groups from the question, like shoulders, then, that’s an incomplete survey. I vaguely recall participating in this survey when it came out, and I don’t remember an intensive section surveying people on all the muscle groups and what they find most attractive. It was a very quick survey, so I’m skeptical about this one. Other studies I’ve seen indicate that it’s the shoulders that matter most, specifically hitting an ideal shoulder-to-waist ratio – once again, there is a point where too much isn’t as attractive.
- lower your body fat percentage as well. While you can be very muscular and still get just as many partners even with a high body fat percentage, it seems like your relationship satisfaction goes up with a better body fat percentage.
- don’t stress or aim to get to the fifth level of muscularity. You don’t need to get that far and much less girls than you think want that level. Plus, it requires anabolics, which has health trade-offs. Instead, it’s probably best to aim for the third level of muscularity. More muscles are better, up until a point.
- more muscles beats zero muscles. But you don’t need to be super jacked or get to the extreme. This is good news because we don’t have to kill ourselves, make lifting weights our entire lives, or sacrifices our health in pursuit of more gains.
Having consumed a good amount of this type of dating pop-culture and evolutionary biology content, I’m not that surprised with the findings. I already knew that men, in general, thought they needed to be more muscular than they actually do for women, but having some muscles help. I knew that intelligence, kindness, and confidence matter too. And I knew that a certain level of muscularity and body fat percentage was probably more ideal.
But I wasn’t certain, and I think another survey to help confirm that and give clarity on what matters more to what percentage is always helpful. Plus, knowing the principles and doing it are different things. I’m still hitting the gym multiple times a week, but I haven’t honestly gotten to a level 2 of the 5 levels of muscularity. I’m almost there, but it’s a lot of dedication and the toughest part is the diet – not eating too many calories and getting 160+ grams of protein in a day. And confidence, at least real, strong, bold confidence, takes time. It’s not easy to develop, even if you’re practicing talking to girls often.
Also, another peculiarity in the video has to do with kindness and intelligence. I’m glad that Jeff mentioned these as the top two attractive traits. Other studies I’ve encountered support this claim. However, the question is why then do we know nerds or geeks who are intelligent and kind and still struggle with women?
Perhaps, especially in school, other attraction triggers reign supreme and get first priority, such as social status and popularity or athleticism and social skills.
To use a nerdy RPG analogy, some nerds tend to have high stats in academic intelligence and kindness, but have very low, dare I say level 1, stats in social intelligence, social skills, hygiene, health, fitness, and athleticism. It’s an extreme example to illustrate the point since I know there are athletic nerds and funny, socially savvy nerds as well, but perhaps, their low scores in other stats cancel out the good stats?
Plus, there’s a difference between real kindness and the more common, fake “give to get” kindness. Jeff claims that nice guys are perceived to finish last because they’re also associated with other low-value, low-status behaviors like desperation, clinginess, and neediness. While I think that is true and it’s great he mentioned this as advice, another cause is that some “nice” guys aren’t really that nice. They’re only being nice to women while being jerks or normal to everyone else, while expecting or hoping to get something back from the women, such as their approval or a date or something romantic.
The worst of them throw a fit when they don’t receive what they expect, not realizing that it’s become transactional, and nobody owes them anything. Just because you’re nice to someone doesn’t mean they owe you their love or interest. I mean many women get approached so often by these “nice” guys, it wouldn’t make sense for her to just fall in love with them all just because they bought her something or were nice to her.
A real generous person does it without expecting anything back. So, there are some real nice guys, but there’s also many fakes. So, try being actually nice for once. If you can’t, better to just treat everyone the same like you would treat your male friends and don’t be overly nice as it could be perceived as you trying to manipulate or get something back.
As far as the mystery of intelligence for attraction goes, the best explanation I’ve found so far comes from the book Mate by Dr. Geoffrey Miller and Tucker Max. They argue that there are multiple forms of intelligence, and academic intelligence is the worst form for attraction. Our ancestors didn’t care as much for someone who could do calculus as much as someone who was street smart and socially intelligent who could win people over, develop friendships with people, and become a popular, local celebrity within their local tribe or village and have a level of prestige. So, while it’s still more attractive to be academically intelligent than all around stupid, there’s other forms of intelligence that are worth developing and marketing to women first.
