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How Can A Thin Man Gain Muscle
The Truly Huge Bodybuilding Program...
This program can boost your recuperation ability, allowing you to increase your strength every workout and make size gains every week. The human body is quite capable of making gains each and every week, if it is trained and rested at the proper time within the recuperative cycle. You will also learn the "laws" that force your muscles to grow and how to blast through all plateaus. You don't need steroids to make fast gains in size and strength.
Trainees following this program exactly have never failed to make incredible gains in size and strength. It worked for them and it can work for you! This easy-to-understand book details the exact training to follow to make big gains fast.
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How to Gain Muscle Mass If You're Naturally Thin
Gaining muscle is hard work for anyone, and that goes double (or triple) for trainers who are naturally thin, or ectomorphs.
The good news is that even skinny guys can gain muscle, if you go about it the right way.
If you fall into the category of the classic hardgainer, here are some steps you can take to get the most from your muscle-building efforts.
Training
High-intensity training (HIT) has been a boon to many lifters over the last four decades because it made us realize and avoid the pitfalls of overtraining. Even so, the extremes of HIT are not places that ectomorphs should visit too often.
Advanced HIT advocates a strict focus on increasing strength as a means to muscular growth. As you get stronger, you reduce the amount and frequency of your exercise to accommodate your recovery ability.
This works to a point, and it works for quite a while for mesomorphs who have strong muscle nerve impulses and can generate maximum stimulation from minimal training.
For ectomorphs, though, decreasing frequency and volume more often leads to big strength increases in the specific lifts you target but few changes to your physique.
If muscle size is the goal, skinny guys are better off to train each muscle group as often as possible with moderate weights and volume, more along the lines of the classic HIT that Arthur Jones first preached in the early 1970s:
- Use full-body routines
- Train three days a week
- Perform 8-12 reps per set
- Perform one set per exercise
- Include 1-3 exercises per body part
Rather than reducing frequency or volume over time, you can change your routine every few weeks to keep your poundages from stalling. Changes can be small — flopping exercise order — or big — changing all your exercises.
Training each bodypart more often keeps you from going “flat” and provides continual stimulation, but it can also lead to overtraining if you are not careful.
To avoid this, stop some of your sets short of failure, or at least don’t train beyond failure. You should also take a complete week away from the gym every few months to recharge your batteries.
Diet
Slender hardgainers typically have racing metabolisms, which makes it hard to pack on pounds. Because of this, nutrition is vital to your mass-gaining program.
Everyone needs to eat healthful, nutrient-dense foods like fruits, vegetables, and lean meats to ensure full nutritional coverage to help us grow and stay healthy.
Hardainers also need to focus on energy-dense foods to bump up their overall caloric intake without spending all day eating. Foods with the highest caloric counts are typically fatty, and that can scare some guys, but it shouldn’t.
Good foods for boosting your calories while keeping you healthy are peanut butter, nuts, avocados, fatty fish, whole eggs, and even heavy cream. You don’t have to adopt a high-fat diet, but you do need to take in enough calories to support growth.
General guidelines for hardgainer eating include:
- Eat at least one gram of protein per pound of bodweight a day, and 1.5 may be even better.
- Eat lots of wholesome, starchy carbohydrates to fuel your workouts: sweet potatoes, oatmeal, rice, wheat bread (if you’re not gluten intolerant).
- Eat enough fat to get your bodyweight moving upward.
If you’re already following these guidelines but not gaining muscle weight, then add another potato and some butter to your diet. Keep adding fats and carbs until you start gaining and then adjust again as needed.
Supplements
Your supplement program does not need to be elaborate, and you can probably skip it entirely until you’re seeing some results from your training and diet.
Once you’re getting stronger and building muscle, then adding creatine and protein powder to your regimen can help you get the most out of your gaining program. Creatine has been shown time and again to aid in gaining lean mass, and supplements like whey and casein help ensure you get enough protein each day.
You can also add a multivitamin to make sure you have all of your nutritional bases covered, and to get enough of the B vitamins that help you turn food into energy.
The Rest
These basic ideas should help you start gaining muscle, even if you ARE an extreme ectomorph. But there are other adjustments that can help.
Hardgainers are often high-strung, so you need to find ways to keep your nerves in check.
Avoid caffeine. Add yoga to your routine. Take leisurely walks on your “off” days, but avoid intense cardio work.
Most of all, make sure you’re getting plenty of sleep each day.
Talk to your doctor before you start your hardgainer program, and then tackle it with all you’ve got.
With proper dedication to solid principles, even skinny guys can build muscle!