Best Aesthetic Workout Plan: The No-BS Guide (2023)

If you want the best aesthetic workout routine that maximizes both aesthetics and size, but don’t know where to start, then you’re in the right place.

I’m not gonna make you pay for it or enter your email, nope.

I know what it’s like to want to get into the gym as a beginner but not knowing where to start as there are literally HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of routines out there. It can be quite paralyzing to say the least.

Everywhere you look, there are routines that promise to get you jacked, and good looking. However, most of the time you can only tell when routines are complete horseshit when you’ve already been lifting for numerous years.

This guide is here to give people who want to make a change a head start over their competition and if you’re willing to put in a bit of effort, the rewards will be tenfold.

So let’s jump right in!

Goals Of This Program

There’s a whole bunch of different goals and things that I’d like you to get out of this routine to be honest.

Ultimately I want to set you on the path of success.

But success in anything starts with taking good care of your physical body and mind, and so some goals that I want to focus on for this article are:

• Aesthetics
• Size & Strength
• Foundation For Success

It’s always good to have a goal when trying to improve your life.

This will give you the motivation and discipline to push yourself farther than 99% of other people. Stay the course and the results will follow.

Aesthetics Training

Let’s make something clear… Size does NOT equal aesthetics.

Far too many men focus on just getting as huge as possible, and they end up looking like a bloated ninja turtle with huge pecs, lats, and legs but are horribly out of proportion.

The best aesthetic workout routine should be one that maximizes both size and aesthetics, but focuses on aesthetics.

I am not huge, and I currently am not trying to be.

If you focus on aesthetics above all else, you will look 3x more massive than you actually do and look way better while doing so too, so focus on aesthetics first.

Focusing on aesthetics typically includes accentuating your V-Taper, getting lean, and narrowing down your waist as much as possible.

Don’t worry too much about how to go about it, just implement some of the advice from the best aesthetic routine to see some EXTREMELY quick results.

Size & Strength

I know, I know, I just spent the last section talking about how you do not need size to look good.

That being said, easily carrying around twice the weight of your peers on your upper body is definitely a nice bonus…

When you first start this routine, it may be a week or two before you see any noticeable differences, but if you stick with it, you might wake up one morning and look in the mirror and might find your first shoulder striation, or bicep vein.

These results are incredibly addicting, and will leave you wanting to attack the gym with even more ferocity, lifting heavier weight and to start packing on pounds of lean muscle mass.

Good news for complete beginners out there, If you follow this aesthetic workout plan and diet to a fucking T, you will put on muscle literally 3x faster than anyone who’s been lifting for 5 years straight.

Yep, that’s right, this is something that is usually referred to as “newbie gains”.

It’s where your body initially freaks out due to the sudden increase of stress on the muscles sends your body into overdrive to create muscle as fast as possible to accommodate the physical stress of working out.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THIS PHASE, I cannot stress this enough.

You will NEVER put on muscle this fast again unless you get onto steroids, prohormones, or SARMs, so make sure you maximize your initial gym ventures and do NOT waste this phase!

Foundation For Success

Last, but certainly not least. I want to help set you up with a foundation to not only succeed at the gym but also at life.

There are many lessons you learn while in the gym that you can apply to literally every other part of your life, such as the value of dedication, consistency, no pain no gain, etc.

Not only this, but when you cultivate physical toughness, you also cultivate mental toughness.

On those days where you don’t really feel like going to the gym, it takes discipline to get your ass off the couch and go to the gym.

You become more disciplined in EVERY walk of life.

Not only this but when your body is filled to the brim with energy and testosterone you’ll realize that literally EVERYTHING else in life becomes easier, because you’re more mentally sharp, you have more energy, confidence, etc.

Start implementing the advice from the best aesthetic workout plan to reap the rewards from EVERY aspect of your life and experience not just the body, but also the LIFE of your dreams.

This is your life my friend, take the steps to improve it.

Principles Of Lifting

WARNING: DO NOT READ ANYTHING ELSE UNTIL YOU’VE READ THROUGH THIS SECTION!

One of the best pieces of advice I could give you to succeed at anything in life is to follow principles over techniques. Following the proper workout principles could turn even a shitty routine into a pretty damn good one.

But when you combine the workout principles WITH an aesthetic workout routine? You will literally triple your effectiveness.

Here are the most important principles of lifting…

• No Pain No Gain
• The Rule Of 33/33/33
• Consistency Over Intensity
• Proper Form Beats Weight

This is arguably the most important part of this whole routine, EVEN MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE EXERCISES.

No Pain No Gain

Arguably the most important principle of lifting, without pain, there shall be no gain.

When you’re under a bar bench-pressing twice your weight and all of your muscle fibers are straining themselves past their limits just to lift the fucking weight up, THAT’S when you will start getting the gains.

Let me tell you a quick story to emphasize this point…

Muhammad Ali was once training for a boxing match, and the paparazzi was gathered around him as he was doing his sit-ups. While watching in awe, one reporter got up the nerve to approach the intensely focused Ali and asked him how many sit-ups he did…

Muhammad Ali didn’t boast about a specific number, or try to impress anyone, all he said was simply “I don’t start counting until it hurts” and continued to do his fucking sit-ups.

THAT gentlemen is how you want to approach the gym, because when you push past your previous limits, when it starts to hurt, THAT is when the reps truly start to count. So yeah, train hard.

The Rule Of 1/3

When getting jacked remember the rule of thirds. Put simply the rule of thirds states:

“1/3 of your results will come from proper workout. 1/3 will come from proper dieting. And 1/3 will come from recovering effectively and consistently.”

You could have the world’s best aesthetic workout plan of all time (which I’ll give you) and the best diet ever created, but if you’re only getting like 4 hours of sleep, and not taking any rest days you will be FUCKED when trying to build muscle.

This applies too if you sleep 9 hours a night, and have the best routine too, but if you have a shitty diet, you aren’t going to make it far at all.

In order to get the most bang for your buck, focus on all 3 of these areas and in 3 months you will be immensely glad you did.

Long Term Consistency > Short Term Intensity

Achieving the physique of your dreams is a marathon, not a sprint.

Remember this rule, focus on long-term consistency over short-term intensity. It’s better to only workout 10 minutes a day 7 days a week, than to workout for 70 minutes one day, seriously.

No matter what your goal is, it will take time, and when you’re first starting out it’s more important to get the habit down before you start going to the gym for 4 hours a day (like I used to).

Proper Form Beats Weight

The man who properly bicep curls the 15 pound dumbbells will make more gains over a year than the man who uses shitty form with 40 pound dumbbells.

Something that took me a long time to realize is that a lot of the time the exercise you do isn’t what matters but instead HOW you do the exercise.

I’m not going to go into the specifics as to how to lift everything perfectly to exact degree of angles, but I encourage you to click the links below that will demonstrate how to do the exercises if you don’t already.

Best Aesthetic Workout Routine For Muscle Mass

Finally, now that all the theory is out of the way, let’s cut the foreplay and get right into the best beginner routine.

The following program was built to take you from a scrawny kid into a Greek god as quickly as possible as a beginner.

This routine is a push, pull, legs split which I truly believe is the best gym split for aesthetics.

This means on the first day you’ll be training all your muscles associated with “pushing” i.e. your chest, shoulders, and triceps, on the second, your “pull” muscles (biceps, and back) and finally on day 3 you’ll train your legs.

You can choose to do all three days in a row, take one rest day, and then do all 3 again, ad infinitum. The other option is that you can train push, then take a rest day, the train pull, rest day, legs, rest day, etc.

If you follow this routine, you can expect some pretty realistic results such as…

• In a week you might not notice much difference, maybe extra veins here and there.
  
• In a month your physique will start to fill itself out, your shoulders will start to widen and your muscles will be way more pronounced.
  
• In 3 months the newbie gains will have fully kicked in and you will have a completely transformed physique that will literally ooze with confidence, friends and family will be commenting on the size you put on, and girls may start coming up and asking to feel your abs and arms.
  
• After a year, you will be pretty decent at the whole art of lifting and can start to mold your physique into your EXACT goals, you’ll be turning heads at pools, beaches, or even on the street, and you will command 10x the respect from men and women.

If this sounds like something you want, then here’s the routine…

Upper Body Workout Day 1: Push

Once again, your push muscles are your chest, shoulders and triceps.

We’re starting out with 5 sets of bench to “pre-exhaust” your muscles so that everything that you do after will translate directly into gains made with the selected muscles…

With chest you REALLY want to hit that upper chest, this will give you that solid “plate of armor look”.

Michael B Jordan has great upper chest development and that’s ideally one of the main goals for day 1 of the aesthetic workout routine.

With all that said, here’s the routine to get you started:

• Bench Press OR Incline Press:
  5×12,10,8,5,3
  
• Incline Dumbbell Flys:
  3×10-12
  
• Dips:
  3xFAILURE
  
• Shoulder Press OR Arnold Press:
  4×8-10
  
• Lateral Raises:
  3×12
  
• Rear Delt Flys:
  3×15
  
• Rope Pushdowns:
  3×15
  
• Skull Crushers:
  3×10-12
  

Note: “Failure” means you do as many reps as you can until you CAN NOT do another rep afterward.

Upper Body Workout Day 2: Pull

For Day 2 of the best routine for an aesthetic body, we’re hitting the traps, lats, back, and biceps.

For aesthetics today is extremely important as this is the day you target the muscles SPECIFICALLY involved in giving you the V-Taper look (Besides abs but we’ll get into that).

There’s generally 3 things you want to target for back and that’s width (with chin ups), thickness (rows), and proportions.

Doing these exercises will ensure that you hit all of these, with an emphasis on lat width, to help give you that V-taper.

With that said, here’s day 2 of the upper body workouts:

• Deadlifts:
  5×12,10,8,5,3
  
• Pull Ups/Chin-Ups:
  3xFAILURE
  
• Lat Pulldowns:
  3×12
  
• Barbell OR Cable Row:
  3×10-12
  
• Barbell OR Dumbbell Shrugs:
  3×20
  
• Barbell Curls:
  3×8-10
  
• Dumbbell OR Preacher Curls:
  3×12
  
• Hammer Curls:
  3×15

For people who struggle with growing their biceps (this was me for a long time), take the time to learn the proper form.

Biceps are NOTORIOUS for trying to get “extra help” from your shoulders, traps, forearms, etc. Follow the proper form and increase the weight and reps over time.

Lower Body Workout Day 3: Legs

Ah leg day of the best beginner routine, some people absolutely hate it, and some people love it, I don’t care which one you are as long as you DO it.

Leg days are famously skipped for a reason… they suck. Especially if you’re doing them right (You should be struggling to walk afterward).

However, this lower body muscle group is by FAR the most rewarding hormonally because it is during heavy leg exercises that you’re body produces the most muscle building hormones like HGH and testosterone.

• Back Squats:
  5×12,10,8,5,3
  
• Leg Press:
  3×12
  
• Lunges:
  3×10
  
• Leg Extensions:
  3×15
  
• Leg Curls:
  3×12
  
• Calf Raises:
  3×20
  
• (Optional) Seated Calf Raises:
  3×20

Note: This lower body workout can be pretty straightforward, the only thing to really remember when you’re first starting out is to break parallel when you squat, this means to dip your hips below your knees when you go down.

If you look at anyone with chicken legs, I guarantee you they aren’t doing squats properly.

Day 4: Rest And Recovery

I’m not going to spend too long here as I will have posts dedicated to rules of recovery in the future but as a hardgainer some good rules of thumb to follow are…

• Consume one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight
  
• In general, no processed food, fast food, or any other junk that fucks with your testosterone levels
  
• Drink a gallon of water a day
  
• Get 8-9 hours of sleep
  
• Follow The Best Beginner Routine And Take Your Rest Days Seriously

All in all these rules account for about 80% of proper diet and recovery as a hardgainer so make sure you start implementing them ASAP

That’s it, I designed this routine to provide an intense challenge for newcomers but not overly complicated by introducing various exercises that rely on perfect mind-muscle connection, absolutely perfect form, etc. that stuff is for people trying to become fitness models.

That being said the most important part of all of this is just to START, don’t worry about doing it wrong.

I repeat, the most important part is to start, no more excuses, even if you fail at all the exercises with bad form, at least you tried, the next time, take what you learned and fail better.

Keep failing and improving until eventually you get it down. You will NOT make gains simply by reading about how to do so, you need to get your ass in the gym and start ASAP

Tips To Get Started

I realize this may all be very daunting and intimidating as a beginner but rest assured that the efforts will be worth it 10x. If you are willing to put in the work, the results will follow, the most important part is that you get started.

Just get started, if you don’t know how try brainstorming:

• If you don’t have a gym, start with as much bodyweight as you can…
• If all you eat is junk, get started with a cheap bulking diet…
• If you don’t know how to do anything, just START and then adjust afterwards…

There are NO more excuses, a man who truly wants something won’t let anything get in his way, it’s just about starting and staying consistent.

Lliterally don’t even focus on anything else at first other than going to the gym, trying the exercises, then going home and consuming protein.

The key is just to start.

The Best Beginner Routine In Conclusion

At this point, I’ve given you guys the best beginner routine that you need to go from scrawny to jacked in as little time as possible.

What you’ll realize is that overall getting jacked is incredibly easy once you get over the initial learning curve, just apply the principles when you workout, and you WILL see results, guaranteed.

Lift big, eat big, sleep big, and eventually you will GET big. I truly hope you decide to make a change in your life, and I want to help you along your journey as much as possible…

So if you have any questions, comments or concerns, shoot me an email at matthewcarter@hardgainerbodybuilding.com and I’ll get back to you guys as soon as possible.

To Your Success,

Matthew Carter