How To Build Muscle: For Skinny Guys
If you’re a skinny guy with hopes of learning how to build muscle, then this is a very bad way to endear myself to you. Why? Because although the title is “How To Build Muscle: For Skinny Guys“, I’m going to do no such thing as only show you, a skinny guy, how to build muscle. Nope! I’m also going to show skinny ladies too!!!
See, we all want the same thing — we just don’t know it.
You can be a dude who prays for a big chest, ‘80s shoulder pads looking delts, and sleeve-busting biceps.1…with nothing said of his legs, which we’ll touch on shortly. Or a young lady who longs for bigger glutes to draw attention to her backside in a desperate attempt to make up for her lack of anything else going on for her. Whatever way you frame it, you both want to gain muscle.
There’s just one itty-bitty problem: you’re an ectomorph and can’t seem to put on muscle for the life of you. Like, no matter what you do!
Yeah, that’s kind of a big stumbling block to making all your shallow dreams come true.
As such, both of you have the same problem. Lucky for me, both of your problems have the same solution. So I’m going to kill two birds with one stone here and save myself from having to write the female equivalent of this.
Yeah, everybody wins!!!
ONE
Eat to grow.
How you do this is by consuming more calories than you expend so you enter into a positive energy balance, also known as a caloric surplus. There’s nothing more to it. Failure to gain weight is a failure to do this most basic of things. This applies to everyone, even those who say they can’t seem to add size no matter how much they eat. As they like to tell it, their bodies are incinerators torching everything that goes into their mouth!
But that’s as they like to tell it.
The truth of the matter is that these “hardgainers” with their superhuman metabolisms aren’t so superhuman, as they’re simply overestimating the amount of calories and macronutrients they consume.
How do I know this?
When it comes to bros, enough of them have asked me how to get big as shit and each time I’ve responded by asking exactly how many calories and grams of fat, carbs, and protein they eat in an average day, they can’t tell me the amounts because they don’t keep track of what they eat. All they know is that they eat a fuckton of food. But then when I tell them to run down exactly what their daily diet consists of, that fuckton of food turns out to be what I eat by 10 am.
As for my women folk, the common problem is overcoming their social conditioning to undereat out of fear of ballooning up to an unacceptable weight and dying as a spinster in a house full of cats if they scarf down too many calories. The same about having to eat for growth goes for them as it does for men, with proper calorie intake probably being of more import because of what’s known as “female athlete triad”, the name for the overlapping conditions of bone loss, irregular menstruation, and low energy spurred on by too few calories in conjunction with heavy physical activity.
So yeah, to look like the Incredible (She)Hulk, you have to bulk.
When getting started, it’s common to feel stuffed as you eat or bloated after a meal, both of which may stop you from then eating all the required calories for growth. To overcome this, you have to train yourself at the table much like you have to train your body in the gym.2Refer to #2 below.
See, your stomach is sized to hold the amount of food it’s currently accustomed to hold in order to maintain your present body weight. Once you consume more and more calories, your stomach will expand to more readily contain those contents with ease. That’s why upon finding out how many calories you need to eat to gain muscle, you should do this: rather than jumping from the 1000 calories you’ve been eating to 2000 calories the very next day, for example, it behooves you to slowly add the 1000 calories to your diet in small increments over a period of weeks. As an illustration of the provided example, you might elect to start at 1300 calories. In a week or two, you’d add another 100-200 calories. That would be repeated until reaching the daily calorie target of 2000 calories. Simple!
Oh, and another thing…
Bulking isn’t a license to eat yourself out of house and home. The majority of your food should come from high quality protein, carb, and fat sources, with you only eating 300 to 500 calories above your maintenance level for months. Yeah, I said MONTHS!!! Bulking for a week like almost everybody does isn’t going to do shit for you. Instead, don’t be like most people. Enter a caloric surplus and stay there!!!
TWO
Train instead of exercising.
Many of these people who seem to have difficulty gaining size — because, you know, they’re in possession of such unique bodies — overestimate exactly how much effort they’re putting into their workouts. Having a poor level of consistency isn’t going to do jack shit for ya. Neither is working out with minimal intensity by aimlessly tossing around some barbells and dumbbells and jumping around from machine to machine.
Sorry.
…well, not really.
Anyway, the name of the game is progressive overload, or changing the amount of stress (e.g. weight, sets, reps, tempo, time under tension, rest periods) placed on the body in order to force a physical adaptation, whether it be strength, muscle size, or body composition.
To achieve your desired response, set a goal and plan a course of action to reach it.
Then take your ass to the motherfucking gym and work out with purpose.
When you go to the gym and behave like you actually have a task at hand, you should notice that rather than feeling like you’re forcing yourself to eat, the hard workouts are making it easier to meet your caloric needs. That’s because serious weight training helps place a demand on the body for more fuel.3See #1 above.
Oh, and another thing…
I know I just told you to go to the gym and bust your ass, but that doesn’t mean to do that EVERY FUCKING MINUTE OF EVERY FUCKING DAY!!!
Outside of the gym is where muscles grow, as the body repairs itself from what you did inside of the gym. That is, if what you did inside the gym is adequate enough to prompt growth.
So train hard and rest!
THREE
Want to know something else?
Start training your lower body with as much effort as you put into your top half.4This tip is directed mostly at the fellas, who for some reason are more averse to training legs than the ladies.
I won’t get into the technical, scientific mumbo jumbo, but the idea is that training legs — especially via compound movements like squats and deadlifts — releases testosterone and natural growth hormone (GH).
Considering that the body is flooded with these building blocks of muscle when the lower body is trained, you should be able to put two and two together as to why some coaches are of the mind that you shouldn’t skip leg day if your ultimate objective is to get big as shit.
This bit of advice has been debunked as bro-science in separate studies by pencil-neck geeks in lab coats who’ve found that exercise-induced anabolic hormones, such as testosterone and GH, have no bearing in muscle protein synthesis, the process by which muscles are made bigger.
These findings, however, don’t mean you have license to ignore leg training. The advice for you to train your legs if you want to get bigger is still valid, just for a different reason.
The legs are one of the largest muscle groups in the body. And if you remember that this shit is all about introducing enough stress to the human organism to force a physical adaptation to overcome that stimuli, performing lower body movements causes stress to large areas of the body, thus prompting a response over a wide expanse. So because the human body tries to maintain as much of a balance as possible, other parts of the body will grow to remain in proportion with the legs.
Couldn’t be bothered to read a handful of sentences, so you scrolled down here with your fingers crossed in hope of cliff notes on how to build muscle for skinny guys?
Boy oh boy, are you in luck again!
Again?!
Yeah, again!
Not only do you have the luck of me having the foresight to write this specifically for you in the past so you could read it right now in my future and your present but you also have the luck of me including a TL;DR section!
For real, you should play the lottery today.5Sharing half of the winning ticket with me would be the fair thing to do.
The three steps to getting big are to
1) actually eat instead of just saying that you do
2) train like someone who has a brain
3) use the squat rack for — ummmmmmm, I don’t know — SQUATTING!!!
That’s how to build muscle and go from scrawny to brawny.
Now, I know what you’re thinking to yourself.
But, Monster, those directions for an ectomorph sure do look like the same directions for everybody else.
– you, thinking exactly what I’m attributing you as thinking
That’s damn right.
These must-dos apply to all, whether or not you have a penis, vagina, both, or none.6That’s why I included women in this male-only guide, as I stated I was going to do in the introduction that…you…didn’t…read!!! And it doesn’t matter either if you’re a stick figure or not.
So now, my child, go!
Go forth and multiply in size, ye!!!
…or just keep thinking you’re special and fall into a certain body type that requires you to train and eat a certain way because you’re soooooooooo bloody special.
Glossary: barbell, biceps, bulk, calories, deadlift, diet, dumbbells, ectomorph, exercise, glutes, goal, gym, intensity, leg day, metabolism, muscle, muscle group, squat, squat rack, squats, work out, workout