Building muscle skinny guy/ Need Advice

Ummm...stretching is really important because it builds up your core. Anything that engages your abs like a rotation will build muscles near your stomach.

 

Hey there Arctichowler!

Glad to hear I'm not the only skinny guy here who's also been trying to get into fitness as well Welcome to nofap.

I'm a skinny guy myself who has a lot of trouble gaining weight and muscle (though I somehow keep my strength). I decided to get serious about my fitness, so I've started doing a bit of research to get smart about it. Here are 3 key things I've learned. (I've also included a TL;DR at the end)

Key things I've learned from research

1. Gainz are made in the kitchen - The biggest problem for skinny guys is that we're not eating enough. I thought I was eating enough since I was eating 3 meals a day and often from a bigger plate than my larger friends, but once I started tracking my calories, I realized I still WASN'T eating that much.
   People often eat around 2k calories (check nutrition facts on food item), but if we want to GAIN weight, we need to eat at least 2750-3000 calories a day CONSISTENTLY. After implementing this knowledge, I eat meals every 2-3 hours just to reach that goal.
2. Train for bulking, not shredding - There are two main phases when training: shredding (aka cutting) and bulking. If you want to build muscle and get bigger, you MUST TRAIN FOR BULK. That means you must do much more weight training with heavy weights and less cardio to cut back on weights. All the fitness articles agree that there can't be muscle gain without fat gain. There are ways to optimize each, but it requires a lot of planning. It's better to just get started bulking for now and learn how to "clean bulk" later as this requires much more careful planning of workout days and diet.
3. Gym, sleep, diet - I'm going to end off with the obvious, but only because it's still often overlooked. Yes, you must train hard in the gym to make gains, but that's not enough. When you're working out, you're actually breaking down and creating micro tears in your muscles. You build muscle during sleep: when your body recovers and overcompensates in order to adapt to growing stress on your body. It uses the nutrients you get from food to fuel that recovery. (this is where I would get into macros, short for macronutrients, but I don't want to overcomplicate it more than I already have right from the get-go).

Handy Resources (all are clickable links)

1. r/fitness - I got a lot of my beginner info from this subreddit. I recommend reading the wiki to understand the basics, especially the getting started section which gives you a bunch of different workout routines to try out.
2. Myfitnesspal - The best CALORIE COUNTER I've found on the Android store. It has a database on most foods in restaurants and stores. Just add it to your log, and it shows you the amount of calories, sugar, protein, carbs, fat etc. you consumed from that food and it tracks it.
   App: "Just got a double-double from In'N'Out? It tracks it for you. Just drank milk you bought from walmart? Just tell me if it's whole, skim, or non-fat and add it, along with all the nutrition facts, into your log. Oh and by the way, you can also add your own recipe to my database and I'll track it and keep it in my memory so you can just click it again when you need it. No need to type out all the ingredients or even the whole word out EVERY time.
3. Jefit - It's the best WORKOUT TRACKER I've found on the android store (it's also on itunes) which tracks your workout progress and routine then inputs them into charts and your calendar. A good alternative is Simple Workout Log. Both are free, but you can get advanced features if you pay for Jefit.

I think I've made this long enough. Good luck, and if you need more resources, hit me up.

TL;DR:

1. Eat more and track calories (at least 2750 calories a day)
2. Train with heavier weights, do less cardio.
3. Keep diet and sleep in mind.

EDIT: Last piece of advice I forgot to write: CONSISTENCY IS KEY.

 

As the last person said... without calories you will never gain weight. I'm about 190 lbs now at 5'9. When I was about 30 I made the jump from 160lbs to 175lbs over a few months. The method I used was GOMAD (gallon of milk a day! - whole milk)... this is added to you normal food. It's hard going! As far as the weight lifting went I followed a program called Stronglifts 5x5. An old school squats/strength program that also helps develop dense muscle. I suggest you look it up online. They have a good app that is free.

Once you have done this for a while then maybe look at more varied routines but for a basic formula I think stronglifts is the best out there for new-ish lifters.

 

Ps. This was lifting 3 days a week. I also did a sprint day and a low impact cardiovascular day to try not to get a bit fat as I was taking in a lot of calories. 2 days rest.

 

Hi @Arctichowler just some general tips for ya:

- Since you are getting back into fitness I would recommend using a relatively lower weight/higher rep scheme for the first 2 weeks as you are retraining not only your muscles but your nervous system. For example 15-20 reps per set. Once you get back into the swing of things I would do more moderate weight and reps or high weight low reps.
- Concentrate as hard as you can on form and muscle activation. Like if you are doing bench concentrate on your pecs. This will help your mind-muscle connection and further train your nervous system.
- Focus on compound lifts for now. Squats, deadlifts, bench press, rows, military press; focus on these for the first month and add in isolation lifts afterwards
- For a beginner I'd recommend splitting your work as either: a) upper body days/lower body days, or b) push muscle day/pull muscle day/leg day+low back day
- Eat every 2-3 hours, non processed food, always include a protein source
- Protein shake first thing in the morning, last thing before bed, immediately after training

 

I've just read about the GOMAD approach. What's your experience with it? I know you gain a lot of weight, but I also hear that there are lots of side effects (e.g. explosive sh*ts, acne, stomach gurgling). I'm currently considering if I should try it or not. What makes you recommend it over other types of diets?

 

Gomad worked great for me. It very much an individual thing and how you deal with dairy.

I suggested it as it's a cheap, nutrient dense way of adding calories. You'll need a bit of a cut phase after but i think the two cardiovascular days I mentioned help keep that on check.

 

Pick a routine online (a beginner routine is generally 3 full-body workouts a week, combining 3-4 heavy compound exercises, and a couple accessories) and stick with it.

Progressive overload - keep adding weights (see instructions in online routine) every workout/week until you fail your sets, deload, repeat.

Calorie surplus - calculate your maintenance calories, add 500 and try to stay in that range.

 

Keep eating, all day long and as much as you can, and as soon as you get sick take one more bite. Eat as much as you can, and then a little bit more. You don't need to track calories. It doesn't really matter what you eat, some protein is always good and don't eat too much sugar.

Go to the gym about once every two days. Heavy squats and heavy deadlifts helped me a lot (technique is hard! you need to learn it from some sort of fysiotherapist... be careful!) If you are in the gym and you feel like: okay NOW it's enough! Do one more set.

Go the extra mile.

I gained almost 30lbs in about 8 months, doing almost only squats and deadlifts and eating all day long as much as I could. It became a complete obsession for me though, it was the only way to make it work. Good luck man.

 

Enki said most of it already, but I'll add a couple of things, one of which SupBruh mentioned above:

Progressive Overload.

Something a lot of people don't realise when they first go to the gym, is that in order to keep growing, you have to keep increasing the total volume of your workouts. Your body will only produce as much muscle as it feels it needs to get through your workouts without injury, so if you do the same workout day in, day out, for years, without increasing weight, reps, or sets, you will not grow any new muscle, despite working out all the time.

So how do you achieve progressive overload? Increase volume on a regular basis. Volume = Weight x Reps x Sets. You can stick with a lower weight forever and just increase reps and sets, but if you literally just use the weight you started with on your first day in the gym forever it'll get to the point where you'd be doing 20 or more 200+ rep sets if you really wanted to be able to get your muscles to grow past a certain point.. versus if you simply continue to add weight each week, you can continue to do say 3 sets of 5 and get the same progress if not more, in less work.

With regards to low reps vs high reps, there is some specificity to it. Lower reps will allow you to progress in strength slightly faster, since you'll be handling higher intensity (more weight). Higher reps will allow you to progress in size slightly faster, since your muscles will also have to increase the size of their fuel stores to deal with the metabolic stress of higher rep sets. In reality though, you will build both size and strength with either rep range - the rep range you choose will just dictate your focus slightly.

However, I still think you should do low reps at first. Why? Two reasons.

1) As a beginner, you start off weak. The quicker you can increase your strength to a decent point, the quicker you can do those high rep sets with more weight.. and gain size faster than if you didn't bother to work on your strength much to begin with.

2) This is the more important of the two reason, and is the reason that beginner programs tend to use low reps. As a beginner, your form SUCKS. It may take you months to learn proper form, or even years. Every rep with bad form, is muscles that aren't being worked, injuries that are being risked, etc. It is easiest to maintain good form on your first rep, and gets progressively harder with each additional rep. When doing say 10-12 rep sets as a beginner, often only the first 4-5 reps have good form, and after that form will break down. This is why beginner programs usually suggests sets of 5 or 6 reps, so that you stay in a range that you can comfortably maintain your best form. This is especially important for things like Deadlifts, where bad form can leave you in a wheelchair (seriously), but it's important for every exercise really.

After you have 5-6 months under your belt and got the basics of form down, and have a taste for lifting, that's when I suggest deciding which way you want to focus mostly: Purely on size and aesthetics? Or more on strength? Or a balance of the two? Once you decide, you can find a program, and use appropriate rep ranges etc. Realistically, at that stage, you might want to consider working in multiple rep ranges, for example strength days where you do low reps + high weight, and hypertrophy days where you use a lighter weight for more reps.

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Also with regards to how much you need to eat on a bulk, it's very individual. If you're a 4'11 guy who's like 110lbs, then eating even 2500 calories a day might just get you fat. If you're a 6'4 guy who's already 190lbs, you might find that you need to eat close to 4000+ calories to even gain weight at all.

Here's a good way to find out roughly how much you need to eat:

PS, don't use this formula if you have much body fat. If you do, then try to work out your body fat % first, use that to calculate your lean mass, and use the Katch-McArdle formula instead (from the bodybuilding.com link below)
For more info on calculating your maintenance calories and how much to eat in a bulk/cut, see here:
http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=121703981

Assuming you're a guy:
BMR = [9.99 x weight (kg)] + [6.25 x height (cm)] - [4.92 x age (years)] + 5

(if you don't know your weight in kgs, take your weight in lbs and divide it by 2.2)

So for example, say you're 62kg, 170cm tall, and 26 years old, then you'd do:
[9.99 x 62] + [6.25 x 170] - [4.92 x 26] + 5 = 1558.96 calories.

Now this isn't how much you need to eat, or even close yet. This is the amount of calories someone with those stats would roughly burn while in a coma, completely physically inactive, just to survive.

To then work out how much you actually use, you multiply that number by how active you are:

1.2 = Sedentary (Desk job, and Little Formal Exercise)
1.3-1.4 = Lightly Active (Light daily activity AND light exercise 1-3 days a week)
1.5-1.6 = Moderately Active (Moderately daily Activity & Moderate exercise 3-5 days a week)
1.7-1.8 = Very Active (Physically demanding lifestyle & Hard exercise 6-7 days a week)
1.9-2.2 = Extremely Active (Athlete in ENDURANCE training or VERY HARD physical job)

So for example, if you're fairly sedentary but you do exercise 3 days a week, you can times it by somewhere in the 1.3 to 1.4 range, let's just say 1.35.

So 1558.96 x 1.35 = 2104.596 calories

That's how much this particular 170cm tall individual weighing 62kg would roughly need to eat to stay the same weight. Now if they want to bulk and put on muscle, then add ~300 calories a day, so around ~2405 calories/day would be what they bulked with. If they wanted to cut and lose weight, they'd eat in a deficit of ~500, so ~1604 calories daily.

Obviously this is just an example, and depending on your stats, you'll get a different number. Now the next thing to keep in mind is that this is only a calculation, so don't rely on it. Just use it as a guideline for how much to eat to begin with, then adjust over time as you see if you're progressing right or not.

Weigh yourself each morning, and each week take the average of those weigh ins. Compare it to the week before. See how much you've gained/lost. If you're trying to bulk, aim to gain around ~0.8lbs per week (or 0.36kg). More than this won't help you gain any extra muscle, you'll just gain more fat (although it will help slightly with strength, as even fat gain up to a certain point helps with strength) - less than this you probably won't be gaining as much muscle as you could as a beginner.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B...e=as2&tag=powtowin-20&linkId=23QREMKBBKDECW4P

^ Follow a good program by someone who knows what they are doing. Read the whole book. Youtube has some great tutorials 'Mark Bell' has a great channel about weightlifting. Keep in mind there is a ton of bad info on youtube as well.

Don't listen to people on forums. Look at what you read in books by reputable people in weight lifting and compare that to the advice you got here.

You can still make gains working out improperly doing things wrong, but you can do a lot better doing a proper workout and you will feel better as well your body will last longer rather than get broken down.

 

You're exactly right. Follow a good program by someone who knows what they're doing. I actually started out by reading and starting Izzy's PowerliftingtoWin program myself. Yeah, he's a good guy and he knows what he's doing, but you're just an average-speed reader with a busy schedule, it could take days, weeks, and even months just to get through his book the first time... time that you could have spent by already making gains in your size, strength and improvement in diet. That's just to read it for the first time. You'd still have to put in time to understand what his numbers mean, how to work with his excel sheets, review what the program was to understand it. And you might even find out that the program is not meant for you until halfway through reading the book (As a beginner lifter, I didn't understand the differences between powerlifting, bodybuilding, crossfit, etc.) Then, MIDWAY THROUGH THE BOOK, he mentions that you will need to buy more weights (microplates) or else you should not even do his program. It felt like a big sink of both time and (potentially) money.

While I do respect Izzy and the knowledge he offers, I would not recommend it to beginners. Quite frankly, he nerds out on powerlifting and speaks with a lot of terms and numbers that just make you lose focus, especially if you're new. I didn't really get most of what he was talking about until I did a few more months of research on the basics myself (and I still don't understand everything he's saying since he assumes that you've been in the community for a while and have already tried a bunch of different programs like 5/3/1 etc.).

I would start with incremental change, and just get started with a "cookie cutter" program (e.g., stronglifts or starting strength) that teaches you good form first, and then get more complex as you gain more knowledge. The important thing is to GET STARTED and DO IT.

I agree with @Themadfapper. It's definitely worth it to have theory and know-how behind your workout sessions, but I wouldn't go straight into an esoteric book right away. It's not worth the time-sink. Just learn the basic knowledge of gaining muscle weight first, and get more complex as necessary.

 

^ Maybe I linked the wrong book? 5/3/1 is less than 100pages with lots of pictures and gaps between words. You can read it in an hour.

Starting strength is popular, and the frequency may be better, but I thought it was a rather large book? I've never read it. I'm not recommending 5/3/1 necessarily just it or something like it. A good tested program, by a reputable lifter that is easy to follow in a quick to read little booklet.

The most important thing to grasp for a lot of misinformed youth is 'sub maximal training'. Don't train past failure [ where form breaks down] Training harder does not make you stronger, and if you train too hard it will make you weaker or at least inhibit your gains.

Here is a link to the book 5/3/1... I mistakenly posted a review of beyond 5/3/1

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B...e=as2&tag=powtowin-20&linkId=23QREMKBBKDECW4P

 

I'm trying your suggestion for the first time today. I used to not give a shit about drinking milk... then I tried GOMAD and gave 5 shits in one day... and counting. I'm so bloated but I'm going to stick with it for a while.

 

Thanks man. I've been reading up on Calories and mass gains and have been increasing my knowledge then implementing it each day. This is a good resource that basically simplified most of the knowledge I learned. Fyi, I'm probably just going to save this for later.

 

Right on man, he has some good videos. I am naturally skinny also; I can't gain weight for shit. What helped me was doing less in the gym and spending more time with recovery/resting/eating. Less is definitely more if you're an ectomorph...

 

Woopos. I posted on the wrong place. MY BAD!

 

GOMAD is, honestly, a piss-poor way to approach your diet. You're guaranteed to get fat and bloated (in combination with your regular meals, we are easily at 4000 calories a day), most adults can't digest milk properly, and it seems like your system is already telling you it's bad for you. Which is why Starting Strength students look something like this.