The first thing you need to do as a hardgainer is ensure that you have your training setup correctly with the right exercise selection, rep schemes, and volume. This is key when it comes to how to gain muscle mass for skinny guys out there. Start out with one of my free workout routines that I’ve made as these are all setup optimally for you (link below). Also, you want to stay consistent with your workout routine and then use a progression method such as double progression to ensure that you’re overloading your exercises overtime.
Next, let’s cover the hardgainer diet plan. In reality, most hardgainers struggle with bulking simply because they aren’t eating enough to recover and grow even when they think they are. To avoid this, start tracking your calorie intake for the next few days and get a good sense of what your average intake seems to be. Then, using this number as a baseline, it’s time to very gradually increase this intake by 100 calories or so a week, and then do this until you start gaining weight at a rate of roughly 1% or so of your bodyweight per month.
To help you increase your calorie-intake, here are some mass gain diet tips and how to eat to build muscle. First, rather than increasing the actual calorie content and volume of your meals, increase your eating frequency. Next, it’s vital that you make your diet less filling by choosing foods that are less satiating. And lastly, you’ll want to minimize your protein intake relative to your carb and fat intake. Simply aim to hit the minimum protein intake daily, which is 0.72g/lb of bodyweight, to maximize your gains.
There are 3 things you’ll want to track as an ectomorph. Your bodyweight, circumference measurements, and performance in the gym. Ideally, your strength and these bodily measurements should be gradually increasing along with your body weight.
However, if your weight is increasing but you’re just not seeing much improvement, then you may need to adjust your workout plan. An optimal hardgainer workout plan involves you temporarily increasing your workout volume:
1. Start by adding 1 extra set per exercise in your workouts after every week or two. Continue adding sets but avoid going beyond 8-10 sets per muscle group per session.
2. Stay at this increased volume for as long as your training performance and measurements are improving.
3. Once you start to feel pretty fatigued and/or your progress stalls, take a deload week and then simply return your volume back to what it was initially in step 1. Stay at this baseline volume for a little while depending on how you feel and how your performance is doing before repeating and cycling through the above process.
Keep in mind guys that hardgainer or not, muscle growth takes time. Even with all the right systems in place and with a weight gain of roughly 1% of your bodyweight per week, packing on 10lbs of muscle would take the average 150lb individual who’s already past their newbie stage in the gym at least 7 months to do so, but realistically probably around 8-10 months or so given that some of this weight gain would likely be fat. Don’t let this demotivate you though, because although 10lbs of muscle may not sound like a lot, it will make a huge difference to your physique.
And for a step-by-step program that shows you exactly how to do this by optimizing your workouts and nutrition for you based on science, take the quiz below:
https://builtwithscience.com/bws-free-fitness-quiz/gender?utm_source=Youtube&utm_medium=Video&utm_content=Description%20box&utm_campaign=Pack%20on%2010lbs%20of%20muscle%20Feb%2023%2F2020
LINKS TO MY FULL-BODY WORKOUT PDF’s:
https://builtwithscience.com/workout-a-pdf/
https://builtwithscience.com/workout-b-pdf/
LINKS TO MY UPPER/LOWER WORKOUT SPLIT PDF’s:
https://builtwithscience.com/pdf-downloads/upper-workout/
https://builtwithscience.com/free-lower-body-workout/
Filmed by: Bruno Martin Del Campo
MUSIC:
soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired
STUDIES:
WEIGHT GAIN
https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1550-2783-11-20
MEAL FREQUENCY
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24291535
SATIETY
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15701207_A_Satiety_Index_of_common_foods
PROTEIN
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780857095435500074
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16002798
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/52/6/376.full
TRACKING
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6303131/