Transcription
You've been training for a while. You're eating all the right foods, and on paper, you're doing everything right. But you're frustrated because despite all this hard work, you just can't seem to pack on any size, and the muscle-building process for you seems to be abnormally slow. Well, compared to your peers, aka, you're something that many would call a hard gainer.
I'll be honest, guys, I was quote-unquote a hard gainer myself when I first started training. It seemed that no matter how hard I trained and how much I ate, I just couldn't seem to put on any weight and add size to my skinny frame. Now, although there is some research out there showing that hard gainers do in fact exist, and I'll go through the applicable findings from those studies later on in this video, the truth is that most hard gainers are instead just simply making a few mistakes with their training and nutrition that prevents them from building muscle and packing on size as quickly as it should be. And this was exactly the case for me. I initially thought that I was just a lost cause, a hard gainer myself, but in reality, I was really just making a few key mistakes with my plan that took me a couple years to realize and fix, but really did kickstart my progress once I corrected them. And I'm positive that this is the case for many of you as well.
So, to help you out, in this video, I'll show you how to avoid these crucial mistakes by going through step-by-step how to set up your plan to pack on ten pounds of muscle and how long you should expect this process to take. The first thing you need to do is ensure that you have your training set up correctly with the right exercise selection, rep scheme, set volume to enable you to maximize your efforts in the gym. And the truth is that most skinny guys who struggle to put on size just don't have these variables down. Instead, you suboptimal approaches when it comes to their training, which is part of the reason why they experience slower growth. So, what I recommend is start out with one of my free workout routines that I've passed videos on, as these are all set up optimally for you. There's a three-day full-body and four-day upper/lower routine that you can use and get started with right away. And I'll link the downloadable PDFs to these workouts down below.
But what's even more important than the workouts themselves is the next step, which involves how you actually go about progressing them. Because, as I've said in my past videos, the key to forcing your muscles to grow has to do with progressive overload, which simply involves having your muscles do more work and lift more weight over time, such that they can gradually recover bigger and stronger in response to it to increase demands. And I mean, to put it simply, the arm that can curl 50 pounds is likely going to be significantly bigger than the arm that can only curl 20 pounds, for example. Which means that you need to prioritize overloading your workouts and getting stronger week after week, month after month, year after year. And the best way to do this is to simply stay consistent with your workout routine and then use a progression method such as double progression to ensure that you're overloading your exercises over time. So, for instance, with this method, you're simply just trying to increase your reps week after week in your exercises until you successfully hit the top end of the rep range every set. And then, once done successfully, you proceed to add a little bit of weight and repeat the process over again, well ensuring that you're not reaching failure, that you're using the right muscles to move the weight, and that your exercise form doesn't become compromised in the process.
Now, what though you may be doing all of what I previously mentioned correctly, the next step for most people is where the true problem is, and this has to do with your nutrition. Because in reality, most hard gainers struggle to build muscles simply because they are not eating enough to recover and grow, even when they think they are. And this was the case for me back in the day. I knew that I had to eat somewhere around 3,000 calories to start putting on weight, but after months of stuffing myself daily with what I thought was well over 3,000 calories of food, I still wasn't putting on any weight. And it wasn't until I actually took the time to sit down and track the calories that I was eating on a daily basis that I realized that I was actually under-eating by around 500 calories, hence why I was constantly stuck at the same weight and failing to pack on more size. And I'm sure many of you are making this exact mistake.
And to avoid this, what you need to do is first figure out how many calories you're actually eating rather than relying on how much you think you're eating. So, 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 your intake by a hundred calories or so a week, just to avoid any stomach and appetite discomfort. And then do this until you start gaining weight at a rate of roughly one percent or so of your body weight per month, since that's where research indicates for most lifters is the most effective rate of weight gained to maximize muscle growth while minimizing excess fat accumulation.
Now, this new calorie intake for many of you will likely be quite a bit higher than you're used to. And I can tell you from experience that this becomes very uncomfortable and difficult to do, especially when you ideally want at least 80% or so of these calories to come from whole nutritious foods as opposed to junk. To best help you with this, though, here's a few tips that I'd recommend incorporating. First, rather than increasing the actual calorie content and volume of your meals, research has shown that increasing your eating frequency is a more effective option if you want to increase your daily calorie intake without impacting your appetite as much. For instance, this study found that if you have a 300-calorie snack after lunch, you'll naturally eat around a hundred fewer calories for dinner, resulting in a quote-unquote accidental gain of 200 calories with minimal stress on your stomach or appetite. After you, this can be as simple as incorporating in high-calorie yet nutritious snacks between your meals, such as trail mix, for example, which can easily bump up your calorie intake considerably without impacting your appetite.
But much next, it's vital that you make your diet less filling by choosing foods that are less satiated. So, contrary to my past video I did on the best meals for fat loss where I recommended to start eating the most filling foods based on a satiety index developed from a 1995 study, in your case, you'd instead want to avoid these highly filling foods such as potatoes, fish, and oats as much as possible. And instead, opt for less filling yet still calorie-dense foods such as avoid pasta, rice, muesli, and bananas, for example, as these will be the most effective foods for you to use to plump up your calorie intake without affecting appetite as much.
And lastly, although we know the importance of protein for muscle recovery and growth, we also know that protein has been consistently found to be the most satiating of the three macronutrients. In fact, a 2005 paper found that when subjects increased their protein intake from 15% of their daily calories to 30%, they subconsciously decreased their daily calorie intake by roughly 441 calories a day as a result of the increase in fullness they now felt. Meaning that if you're struggling to eat enough calories, then you'll want to minimize your protein intake relative to your carb and your fat intake. And to properly do this, we know based on a recent meta-analysis that a protein intake of roughly 0.72 grams per pound of body weight is enough to maximize your gains. So, in your case, rather than eating a ton of protein and going way beyond this minimum, which will just result in increased fullness, simply aim to hit this minimum protein intake daily and then utilize more carbs and fats instead of protein to boost your calorie intake, as doing so will minimize the fullness that you feel and make it easier for you to ingest enough calories.
The last step has to do with tracking and adjusting your plan accordingly. There's three things you want to track, which will then determine what you need to adjust. First, you want to track your morning body weight every day and take a weekly average of it at the end of every week. If after a month you haven't gained any weight or you fail to hit your goal waking up roughly 1% of your body weight per month, then this is an indication that you'll just need to bump up your calories slightly by ingesting some extra carbs and/or fats, for example. And then just keep doing this until you're on track with your monthly goal weight gain targets.
Next, you want to track your performance in the gym, as well as various bodily circumference measurements that your arms, your chest, your shoulders, and your legs, for example. Ideally, your strength and these bodily measurements should both be gradually increasing along with your body weight. That's all the good indication that you're doing everything correctly and successfully putting on muscle mass. However, if your weight is increasing, but you're just not seeing much improvement or plateauing in your performance in the gym, your circumference measurements, then you may need to actually adjust your workout plan as a result. More specifically, based on research on hard gainers, you may want to increase the number of sets that you're performing in the gym. For instance, a 2018 paper by Schoenfeld and colleagues analyzed the impact that increasing the volume of a full-body workout had on muscle growth in trained individuals. What they found is that as you increase the number of sets performed for exercise from one set all the way up to five sets, the number of non-responders decrease. In fact, as you can see here, there were very few low responders in the highest volume condition when compared to the lower volume conditions. Meaning that if you're still not experiencing much change or you're plateaued despite everything that I went through before, then temporarily increasing your workout volume may be the solution.
Which you can do in many ways, but one of the simplest ways to do so is the following. First, you want to start by adding one extra set per exercise into your workouts after every week or two. And just continue adding sets, but avoid going beyond eight to ten sets per muscle group per session, as this seems to be the threshold at which further volume in a session tends to do more harm than good. Then, you want to stay at this increased volume for as long as your training performance and measurements are improving. And then, once you start to feel pretty fatigued and/or your progress stalls, you'll want to take a deload week and then simply return back to the volume that you were initially doing in step one. You'll some people want to 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 again.
By using this approach, many of you non-responders and true hard gainers out there will likely see a significant improvement in the gains that you're making. But keep in mind, guys, that hard gainer or not, muscle growth takes time. It's a very slow process that requires a great deal of patience and consistency. For example, even with all the right systems in place and with a weight gain of roughly 1% of your body weight per week, packing on 10 pounds of muscle would take the average 150-pound individual who's already passed the newbie stage in the gym at least 7 months to do so, but realistically, probably around 8 to 10 months or so. Give some of this weight gain would likely be fat.
Don't let this doom motivate you, though, because although 10 pounds of muscle may not sound like a lot, it's going to make a huge difference to your physique. I mean, just take a look at one of our Build With Science members, Kevin, here, for example, who executed his program perfectly and gained a little over 10 pounds of muscle in nine months. You can see just how drastically his physique has changed as a result. So, yes, muscle growth does take time, and it is a slow process, but the end result is definitely worth it.
And for a step-by-step plan that uses the science to optimize all of your training variables and your nutrition for you, such that you have an easy-to-follow program to build lean muscle as efficiently as possible, just like countless other of our members have successfully done, simply head on over to buildwithscience.com to take the analysis quiz that will determine which program is best for you and where your body is currently at. Anyways, guys, I hope you enjoyed this one. Thank you so much for watching. Please do me a favor and show your support by giving the video a like, leaving a comment down below as to what you'd like to see me cover next, subscribe to the channel, and turn in our notifications for the channel as well, as this all really does help me out. Thank you so much, everyone, and I'll see you next time.
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