Not at all. While the typical person will do best on a caloric intake that equals their lean body mass times 12, the hardgainer is better served by taking in as much as 24 calories per pound of total bodyweight as opposed to lean body mass. Therefore, if you are a hardgainer and weigh lbs, your caloric intake will be calories x Your total amounts of carbohydrates per day will be in the order of grams of carbs, your protein will be grams and your fats will be grams of good fats per day.
You can take all of this in 6, 7 or even 8 meals. The key thing for a hardgainer to be successful is to minimize their caloric expenditures and maximize their caloric intake. While the hardgainer may not be able to start out with such a high caloric base, a diet like the one prescribed below is a good starting point and then add on nutrients from there.
This is necessary as the hardgainer metabolism is a furnace that burns calories at all times and if not enough are supplied at one time or the other, then muscle will be consumed by the body for energy purposes. After all, this metabolic issue is what makes a person a hardgainer.
Low-sugar weight gainer such as Prolab's N-Large 2 2 scoops mixed with 16 ounces of skim milk and 1 tablespoon of Flax Oil or natural peanut butter. On non-workout days, trade the post workout meal for a solid meal consisting of chicken, 1 cup of brown rice and green beans or any other lean protein source, complex carb source and green vegetables.
Also, for Meal 7, eliminate the use of the carb component. Low-sugar weight gainer such as Prolab's N-Large 2 1 scoop mixed with 8 ounces of skim milk and 1 tablespoon of Flax Oil or natural peanut butter. Am I going crazy? Somewhere between skinny and fit, but closer to skinny. You can see them in my transformation shots. You may also wind up way stronger than you look, given that your girth will be made up of muscle, not bone.
It also tapes in such a way that the widest part is right near my hand and I have big hands the size of a man 3 inches taller. Those parts between the bones and my hand measure 6. I also have somewhat of a T-rex shape…with smaller but long forearms and more normal-girth knees and shoulders. By elbow breadth, I get solidly medium frame. Also, I know the bone will thicken up a bit look at those tennis player studies again—their racket hand has slightly bigger bones—but this would have worked better in childhood than in my late 20s.
And LOL to the dating guide! I still believe that, but she thought it was a stupid excuse for not accepting myself. And my tastes change toward more and more feminine women, too. Right now, I still prefer the bigger, curvier girls with more muscle than me, in general. Probably a typical preference among smaller guys….
The program for naturally skinny daters looking to build dashingness? Shane, how should we interprete the info you mentioned about the prison overfeeding study? Also, how would you think quinoa rates on the satiety index? Wondering especially because the B2B literature mainly advices us to avoid refined carbs like white rice, so would quinoa be a good substitue as a low satiety food that you can eat lots of?
I suspect he would have had some success leanly building muscle. White rice is fine! Many of the healthiest cultures out there eat a diet rich in rice too, and it can be a great component of a balanced diet. So long as you get your fibre and such elsewhere rice is good. I wrote the nutrition chapters and I have to admit rice took a backseat because I initially kind of, err, forgot about it. Quinoa is a super badass muscle-building food with a whole hell of a lot of nutrients in it.
In highschool I once ate one bar of chocolate every day for two weeks, and did gain two kilograms,but lost them within one week of normal eating, pretty shady metabolism.
The more I eat, the easier I loose weight afterwards.. Or was it muscle you were building? This article is densely packed with useful information. Hello, great article! Can I gain continue gaining muscle mass with only calisthenics? The challenge is what do you do when you can do 15 clap pushups, jump squats or chin ups?
Most people hit that point fairly early and need to start externally loading their lifts to continue to build muscle. Genetics also play a role. It works better for some than others. If you go on YouTube you can see tons of naturally muscular guys who do really really well with callisthenics. Lots of the best weightlifters and strongmen do acrobatics, and lots of the best acrobats lift weights! Thanks for the reply! And I learned how to challenge my self with calisthenics.
If I can do something with two arms like clapping push-ups then I can try to do the same with one arm. When you were gaining 55 pounds of muscle, was your diet the same every day? Is it necessary for us ectomorphs to eat a lot, take in lots of staple foods, and try to eat an excess of calories on non-training days? I gained my 55 pounds in little intense spurts. When trying to build muscle I was eating beastly-style day after day though.
Different guys structure their intake in different ways. Personally, when trying to rapidly build muscle I eat a rather large surplus on workout days largely coming from the workout shake and just a slight surplus on rest days. Seems to make things a little easier for guys like us, since we get a bit of a break on rest days from pushing our digestive systems. I started taking workouts more seriously three months ago.
I got back from deployment and started hitting the gym times a week. I focus on compound exercises for about 30 mins then go on to isolation moves and working kettlebells for another mins. I do some light cardio on occasion, but overall my days are fairly laid back and sedentary when at work. Nothing I do seems to really work that well. I have seen some muscle gain in my upper body, just not as much as I thought I would.
Do you think I can still gain muscle while eating below my daily maintenance requirement even though I eat healthy and pack on about g protein daily? Hey Nick, congrats on your progress! Losing three pounds while simultaneously building up upper body muscle is pretty impressive. Check this transformation out. Pretty badass job of losing fat and building muscle simultaneously.
I would continue on emphasizing fat loss while maintaining muscle mass and taking whatever bits of muscle that may or may not come your way. As odd as it may sound, you actually need more protein when eating in a calorie deficit. Ahaha well becoming fat would just involve eating a calorie surplus!
In that case you could also turn to hyper-palatable foods, too — foods that are high in fat, sugar, salt and calories. Donuts, milkshakes, etc. I have been reading a lot of your articles and picking up quite a lot of useful stuff. It seems most of your articles on nutrition like this one are tailored to the skinny-skinny guys, but maybe you also have some advice for us skinny-fats? As for how skinny-fit or skinny-fat you are, we get a range of guys. So sometimes some fat loss is involved.
I think there are lots of reasons why guys end up skinny and with higher body fat percentages. Once that habit is in place I would then gradually work to improve your nutrition. Weightlifting helps your body ditch fat when you lose weight and it helps your body build muscle when you gain weight.
Without the heavy and clever lifting, your body will likely ditch some muscle when you lose weight and gain awkward amounts of fat when you gain weight. As far as nutrition goes, there are a ton of things you could do. Guys who store fat more easily often do better on higher protein diets. Thanks a lot for the reply! As far as nutrition goes, I am sitting on the fence.
There are those who say first lean down, and only after that:clean bulk. At least I tried it once and failed lost most of my muscle during the cut. May I ask what your own experience is? It seems that you also started your current gains from a very lean state, bf-wise? And I think I read in one of the articles that you once had a bulking episode prior to that … were you able to retain those prior gains, or did you end up losing much of those?
If only you sold it in smaller packages so I could pick what I think is most useful for me! No problem man. I would say that just means you need to be more mindful and clever about it. When bulking almost all of the gains you make should be lean. I did gain a bit of fat, but my stomach looks about as lean as it did at the beginning and I had more muscle definition than when I started. That was the bulk that brought me from ish to ish.
Check this out. Your questions are good ones. Some of those more radical approaches to dieting can be useful for some people in some circumstances, so it might have its merits. A diet centred around restricting various things is usually the last thing we want to do, and that absolutely definitely includes restricting carbs over the course of the day so that we can overeat them later.
The overall quantity and quality of what we eat should always be the main priority though. I know free weights are better but i was wondering if Machines could do the work aswell because in my gym, there are mostly machines and alot of people use them. You could probably do better if you were really thin, really fat resistant, eating really well, or etc … but the ratio of fat to muscle would still be pretty shoddy. Just stopping by, and I want to ask you quick question or two. You might be thinking that my friend Louis was a really strong guy.
He was a lot stronger than me … but I could only squat 60 pounds … so when Louis quit after a couple workouts my little sixteen year old sister was able to do it for me.
Were you also able able to curl the lb barbell at that time? Is your sister also an ectomorph? Sometimes I feel like a thin build can come out of nowhere in a family. Or you might inherit it from one of your parents. Or worse yet, both of your parents have mixed builds and you get the skinny upper body from one and teh skinny lower body from the other. Ahaha nah, my little sister is just as ectomorphic as I am. It was a very very awkward process, trying to get the bar onto my back.
But, after seven years of consistent training and nutrition, I weighed lbs with a visible washboard and was regularly front squatting for 7 following a work set of vertical leg presses of for 7 , flat benching for 3 sets of , pressing a pair of Even now at age 58, at lbs, despite the normal strength-and-mass ebb of age-declining testosterone and despite my accumulated job-incurred rotator-cuff, knee, and lower-spine injuries; I regularly below-parallel squat for 20 reps, partial squat for 20 reps, and deadlift for 8 reps.
In my initial years, I faced the consuming-enough-calories dilemma, of course, and solved it when I was about age Into a blender, I added ice cream, bananas, raw eggs, honey, peanut butter, weight-gain powder, powdered dry milk, chocolate syrup, frozen fruit, and whatever else I could think of or had, to one can of evaporated milk, in order to increase the calorie total to 1,; and I drank FIVE of those blenderized 1,calorie concoctions every day FOR A YEAR.
I did eat other food, but I ensured that I consumed at least those five milk-blends every day. In that year, I managed to push my bodyweight from to almost , and made my greatest strength gains.
Okay, well, okay so he probably would have cried … but you get my point. Keep being a beast! What I slowly, incrementally achieved has all been as a lifelong drug-free natural. Solid article. In my experience, gaining the weight was by far the hardest part. But many people are skinny fats. Worst possible combination for muscle gaining. This body type hates carbs and loves to store them as fat if in excessive quantity.
So there is no known cure for having steady, controllable gains as this body easily loses muscle gains like ectomorph, and sticks to its fat, like endos? So, its impossible to eat right, because whatever you do is either loose muscle or gain fat. Well, this is my case obviously, so i stopped, because my body told my no no after countless years of experimenting with hi carb hi meal, intermittent fasting, balanced diet….
So now i obsess only in getting stronger in a small number of exercises, like bench, DL, squat, chinup, pushup. Body is still not cured of skinny fattness, but very smal progress is visible. Keep it up. However, once I understood that progressing in strength on basic compound movements — squats, deadlifts, chins, overhead presses, barbell rows, bench presses, dips — is essential for most guys for adding muscle size, and I consistently used rep sets even for chins and dips and actually, gradually, increased my poundages substantially on those core movements, then my body did start channeling calories into muscle tissue instead of merely fat tissue.
Seemed like, until my body grew stronger and was handling what for it was serious resistance, it saw no need to respond by growing muscle tissue. I still have the problem losing too much muscle mass when I alter my eating in order to carry a lean washboard , but at least now, thanks to the muscle I managed to build after my strength increased and have managed to mostly retain through the years by means of keeping my compounds as heavy as possible, I do have some muscle to show when I diet for that leanness during six months out of every year.
So, perhaps as you continue gaining strength on your in my opinion, excellent program , your stubborn body will experience the same. Hey Denis, yeah, sometimes it seems like your genetics are against you. Someone with poor genetics doing a good job of following a great program will often get much better results than someone with superior genetics, after all.
Like Joesantus and you have both noticed, if you can also build up some appreciable muscle mass, get into the habit of lifting heavy and getting stronger, and eat cleverly you can actually CHANGE your genetics to a certain degree. It can be really frustrating when your formula is a little bit off and whenever you diet you lose all kinds of muscle mass along with your fat.
It essentially comes down to a couple things: 1. Lifting heavy and follow a good weightlifting program. Revving your protein intake up, not down. Keeping your calorie deficit modest.
I have a question for you! I found this article, and I find that it shares a lot with what you guys have to say. Hey Jeremy, ahaha oh man do I ever know how you feel! I think that program will get you lightyears further than nothing. The most important thing is that you find a well programmed weightlifting program and follow it.
A caveat to that, I would say, is that your first goal should be avoiding injury. Those programs are rather advanced and built for guys with excellent mobility, stability, tendon strength, structural sturdiness and athleticism.
And I think that will give you a good idea of how to modify things to make them safer, at the very least, and thus make the program a viable one! Becoming radically stronger over time is indeed how you build up an impressive physique. Hell, we drop as low as three reps sometimes — but it needs to be done very strategically and only once a certain degree of tendon strength, technique, stability and mobility are built up. Hey man, sorry if this question is a bit off topic.
So I wanted to ask if I could maybe grow a few inches taller with this program? Thanks again. If it helps, I just turned 18 and I too am an ectomorph. Currently at 62 kilograms which is about lbs. I discovered this website yesterday and im eating all the articles on it!
Its awesome!! By the way I got a few questions, hope you can answer them:. Are they important to build muscle? I think its beacause im a skinny-fat guy got a little belly thats annoying. That one I know the source of the though. It has nothing to do with healthy guys trying to build muscle though. I eat tons of carbs before bed, even when cutting! Yes, they can be important when building muscle. First I would worry about lifting weights and gaining weight on the scale though.
Oats are great! Try to get the rest from whole foods. Just need to be mindful that the dosages are reasonable. Am I working out at too young a age? High school seems to be a great age to get into weightlifting and building muscle! There are risks for injury of course, as they are for anything, but weightlifting is pretty safe as far as being active goes.
Far safer than common sports like soccer, football and rugby, for example. As with all of this internet fitness stuff though, always best to act your doctor.
I noticed that my mom, who is a few inches shorter than me and female of course , outweighed me by about 20 lbs when I started and had bigger arms and legs than me. She was not fat, just a bit overweight. Of course, I found out that my own mom indeed has thicker bones than me. It just makes no sense how that could be…where does our body type come from if no one in our family has it?
The other thing that makes no sense is, how having smaller bones makes someone need more calories. All I can figure is that the bones are small due to undernutrition growing up—a product of burning more energy and therefore not having as much left for growth and not being hungry, so eating less than the average kid.
Everyone has a maximum size they can grow to. But you can still look really good if you put in enough work. Your body also has a chemical called myostatin that will dictate how large your muscles will get. Luckily for us skinny guys, the limit is VERY far away. As Shane has mentioned, we really do have a lot of benefits for putting on healthy weight. I last posted here February 28th. My brother was a lb shot-putting tank, and my other brother was a skinny-fat theater kid.
You can change. My family is full of a bunch of different body types as well. Malnutrition to the degree that it would impair growth is fairly uncommon these days in the developed world, and I think the predominant theory is that most people are reaching their full growth potential from a structural standpoint.
Hi, I have read all your blog and watched your videos and got really interested in start the program. I am really brave an fear no exercises!
I also do push-ups and chin-ups regularly since long time, and I eat the same amount of food that my brother eats, but damn! I just weigh boring pounds.
I want to be like him,do you think I could be able to gain 70 pounds and jump from lbs to lbs doing the program? I saw you gain 60lbs and that guy Marcel gain 78lbs,so I guess is not that impossible to gain 70 pounds,what you think?
Hey C. Marcel has also gained over 70 pounds. Marcel and I started a good 35 pounds skinnier than you. Gaining that much weight takes a lot of work and a lot of patience though. We normally see guys gain over the course of the program, and progress slows the more advanced you get, so if they repeat the program they inevitably gain less the second time — perhaps pounds.
Most skinny guys end up being easy gainers when switching to lifting heavy weights progressively. Congratulations on the 37 pounds!! Hi, I have a question, when you guys make body measurements biceps, waist, shoulders,etc… and weighing, what time of the day do you do that? For example, I read that the right way to measure the height is to measure when you wake up, in the afternoon and at night, then you take average, and that is your real height.
Should I do the same with some other parts of the body? For instance, the waist varies in size during the day due to the meals so… Thanks in advance. I always take them first thing in the morning. Having less energy in the gym is pretty common when cutting. Sugars e. You can play with the timing of it as well. Also whats your stance on pre-workout drinks? My favourite pre-workout drink is a simple coffee. We have a fairly good idea of what it does and what you can expect.
Tier One , by Citadel Nutrition, is pretty good for that. They only use evidence-based ingredients and they leave out all the junk filler and proprietary blends.
If it helps get you to the gym and it helps you lift well though … that can indeed translate into building more muscle mass! Hi, Shane. I want to get through each day knowing that I have consume crazy amounts of calories to go with my training program.
Honestly, nutrition is really not something I would like to think about day and night. My diet consists of mainly chicken, fish, pork, vegetables and lots and lots and lots of rice.
Is there a foolproof way to ensure that I eat enough? Just eat more, I can. I wake early everyday at about 6. How do I prepare a monster breakfast in no time? I just want to make it real simple and straight forward. I feel kinda left out right now.. Those are notorious for causing pretty fatty bulks, but you obviously also build a lot of muscle if you succeed in consistently staying in a huge caloric surplus. In fact, us skinny ectomorph guys are the best at those kinds of diets, because of the adaptive metabolisms that I talk about in the article above.
There are many ways to prepare breakfast in no time. I usually have a smoothie. Some people have peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Some people like cereal. Just make sure your breakfast is mostly made up of whole foods and has enough protein to help you meet your protein goals.
I am looking for a sustainable, feasible program to keep my fitness up and improve my health. I gained around lbs. I am not terribly skinny but am not fat either. I could lose weight rapidly if I chose to, although I would lose just as much muscle as I would lose fat.
But I am still unsure of whether I should consider myself as an ectomorph. As an educated athlete I feel like I already have a good grasp on a few things. I drink plenty of water everyday, get enough sleep, stay away from excess sugar including all soda , and warmup and cooldown effectively. Although I do not run competitively anymore, I still recreationally run 30 miles a week.
In addition, to keep my fitness levels up, I play basketball and swim recreationally. But now, I feel like it is time for a change. I am willing to get in the gym times a week, and sacrifice any of the other activities I am trying. As a student, I also enjoy the research links and the evidence based approach.
My current routine consists of a warm-up, 10 exercises squats, lunges, lateral shoulder raises, shrugs, incline bench press, dips, pull-ups, bent-over rows, deadlifts, and planks in that order , and a cooldown. I plan on doing this full-body routine 3 times a week. I feel like I might be expecting too much from my body with this routine, along with recreational running, basketball, and swimming. Most of it is a pretty even balance of meat chicken, turkey, ham, steak, etc. I try to stay away from excess sugar, salt, fried foods, candy, starch, etc.
Should other sports be relegated to the territory of active rest, or be actively promoted to increase fitness? I eat around calories per day these days. Running a full 30 miles per week may be too high a volume to optimally help with either — it really depends.
Improving general fitness improves your ability to recover and allows you do handle higher volumes of activity, so this stuff can all work really well together, depending on how you do it! Where the emphasis lies will determine where the bulk of your results are. I gained most of my 55ish pounds over the course of three month periods, gaining 20 pounds in each and then just more or less maintaining in between those little muscle-building sprints. I think you sound like a good fit! Is it an ice cream scoop or a formula milk scoop?
The direction says that you should consume 3 rounded scoops g. Is there an easier way to do this like how many spoons would be equivalent to 3 rounded scoops or grams? Rounded scoop, means you stick the scoop in and whatever comes out of the whey goes in your cereal, etc. If you have any advice, i would appreciate it, thanks. Leaner … but also fatter.
Your bigger muscles will also make you appear much leaner than before, since your muscles will now readily show through small amounts of fat. As a result you may be underestimating how lean you were back then and overestimating how lean you are now.
Most skinny guys wind up with markedly more chiseled faces when building muscle leanly-ish. When overeating sometimes guys store fat first in their face. When I bulk my face gets chubbier, and then when I stop bulking my face quickly leans out again. You can see that here. This puts it squarely in the realm of your doctor.
Good luck! Hi Shane, great article! I have a much easier bulking diet now in terms of time, appetite and enjoyment, a little bit of which I discuss in the above article. Now I bulk on a little over 4, calories. All of those traits I talk about in the article I have in a very exaggerated way.
Only a few guys in the community need to consume as many calories as I do to gain weight. Although there are also a couple that need to consume even more!
Have one small concern though. As a kid, I was always on the skinny side. I have a relative small bone structure. I guess I have skinny genes. Since I left school more than 23 years ago, I gained about 35 lbs in total. Currently have some flab around the waste-line believe it or not and have some posture problems hunched over shoulders.
Ectomorph is a term that means a collection of a bunch of different traits that result in a skinny body type. Some people have all of the ectomorph traits like me but the vast majority of people are a combination of a couple different ones.
You may have a small stomach capacity and smaller appetite i. Could be any number of things. Mostly it sounds like you have a sedentary lifestyle and iffy nutrition habits.
Thanks for your response, I really appreciate the effort and time. You are spot on with iffy nutrition on my part. I have a fast metabolism and a small stomach and eat maybe meals a day.
I guess there are quite a number of factors that keep me skinny. But I can eat about every hours. No problem with appetite. Struggling to drink a lot of water though. Mostly drink if I feel thirsty. Looking back, I now know that I approached it the wrong way. Was caught up in the marketing hype and training programs of the BB magazines. I guess I have nothing to lose quite literally by trying it out. Seems that mono is not readily available, at least not the local brands.
Do those combos work just as well as mono? It tends to form clumps. During this period of time, they say they did lose some or even most of their gains, and not just fat. Or at least a lot of it. This is called muscle atrophy. This is true with any type of training adaptation. That could be lifting weights, it could be sports, it could something else. This will keep you healthy, fit, mentally sharp and calm. It sounded like a nutrition problem so I upped the calories, my weight started increasing very VERY slowly but I have noticed fairly large increases in my measurements such as shoulder width even without weight increase.
Any ideas? It sounds like things are going pretty well! I mean, the better your program is the more inclined your body will be to build muscle out of whatever you give it, but you also need to supply the calories in order to get into a surplus, especially in the early stages of the game.
Hey Shane. Longtime lurker and lifelong ecto here. I seem to be relating to most of the things I see described even though I still have a hard time believing you actually had as horrible of an appetite as I do when you were around haha. Anyway, my question is, how do your workout routines address such a crucial issue as having weak knees? I do use neoprene knee supports for my squats but I imagine that I will hit a weight plateau where adding anything more could compromise my joints and have severe consequences.
We start with regressions, and generally with regressions the goal is to teach guys to sit back deep into their hips. This takes stress off the knees and puts it in your hips instead, and your hips are more than powerful enough to handle it just fine. When you transition back into back squats hopefully the issue will have resolved on its own. Marco is very well trained in that. Never really had any muscle definition. Since i left college, i have put on weight but only in my gut, no where else.
Your program sounds intriguing but i would like to get rid of my gut as well as build muscle. Seems like your program involves eating more calories, i just dont want to get any bigger in my gut. Ahaha yeah… that seems to happen to a lot of longtime ectomorphs. As the years roll by a gut begins to form. Combining a good weightlifting plan, a muscle-building nutrition plan and a calorie deficit is good for that.
Love the website and great article. I just wanted to mention something about satiating foods. Initially I feel full but within like 10 minutes I have hunger like nothing else.
Maybe it fills the stomach and then gets digestive quickly, leaving you with a large, empty stomach perhaps? But I never actually thought of feeling hungry as an advantage! My guess would be that this has to do with the food being digested rather quickly, yeah. Hey, Im pretty skinny so I wanted to know what should I eat to gain weight at first and then gain muscle afterwards and what exercises I should do for arm and leg muscle for a skinny person like myself.
First of all. Thank you for the articles. Very Nice read. I especially enjoyed the workout one. Actually, see how many calories and grams of proteins, fats and carbs you are eating for a full week of normal eating. Now you have a baseline known as your maintenance.
All you need to do now in combination with a good workout is add calories to your total and make sure you are getting roughly 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight. Real hardgainers tend to need to eat at least calories above their maintenance to see the scale move up.
The second thing I question hardgainers on is their strength on the key lifts. Both answers tell me a lot about what they are doing wrong.
The big key barbell movements build muscle the BEST hands down. Far better than machines or other exercises. Train the big lifts times a week. This means you will have to do them frequently. Its just not enough frequency to get you good at those really effective movements. Get strong and you will get bigger.
Especially if you are a newer lifter. I recommend to anyone who is trying to build muscle to do at least 6 weeks a year on straight up heavy strength training in the rep range. If you are a hardgainer I recommend at least 12 weeks. I have never met a skinny guy or girl who could lift impressive numbers.
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