Welcome to the Get Fit Guys quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up.

My name is Ben Greenfield and I'm the Get Fit Guy.

Now, as you can probably imagine, especially if you've ever spent much time in a locker room or at the beach,

your body type and your body shape is relatively unique. And no single

fitness program, workout, exercise machine, number of sets, cardio class, diet, or any other method

of attaining a dream body is going to work ideally for every body type. In other words,

that magazine workout program or generic gym routine may not be optimized for you.

In fact, it might be hindering your fitness goals.

So in this two-part series, I'm going to teach you how body typing works, how to figure out your body type,

and how to create an exercise and eating plan for your unique body type.

So let's look at the history of body typing.

Back in 460 BC, long time ago, the Greek philosopher Hippocrates proposed that there are two basic body types,

and the slightly awkward Latin phrases he used to describe them can basically be translated to a long,

thin body, or a short, thick body. But body types weren't quantified or described more fully

until 1919, when an Italian anthropometrist named Viola took 10 measurements of the bodies of a large group of people

compared the individuals to a group average and then came up with three different and

difficult to pronounce body types which he quantified and described as micro splanknic

macro splanknic and normosplank. And each of these different body types were

quantified based off having a small trunk and long limbs, a large body and short limbs, or kind of an

intermediate group. Now, a few years later, another guy, a German psychiatrist named Ernst Krenschmer,

described three body types, and he described them as

broad, round, and sturdy, long and thin, and large and muscular. And then later in the 1940s,

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