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No Need to be a Freak to get a Superhero Physique—Just Eat like Clark Kent

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I had coffee a few weeks back with a good friend of mine from Montreal. I had just finished a couple months of the Bony to Beastly program, and I’d put on 20ish pounds of muscle since she last saw me. She was wowed by my progress and told me I looked a Hell of a lot stronger. My physical health was obviously not a problem, but she was worried that I was headed down the road to obsession. She knows that I barely train 3 hours per week, so there’s obviously no obsessive behaviour there. But she also knows that I’m extremely fascinated by the role that nutrition plays with fat loss, health and building muscle—especially for us ectomorphs. So, despite the fact that we had just finished pouring rum into our coffees, she was concerned that I was developing an obsession with eating healthy foods and only healthy foods.

The interesting thing is that eating healthy and only healthy foods can actually hinder your results. Many people struggle to build muscle, lose fat, love life, and accomplish their goals because they place too much emphasis on “healthy” eating. The true secret to becoming superhuman isn’t to eat superfoods, it’s to eat “Clark Kent” foods—everyday foods that will give you superhuman results.

Curious?

Let’s take a look at the two extremes.

I used to suffer from what I now call “apparent anorexia”, where I would dream of being more muscular but often have strangers wondering “does this guy have an eating disorder?” I was 6’2 and 130 pounds, with a body that made starving female runway models jealous. Damn ectomorph genetics. In fact, my dad was in the same skinny boat at my age, despite infamously being able to finish several entrees at a time at restaurants. Our diets may not have been the best, but we weren’t intentionally making ourselves thin—quite the opposite. This is an example of me having no idea what I was doing nutritionally, and quite obviously it wasn’t working out for me.

Now, 55 pounds of muscle heavier and with my “genetics” soundly defeated, I’ve been accused of something a little bit more flattering: orthorexia. “Orthorexia” is an unhealthy obsession with eating only extremely healthy foods. The accusation raises a very interesting point, even though I consider my interest in nutrition quite psychologically healthy. I mean, I’ve never enjoyed what I eat more than now, and I neither crave nor avoid going out for a few beers and some suicide wings with friends. I’m also extremely happy with my physique, even as I push myself for health and strength improvements.

Skinny guy Shane Duquette's ectomorph muscle-building transformation (before and after)

This isn’t always the case with nutrition-loving guys though, and many dudes perpetually follow extremely strict and limited diets consisting of supplements and superfoods. Does this give them results? Of course. Does it give them the best results. Hell no.

Being a doofus when it comes to nutrition is a sure way to fail. Being obsessive and following the latest superfood superfad is often a hell of a lot better for most people, but it’s still not the ultimate solution. It’s common for people on diets to run into deficiencies. They’re consuming fewer calories, so less nutrients are coming in. That’s not all that surprising. (study)

But this is where things get wild. The health-conscious man who’s on a restrictive health diet has the highest chance of suffering from nutrient deficiencies. This is very common among athletes, bodybuilders and people with eating disorders. (study, study, study, study, study)

This is very ironic. How is it that the men who obsess the most about eating healthfully are missing more nutrients than your average guy. Athletes and bodybuilders often eat a lot of the food, so what’s going on here?

The answer to that is pretty obvious when you give these diets a look-over. Eating a “clean” bodybuilding diet, for example, is one hell of a weird way to eat. It’s usually based around just a few foods: skinless chicken breast, egg whites, lean cuts of steak, olive oil, fish oil, spinach, broccoli, sweet potatoes, brown rice, tuna, oats, protein powder and creatine.

I mean, if you’re cutting out dairy, potatoes, fruits, egg yolks, fatty meat, etc … it’s no surprise that you’re going to run into some problems. You can’t pick a list of twelve “clean” foods, eat them day in and day out and expect them to add up to a balanced diet.

Most cultures have found a way of meeting their nutritional needs, and over time these practices become cultural traditions. Mexicans can’t just go Paleo and cut out beans,  Northern Europeans can’t just cut out dairy because it’s an animal product, Americans can’t just cut out fruits because of the carbs/fructose, and us Canadians can’t just cut out polar bear steaks because of the saturated fat.

If you deprive it of a food group that’s commonly consumed in your culture (grains, dairy, breakfast, carbs, sugars, beaver tails, etc) you leave a nutritional hole that needs to be plugged. I’m not saying you’re stuck eating brussels sprouts even if you hate them. These holes can be plugged. If you need to (or want to) avoid a certain type of food that’s okay. I’m just saying that you need to be mindful of it.

One issue is that restrictive diets are very very common nowadays. You’ve probably heard a lot about plant-based diets (cutting out animal products), paleo diets, low-carb diets, intermittent fasting and eating every 2-3 hours. You’ve also probably heard a lot about acai berries, flax, pomegranates, red wine, goji berries, broccoli, spinach, coconut oil, chick peas, blueberries, turmeric and garlic. The interesting thing is that despite all the hype, in order to look like Superman you shouldn’t be restricting evil foods, eating “superfoods” and following trendy diets.

You should be eating Clark Kent foods—staple foods.

Trendy diets do work,
When the fundamentals are also handled.

If you eat a plant-based diet that focuses on whole unprocessed foods (and supplement with leucine) you can build a ton of muscle. Similarily, if you follow a meat-rich paleo diet, you can also achieve an incredible physique. Eating 9 times a day works. Eating 2 square meals a day works too, assuming you take in the same quantity and quality of nutrition. If you find that your lifestyle or moral code meshes well with a certain doctrine then great—you can probably make it work wonders for you. Most diet fads do work, at least in part, but probably not for the reason you think they do.

Don’t suffer any delusions though. Whether you eat 3 meals a day or 12 you’ll get comparable results if the foods you’re eating are the same. Vega’s vegan sports performance protein is awesome, but so is steak. There are many valid ways to get in the macronutrients you need to accomplish your goals.

“Superfoods” are incredibly healthy,
When incorporated into a balanced diet.

Blueberries are fiercely rich in antioxidants and polyphenols, broccoli has fat and toxin fighting properties, flax is a great source of polyunsaturated fats, and turmeric has incredible anti-inflammatory properties. If you love these foods then fantastic—eat plenty of them. Knowing about them and their benefits is great. I love trying out weird superfoods, and many of them taste fantastic.

Blueberries rock, but so do apples and oranges—everyday Clark Kent foods. Chick peas are great, but so are yams. Don’t place too much emphasis on superfoods or super supplements, because that’s not how a superhuman body is built. Chances are they won’t produce a noticeable difference in your results unless you figure out a great overall approach to eating.

Consider this study, where blueberries are being examined for their superfood-like phytochemical and antioxidant levels. The premise is that blueberries might be able to improve strength training recovery times, thus allowing you to build muscle more quickly. One group of study participants was given 2.2 pounds of blueberries between workouts, while the control group was given 2.2 pounds of regular fruits (bananas, apple juice, etc). Both were in the form of fruit smoothies, and neither group knew which type of smoothie they were drinking. The result? Eating 2.2 pounds of Blueberries sliiightly improved muscle recovery versus the control group.

Now check out this study, where participants started strength training and eating at a calorie surplus. The first group, who didn’t alter their diets at all, gained 3 pounds of muscle in 8 weeks just from the strength training. Pretty good. The second group, who consumed an extra 356g carbs and 106g protein powder, gained over 6 pounds of lean mass. More than double the muscle gains! The third group, who consumed an extra 438g carbs and just 24g protein powder, gained 7.5 pounds of lean mass!

These weren’t fancy carbs—just simple sugar and starch powders. A potato, fruit or bagel would have had the same effect. Interestingly enough, eating more bananas and potatoes, it seems, result in more muscle gains than even consuming protein powders.

The moral of the story? Superfoods can make the tiniest of differences, so if you’re looking to gain 1.1 pounds of muscle instead of 1 pound of muscle this week then go for it. How do you double your gains? Eat large amounts of staple foods. (Easier said than done, I know.) The problem is that people fall hook line and sinker for supplement ads and novel dieting strategies, when the simple truth is that a rock solid training program and whole hearty foods is where the real results are built.

The Bony to Beastly Approach

I’m not trying to say you shouldn’t learn about nutrition. In fact you absolutely should. If you don’t have the physique, strength and energy that you want then obviously some things need to change. If you’re very skinny, like I was, then you might need to change quite a bit. What I’m saying is that you don’t need to adopt any kind of extreme lifestyle. We help our members come up with radically different nutrition strategies depending on their preferences, lifestyles and budgets. Our guys in the UK are eating very different diets from our guys in Texas, and they’re eating very different diets from our guys in Australia. And they all build muscle like monsters because their fundamentals are all solid.

Bony to Beastly isn’t a fad. We don’t have a dietary angle. We aren’t vegan or paleo, and we don’t have a problem if you are. Our diet is built on solid building blocks that consist of real everyday foods that men enjoy. We can’t build your muscles entirely out of McDonalds and Pop Tarts, but we can build them out of hamburgers and chicken parmesan (especially if you prepare them like we do) and a double-helping of dessert. We may tell you to eat a side of green beans with your burgers, but we won’t be pestering you about whether you took your acai berry supplement. We will absolutely ask you if you ate enough food today to build impressive amounts of mass, but we won’t be asking you if you ate every 3 hours on the dot or not.

When it comes to eating enough food to build impressive amount of muscle, us skinny guys often struggle. That’s one of our biggest struggles, and there are a lot of reasons for it. Processed foods and desserts offer us an easy way to get more calories in. So long as we’re also getting the nutrients that we need to be healthy and build muscle from other foods, well, a dessert will sure help us hit our calorie goals.

Skinny guys trying to build muscle and gain weight are the last guys who should be restricting foods for no reason.

All this restrictive stuff is really more so for people trying to avoid foods that are easy to overeat. We’re trying to overeat, and we’re intentionally consuming a lot of calories. We’ve got a lot of room in our diets for the things that we love, even if they aren’t technically “clean” foods.

Our approach to nutrition is actually pretty wholesome and flexible. We don’t recommend obsessing over nutrition, we aren’t weird health nuts, we don’t avoid eating socially because it conflicts with our “diet”, and we place a high priority on loving life. We don’t do this because we don’t care about results—in fact our goal is to pack muscle onto you as quickly as humanly possible—we do this because this how you get results.

I’ve always found superfoods and supplements incredibly fascinating. I love reading about them. The problem is that they make it easy to forget the bigger picture. Can you build muscle and improve your health just as efficiently with a homemade hamburger as you can with chicken + broccoli. Absolutely.

What about an acai-bolic protein infused smoothie with timed release amino acids and a patent-protected muscle-building carbohydrate complex? (Hehe I love all these wild supplement ads.)

Consider this example. Lots of struggling ectomorphs are tempted to take the popular supplement branched chain amino acids (BCAAs) after hearing about its muscle-building properties. BCAAs are a low-calorie way of getting leucine, primarily, which is fantastic for building muscle. What’s another way to get BCAAs? Drinking milk, eating meat, or frying up some eggs. A decent sized steak would have 13-15g of BCAAs in it. That’s 2-3 scoops of fancy BCAA powder in every steak. And not only are these whole foods a better way for your body to absorb the BCAAs, they’re also packed full of other muscle-building and healthful nutrients—and they’re full of calories! Unless you’re on a very calorie restricted diet, which us ectomorphs aren’t, there’s no advantage to consuming extra BCAAs. (Unless you’re a vegan and don’t consume dairy, eggs or meat.)

The photo up above is of a steak cooked up with some onions and garlic, and served alongside a half-loaf of buttery bread and some broccoli. 950 calories. You could order something similar at a restaurant, or serve yourself up a dish like this at Thanksgiving. Pretty normal meal, pretty delicious. If you were trying to sell it in a supplement store you could say that the starches in the bread are reloading our muscle and liver glycogen stores, the fancy amino acids in the steak are causing some pretty fearsome protein synthesis, the broccoli is providing a vitamin boost and balancing out the acidity of the other nutrients, and the butter has monounsaturated fat and dietary cholesterol in it, which are great for testosterone production.

You can eat like a king, you just need to understand how to get results out of it.

Tips for ectomorphs looking to live healthy and build muscle:

  1. Eat a balanced diet that isn’t overly low or high in protein. Moderate protein intake stimulates the most muscle growth in ectomorphs.
  2. Eat plenty of carbohydrates, especially after training. Yams, brown rice, pasta, whole grain bread, potatoes, bananas. This is anabolic fuel for us ectomorphs.
  3. Eat irresponsibly large amounts of fruits and vegetables. Carrots, apples, pineapples, cherries, berries, oranges, sea cucumbers—whatever you want. All fruits and vegetables are healthy in their own way, and a variety is best. If your appetite or stomach are a limiting factor though, as they often are for us skinny dudes, you may find it helpful to stick to the ones that are high in calories though.
  4. Eat plenty of healthy fats. Nuts, butter, fish, coconut oil, olive oil, avocados, eggs, cheese, full fat yogurt.
  5. Don’t base your diet around processed foods, but don’t be scared of it either. It’s cool if your dessert has flour and sugar in it.
  6. Eat the right amount of food, but don’t stress about your schedule. In order to grow you need to eat enough, but don’t worry about how many meals it takes you.
  7. Supplements can help, but they’re a cherry on top of the cake, so treat them as such—put the bulk of your bulking focus on regular foods.
  8. Enjoy a drink now and then. It won’t do you any harm, and it may even help.
  9. If you enjoy eating superfoods don’t let me stop you! They do rock.
  10. Base your diet around your personal preferences and personal convictions. You can build muscle on a vegan diet. You can build muscle on a Paleo diet. You can build muscle in India, China, Greece, Mexico, etc.
  11. Eat foods that allow you to eat enough to build muscle. This may mean following the opposite advice that you see in most fitness magazines and on most blogs, since most of them are talking about foods that make it easier to lose weight.

Being smart about nutrition and learning how to naturally make healthy and enjoyable choices is a sure way to succeed. As ectomorphs this can sometimes take a bit more effort, as most health and diet strategies are targeted at people trying to lose weight. Being intelligent and aware when it comes to what you eat is key. Keep in mind that regular everyday manly foods are great for you too. They’re also cheaper and far easier to order in restaurants.

Flexible Dieting, by Armi Legge

We practice this approach to nutrition in our program, of course, and we’re all about using a wide variety of foods to build maximal amounts of muscle onto bony bod’s … but if you want to learn more about flexible dieting in particular (and it’s pretty fascinating!), our buddy from below the border, Armi Legge, has a great eBook on the topic. Check it out here.

(I got a chance to read and review Flexible Dieting before he released it, and you’ll see a glowing recommendation from me on his sales page. We aren’t affiliates or anything either.)

If you know someone with anxiety surrounding food, I’d say it’s a must-read.

Hope that helps! If you liked the article, give it a “like”!
Comments or questions? Drop ‘em below. We read them all.


Ectomorph Aesthetics (Full Article)

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Every straight guy knows how a girl’s femininity can tug on our heart strings. And our lust strings. Sometimes a woman’s shape, personality, face, voice—it all just adds up to make her absolutely irresistible. (Here‘s an article on the most attractive female body.) Women feel the same way about us men… just based on a whole different set of traits.

For better or worse, the impression we give off can have a huge impact on our life. Even if we train and eat well for our health and performance, we also want to attract great women, and ultimately spending the rest of our lives with the one we want is a pretty damn big deal. And of course, even once we have her that doesn’t mean we should stop striving to be the man of her dreams.

It’s not just about women either—getting the respect of other men is important to us too, both in our personal and work life. Aesthetics, muscle, health and masculinity are all so closely related that how we train and eat can roll over into every area of our life. It makes sense for us to care.

If anything, as men sometimes we tend to think attractiveness matters less than it actually does. A new study just published at the University of Notre Dame found that the whole successful but unattractive guy marrying a beautiful woman stereotype is pretty much just a myth. It turns out that attractiveness attracts attractiveness, just like success attracts success. This is good news for sexism, bad news for thinking you can get away with being a schlub. (study)

The tricky part is that some of the traits we portray are obvious… but some we’d never even think to think of. Moreover, sometimes it’s those elusive traits that make or break us.

I should also point out that caring about building a manly physique isn’t just a skinny-boy thing. In a study done on college football players—guys who are madly in love with their sport and whose careers depend on how well they perform—they found that while most of them listed power and performance as their reasons behind wanting muscular bodies… they also admitted to caring a whole hell of a lot about their physical appearance and sex appeal. (study)

Aesthetics isn’t something we can avoid, and everyone is influenced by it. To a certain extent we’re all unique snowflakes, sure, but when it comes to aesthetics, well, we aren’t. Personal preference has its place, but a lot of it, in fact almost all of it, is basic human nature with some social conditioning sprinkled on top. Love it or hate it, it happens. It’s instinctive, uncontrollable and often subconscious. We’re built to automatically respect men who display certain traits, and in a similar but different way some of our male traits can create gut-level attraction in women.

Think about the effect that a curvy female hourglass physique has on you. Combine the right bone structure with fat in the right places and muscle in the right places and bam—you get that instinctive response that turns your head and knocks the wind right out of you. I often find myself tempted to click on ridiculous ads featuring photoshopped girls for that very reason.

As men, sometimes the character we portray is obvious. I have one uncle who’s 6’2 and maybe 250 pounds. That man loves his football and loves to eat. He’s been lifting heavy things and eating big his entire life, resulting in around 100 of those pounds being in his shoulders. He doesn’t look like a bodybuilder, he looks like a bear. He has to get all of his clothing not just tailored but completely custom made to accommodate his cartooned musculature. Combine that with his deep booming voice and the overall effect is pretty wild—when he speaks the room falls silent, when he walks down the sidewalk guys give him a wide berth, and when he asks you for something you hurriedly splurt out a yes, often before he finishes his sentence.

It isn’t all show either, and I’ve seen him lift a man off his feet who was (very) disrespectful to my female cousin. When my uncle put him back down the man hit the ground running. Seconds later we heard tires skidding as he sped off. Understandably—if a bear set me back down I’d seriously consider the same exit strategy.

Having a guy like that on your side immediately makes you feel safe. If something goes wrong you just figure things will be okay. He’s a smart and well-read guy, too, and his voice, physique and confidence all make for a hell of a lot of charisma when he speaks.

Do you know what words a stranger would use to describe you when you walk by?

As men we tune into certain things about other men, immediately sizing them up and forming an opinion… yet we’re often totally unaware of how we’re portraying ourselves to other men, let alone women. There are traits we don’t even know exist that can have a powerful drug-like effect on women. Some strong athletic masculine men convey them naturally, but I’ve always found that it pays to consciously know how we can improve, even if just to encourage ourselves to be the most that we can be. That’s how us ectomorphs become strong athletic masculine men, after all.

Besides, aesthetics aren’t just skin deep. The benefits go all the way down to our bones*, improving our health, strength, intelligence, performance and mood. Good looks signal higher degrees of those traits after all, which is why they look “good” to begin with.

*Not a figure of speech—heavy strength training actually increases bone density, as does solid nutrition.

Without further ado, here’s my most research / study / illustration-filled article yet:

Woman-friendly Physiques

It’s not about women being shallow and judging you just based on how hot you are, it’s about women being extremely perceptive and using your physique to give them clues about your genes, your lifestyle and your character. Will you make a good breeding partner? A good husband? A good father?

And can she trust you? Will you protect her? Are you intelligent and ambitious? Will other men respect you? Are you physically, mentally and genetically healthy enough not just to survive, but to thrive?

These are really important questions, and right away smart women will make assumptions about all of them based on the very first impression you give them. Is that fair? Surprisingly it usually is, because, well, women are really damn good at it. (study)

See, lots of guys will pretend to be nice to get what they want. Some guys brag and exaggerate, scheme and manipulate. Some guys will hide skeletons and put only their best foot forward.

An attractive woman can’t give every single guy a chance—there isn’t enough time. And they can’t bet their future on a man if they don’t know if he’s worth it or not. It’s not like they can wait for a disaster to see if a guy can keep it together under pressure… because by then it’s already too late.

So girls judge us based on things that are extremely hard to fake.

All women thus come programmed with the ability to pick out an attractive, healthy, strong, intelligent, honest man. It’s just part of their genes. Then, based on their social conditioning and media exposure, those abilities are slightly tweaked and “heightened” to match the society they live in. (That’s where trends and fashion come in, but we can largely ignore that, since the underlying universal fundamentals are far more powerful anyway.)

There are several things that women instinctively look for regarding your physique, and I’ll break ‘em all down and tell you why they matter. First here’s a rough idea of what’ll put a gal’s heart in her stomach:

The weights and measurements are based on a 6″ tall male, although we don’t really care about height here—just proportions. Body fat is 8-12%.

Now let’s break it down.

1. Strong Broad Shoulders

It’s no coincidence that business suits are designed to make men seem broader in the shoulders – constructed shoulders are the padded push-up bras of male culture.

… actually that’s unfair to suits. Women respond to broad shoulders far more powerfully than men respond to babely breasts, making suits the more powerful of the two. You know that lustful feeling well cloven cleavage can instil in you? Well broad shoulders give women that same feeling, except stronger.(study)

The first things women will take in is your overall shape, allowing them to get a quick guess at how you’ll stack up in all the following aesthetic arenas. There’s a lot of information in how broad your shoulders are – especially in comparison to your waist – and it’s available at a glance. Every study is in unanimous agreement here, and you’re probably already well aware of it. (study, study)

Why? Well broad shoulders are very indicative of a strong man, since adding muscle to your body invariably adds several inches to your shoulders. And what woman doesn’t want a man whose shoulders can bear the weight of the world? There’s a correlation between guys with naturally broad shoulders and naturally high levels of testosterone too, so even in the absence of muscle it’s still a very masculine trait, which girls dig. As such the breadth of your shoulders is a very good indicator of health, strength and masculinity: it’s accurate, it’s hard to fake, and women can see it right away.

The ideal shoulder to waist ratio: 1.618 to 1.

This particular ratio—the golden ratio—appears all over the ideal human body (and throughout nature) and sculptors and artists have been using it for millennia to depict the ideal physique. All those sculptures of Greek gods and Olympians are rockin’ exactly that ratio. What this means is that if you’re a skinny dude with a lean 30 inch waist you’d want to build your shoulder muscles up to 49 inches (1.618 times as big as your waist). With a 32 inch waist you’d build your shoulders up to 52 inches around, etc.

Whatever width your shoulders are right now, don’t fret. Like I said, powerful shoulders can be built:

Some tips:

Narrow shoulders. Guys with naturally narrow shoulders have some advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that they’ll appear more muscular earlier into their training, as their frames fill out easily. The disadvantage is they need to build up a fair bit of muscularity to achieve a powerful broad-shouldered look. Posture is important as well, as proper shoulder alignment will make your shoulders appear broader.

Typical shoulders. These guys have it easy. If you’re skinny your shoulders will appear narrow, yes, but often after adding just a dozen or so pounds of muscle you’re already rocking a badass shoulder / waist ratio. Further down the road, you’ll likely hit the ideal ratio at the same time as you hit the ideal level of muscularity, making achieving the ideal physique pretty straightforward. Clothing is designed for you too, and with a bit of mass on your bones you’ll fit into clothes incredibly well—especially “fitted” clothing, as you’ll have a leaner than average waist.

Broad shoulders. With broad shoulders the ratio is incredibly easy to achieve, but this body type can be equally as tricky as the narrow one, since you need a fair bit of musculature to fill out your frame. Otherwise you’ll look broad from the front but thin from the side. Another problem here is that you need to buy really damn big shirts to fit your really damn broad shoulders… which tend to be designed for overweight people. You’ll probably need to buy huge shirts and find a tailor that can take ‘em in at the waist, and perhaps even in the arms (until you add some arm size).

2. A Trim Waist

Size only matters if that size is lean. Women aren’t trying to just find a big man, they’re trying to find a strong one. Since our male hormones cause us to store a lot of fat in our midsection, the best way to quickly spot a chubster is to look at his belt size. Thus broad shoulders are only attractive when paired with a proportionately small waist.

Why do women care if you’re holding onto some fat? Well obesity has always been a sign of suboptimal health, and it can result in a plethora of issues. Generally speaking a bit of fat isn’t necessarily bad, and thus throughout most of history being a little pudgy was okay. In today’s culture we’re hyper-sensitized to it, likely because so many first-world men struggle with it. We hear about the problems of obesity every single day, while being lean is an increasingly rare and impressive trait.

Having your midsection mastered immediately suggests a lot of things about you: a healthy diet, possible good genetics, physical health, youth, and, of course, self control. (study) And since a trim waist hints at a longer lifespan, chances are she’ll get to enjoy all those great things about you for longer.

This is a really big thing for women—so much so that it actually doesn’t matter how big you get if you’ve got any sort of pudge going on.

It’s like being a really skinny guy with abs. Our abs don’t count until we’re muscular. (Dammit.)

Those big beefy strong guys? They’re disqualified. No matter how muscular a chubby guy is they still have the sex appeal of an overweight guy (less than a skinny guy). They win points from men for being stronger, but their guts fail to win them points with women.

I should note here that I don’t mean abs, I simply mean a trim waist, i.e., no love handles or belly. A flat stomach is equally as attractive as abs, unless you’re dating a woman who’s really into fitness, in which case she may prefer abs simply because she’s part of that cut culture. Generally though being extremely lean is a way for us to show off to each other—not to women.

Yep, that means you can take your ab shot off your online dating profile. A girl can tell how much she likes your ‘bod from how good you look in a fitted tee.

3. Muscularity

Keep in mind that the coveted “V” taper isn’t just created by broad shoulders and a narrow waist. Having beastly back musculature and strong glutes is also incredibly important, and will both make your waist seem smaller and your shoulders seem broader. Forget your back and legs and you’ll wind up with a “T” taper.

With your shoulder / waist ratio women are getting an idea of our muscularity, but the main factor there is the ratio, not about whether it’s from our muscle mass or bone structure. Further studies needed to be done to determine an ideal level of muscularity independent from our shoulder width, and they found that broad shoulders are attractive even in absence of muscle, and muscle is attractive even in absence of broad shoulders. (study)

So here we’re talking less about your frame and more about muscle itself, making this more of a chest & back / waist ratio thing. (Factoring in your lats and chest.)

The drive for muscularity in men is both very innate and very cultural—sort of a chicken and egg scenario. (You know, the scenario where we should really be eating a lot of both.) Men are naturally drawn to muscle, and that drive is further exaggerated by the media. As men we have different biological priorities combined with exposure to different media than women. We thus have very slightly different ideals concerning muscularity than women do. Most guys, myself included, instinctively get this part wrong. (I’ll talk more about male ideals later.)

Muscles aren’t just a man thing though, and one of the main reasons we love them so much is because of women—women love a certain degree of muscularity too.

Why? It’s like a peacock’s tail, indicating an abundance of the ingredients required to thrive. Since the beginning of humanity only the most capable of men have been able to build muscle. It requires a steady supply of a lot of good food, indicating that you can acquire that food consistently; it requires lots of hearty physical activity, indicating that you’re physically healthy and capable; and it requires masculine hormones which have a lot of positive effects on our health and performance.

(Muscularity is heavily influenced by our production of testosterone, hGH, IGF-1 and insulin. Some of this is genetic, but much of our hormone production has to do with our diet and exercise.)

Muscularity isn’t an outdated mechanism either. In today’s society the same basics hold true, and while we may not need to hunt down food ourselves, protein is not the cheapest of foods, healthy food is more expensive than heavily processed food, and consistently eating well and training requires good health, time and dedication. Muscle speaks of a lifestyle of health and abundance.

Going beyond that, it also says a lot about your character. Building a strong lean physique requires dedication, consistency and self control. Since muscularity is such an innate masculine goal it can almost be assumed that every man would prefer to have it, all else equal. Deep down every man wants it, but not every man has the willpower to achieve it. It thus says a lot about your ability to get what you want out of life.

As ectomorphs we can start getting the benefits of being muscular pretty early into our development, since we’re often starting out fairly lean. As soon as our shoulders, back, glutes and chest (in order of importance) start beefing up we do pretty great. The “fit” bodytype isn’t that muscular and can often be accomplished in a matter of months.

Eventually we get to that optimal level where we don’t just look fit—we look strong and masculine. It takes longer, but women really start to feel feminine, sexy and safe around us, since we have a larger and more classically masculine physique.

Going from strong to jacked is no walk in the park, and adding muscle beyond that point is a challenge for most men. Once you get to that highly muscular point it’s truly commendable—but you’ve gone beyond what women find ideal, and you’ll fall behind the more slenderly muscled “fit” guy in terms of desirability. Not by much though, and you’ll still be very highly sought after.

Long story short: slimmer than “fit” and you risk being perceived as weak, fickle, submissive, etc. Any bigger than “jacked” and you lose points for being overly yoked, and thus hormonally fragile.

For guys who are already into strength training that’s a bit of a weird thing to wrap your head around, and I have to admit I fall into the category of guys who instinctively think “whoa wait—why isn’t more better!?”

Turns out more is not better. Not at all. And if you go much beyond the muscularity of the “jacked” guy your physique stops becoming attractive altogether. (study) Women begin to get the sense that something fishy is up hormonally… and they’re probably right—muscularity beyond a certain threshold is nearly impossible to accomplish without either abnormal hormone production (overly mesomorphic genetics) or pharmaceuticals. A very lean 200 pounds (under 10% bodyfat) is the upper limit of muscularity for most 6″ tall men, even with many years of intelligent and consistent training.

See, men have always wanted to be muscular and women have always been drawn to it, but the whole really muscular thing doesn’t work for women. They aren’t socially conditioned to like it, since Cosmo is full of Brad Pitt / Ryan Gosling types—guys who are somewhere between “fit” and “strong”.

(Both examples are ectomorphs, with Pitt being less muscular with naturally broader shoulders, and Gosling being more muscular with naturally narrower shoulders.)

There’s a legitimate reason behind it too though. With peacocks the bigger the tail is the better. It might be costly and dangerous to parade it around, and it may mean they die sooner (either of illness or lion). But that’s okay. Peahens want the most badass offspring possible and don’t really care about what happens to their mate after they mate. Women, however, do. They want a man who’s emotionally stable enough to stick around and healthy enough to survive. That’s how you raise badass offspring, after all.

The right amount of muscularity means you’re healthy and strong. You’ll be able to protect her, provide for her and help her raise healthy muscular kids like you.

4. A healthy masculine (chiseled) face

To a certain extent we’re stuck with the faces our mothers gave us, but there’s actually a whole lot we can do just by improving our health, increasing our muscularity and lowering our body fat percentage.

Mastering our muscularity and midsection will go a long way to changing how attractive women find our faces. See, regardless of how large our noses are, we want faces shaped by muscle, not bone or fat. This will build up manly jaw muscles and chisel out our faces, making us appear more masculine, which women find sexually irresistible.(study) Interestingly enough, the more attractive a woman thinks she is, the more drawn to masculine facial features she is. (study) It may not just be how attractive she thinks she is, either, and some studies are showing that greater attractiveness and femininity in women results in a stronger preference for men with masculine faces. (study)

Facial masculinity is just one piece of the puzzle though, and the next piece is perhaps even more interesting: women can subconsciously pick up on what our skin tone is saying about us. Having the right amount of red and yellow in our colouring is an indicator of health, and will make us appear more attractive. How do we improve our skin tone? Exercise and sound nutrition. Yep, you probably saw that one coming. A higher intake of fruits and vegetables (nutrition), higher levels of oxygenated blood (exercise) and more melanin production (both) will all help. (study) It will go a long way to clearing up acne and improving your complexion, too.

Even in a snowsuit* women can tell if we’re lean, healthy and muscular. Pretty wild.

*This matters to us Canadians.

5. Masculinity (i.e. testosterone)

Masculinity is an interesting thing, and different women are drawn to different levels of it depending on what they’re looking for, how feminine they are and how high their confidence is:

  • Generally the more feminine the woman, the more she’ll be drawn to masculinity. Similarly, more masculine women are often drawn to more feminine men.
  • The more attractive a woman thinks she is, the more confident she’ll feel around masculine men and the more she’ll enjoy being around them. One theory here is that only the most desirable of women are able to attract a very masculine man and keep him. The more masculine the man, the more options he’ll have, after all.
  • The more masculine a man, the more sexually attractive he is. This is that gut-level kind of attraction that women find irresistible—they’re just drawn to it.
  • The more hormonally balanced a man is the more a woman will be inclined to get into a relationship with him. While a slightly less masculine man might not have the same raw sex appeal, they often give off better boyfriend / husband vibes.
  • It’s possible to balance masculinity with an equally impressive degree of health, making you irresistibly masculine yet stable enough to rock a successful relationship.

Women can tell how masculine we are from our body language, stride, voice, muscularity and even our scent. Having the right amount of masculine hormones changes us right down to the way we smell, and that can either make our scent irresistible to women or instinctively give them bad vibes. (study, study, study)

The variance in testosterone levels between men is huge, and it has a big impact on our personalities, appearance and health. Some men walk around with 4-5 times as much testosterone pumping through them as others. Not fair, us slenderly muscled ectomorphs might think, but once again this is not out of our control.

Why does masculinity matter? It says a lot about our health and fitness. Taking it one step further, women can also infer clues about our character. High levels of testosterone in men are linked with ambition and confidence, but there’s another lesser-known side of testosterone too—it also hints at a man’s integrity.

Higher testosterone is strongly linked with honesty, for example. In a study done just a couple weeks ago they found that men whose testosterone levels had been increased (using a gel) were significantly more honest than the men who were given a placebo. Looks like the confidence and power that comes with testosterone also gives us the strength to man up and be honest with one another. (study)

On the flip side, overly high levels of testosterone are actually quite unattractive, as they can cause selfishness, volatility and fragility. While the golden zone of testosterone improves strength, confidence, integrity and ambition, overly high levels of testosterone can in some cases make men emotionally unstable (study), less likely to stick around in a relationship and more prone to illness.

Less likely to stick around in a relationship?!

Interestingly enough, men in longterm relationships have slightly lower testosterone output. Whether entering into a relationship causes the testosterone drop, or whether lower testosterone increases a man’s desire to enter a relationship isn’t clear. (study) Whichever causes which, women are often wary of men with sky-high testosterone.

High testosterone output making us prone to illness is another weird one. Testosterone is a costly hormone, and too much of it not only increases the likelihood that we’ll do stupidly dangerous crap, it also sacrifices our immune system in favour of power. Of course, too little testosterone and we also become vulnerable. Women know we can’t have it all, so they’ve become finely tuned to pick up on Goldilock’s “just right” amount of testosterone output.

Too little testosterone and we’ll be deemed weak, fickle and effeminate. Too much and we’re deemed selfish, volatile and fragile. Rough.

Luckily this isn’t all up to our genetics. Strength training and solid muscle-building nutrition will help regulate your masculinizing hormones (like testosterone) and feminizing hormones (like estrogen), and staying lean will help as well. If you’re doing all that right you can just let your hormones take care of themselves.

+1 for fit guys.

6. Symmetry

Symmetry is pretty straightforward—it’s indicative of good genes. Just like your face is probably pretty symmetrical, chances are your muscles were relatively symmetrical by default but your lopsided desk-dude lifestyle has resulted in some asymmetries.

That’s fine, and relatively easy to fix. The best way to fix’ er right up is just to focus on unilateral lifts (e.g. one-armed bench press, 1-armed lat pulldown) for a while. Train your weaker side first, and limit your dominant side to whatever your weaker side can do. The first phase of our program features a lot of unilateral lifts and by the end of it most of our guys are pretty symmetrical and a hell of a lot more muscular. Symmetry doesn’t take as long to fix as you’d think, and you can add mass everywhere while doing it.

Asymmetrical shoulder heights are also really common among our members and sometimes take a bit longer to fix. Many of us, myself included, started out with one shoulder cocked higher than the other. Luckily I was able to gain 40 pounds while addressing it, so once again it’s not something that should get in our way.

6. Posture / Alignment 

Better posture increases your perceived masculinity, height, status, strength, and confidence. Posture is so finely tied to status and confidence that improving your posture will improve not only the impression you give off, but also how confident you feel. To make things even more interesting, proper posture actually increases our testosterone output and improves the transmission of strength from our lower body to our upper body. Improving our alignment makes us both more masculine and stronger in and of itself. Pretty sweet.

This is fairly advanced stuff, and one reason why I don’t make my own workout programming. We let Marco do his thing and trust his expertise. It’s also why we highly encourage our members to take photos and post them on the forum. From there we can spot any potential problems and make sure we’re addressing them. Luckily most of us ectomorphs have a very similar and distinct problem: upper and lower crossed syndrome with internally rotated shoulders (shown above).

We place a lot of emphasis on lifting heavy and adding mass, but we also dig building wickedly functional, strong and aesthetic bodies, so we always round out our workouts with some quick postural exercises. (More on posture here)

7. Muscular Balance

Women really dig musculature that actually works. Most women couldn’t tell you the difference between your deltoid and your rhomboid, but they’ll still instinctively get a “something is funky over there” vibe when guys have disproportionately built physiques.

Many bodies aren’t trained for function, don’t look like they were trained for function, and thus fail to accomplish their (presumed) primary goal of looking good. Whoops.

How do you get a disproportionate physique?

a) Certain sports. Hockey players, soccer players and bikers often have large legs combined with small upper bodies (the t-rex), rock climbers tend to have really big backs with small chests and triceps, tennis players get one big arm and one little arm, and basketball players are often really tall. In a way that’s a good thing, because it allows them to kick serious ass at their sport. They also need to be careful though, because unbalanced musculature can limit performance and increase the chance of injuries. A degree of physique specialization is recommended for athletes, but it shouldn’t be haphazard.

b) A homemade training program. That’ll give you a pretty wonky ‘bod, guaranteed. We naturally gravitate towards certain exercises and making a program ourselves inevitably leads to a  body that we think looks good in the mirror but that women are confused and repelled by. Women, who get a full 360* view, care about how big your back and butt are.

c) Being totally out of it. The best way to get an unbalanced body is by taking up desk-hunching and couch-riding without any solid physical activity. Some things will tighten up, some things will stretch out, some muscles will get lazy (like your ass), and others will get tendonitis.

Tricks for having perfectly balanced functional musculature: 

a) Train your back twice (i.e. a pull) for every time you train your chest (i.e. a press). Back muscles respond better to a higher volume and will contribute more to your athleticism and aestheticism than your chest. This is especially important for us ectomorphs who look like a lollipop when viewed from the side, since your back musculature is responsible for two thirds of the thickness of your upper body. It’s also responsible for our v-taper when viewed from the front and back.

… but don’t neglect your chest. You really do want strong and plump pecs, since they’re such a huge indicator of muscularity and strength.

b) Train your legs almost as often as you train your upper body, and squat deep enough that you get your glutes and hamstrings working along with your quads. You want your thigh bones going down parallel to the floor. You’ll squat less weight, sure, but even with less weight you’ll build more muscle. You can spend a bit more time growing your upper body if you prefer the look, but if you don’t build up impressive leg (and thus full body) strength you’ll fail to achieve the aesthetic and athletic physique that women long for.

c) Deadlift like a monster. It’s the best back exercise, it’s the best trap exercise, it’ll do wonders to your lower body, it will strengthen your posture and it’s an incredible exercise for core strength. Want a Superman-like silhouette in a hurry? Deadlift. You’ll get absolutely strong as hell and it’ll show from a mile away. It’s also the best forearm / grip exercise out there, so you’ll develop rock hard man-hands that your lady will love to hold.

The Bodies Men Respect & Idolize

Any article on aesthetics needs to be broken up by gender, since both men and women dream of having a body that’s rather different from what the other gender dreams of waking up next to.

Women prefer a man who’s significantly leaner and more muscular than average, you know, like a man found in Cosmo. They found these physiques more attractive than the more muscular ones in magazines targeted at health conscious men, like Men’s Health, and much more attractive than the muscles aspiring male weightlifters are exposed to in magazines like Men’s Fitness. (study) Rest assured that male bodybuilders are not what your dream girl is dreaming of. (Us ectomorphs actually have a pretty great shot at quickly becoming rather ideal in the eyes of most women.)

As ectomorphs some us set our sights a little smaller. When I was 6’2 and 130 pounds damn I was eager just to bulk up to the point where the word bony didn’t spring into everyone’s mind when I entered the room. It wasn’t until I reached 150 that I started trying to look fit, and it wasn’t until 170 that I wanted to look strong. At 185 I’m pretty happy with how I look and care most about actually being strong.

Ectomorphs aside though, most men want slightly more muscular physiques than the men found in Cosmo, shooting instead for the stronger look popular in Men’s Health. (Surprisingly, the physiques in Men’s Health line up pretty well with the physiques that women actually gravitate towards, photos in magazine aside.)

Generally the more interested in fitness a guy is, the more muscle related media he gets exposed to and the bigger he wants to become. Many guys, like me, gradually increase their goals as they go along. That can definitely be a good thing, but many weightlifting enthusiasts eventually get to a point where they’re overestimating what women want by as much as 30 pounds. (study)

I’m not saying it’s all created by the media—Hell the media might just be mirroring what us guys are naturally drawn to. Muscle is a very masculine thing historically, culturally and biologically (men have much more muscle-building potential than women do) so it makes sense that we just want more of it.

Bringing us to:

Bodybuilder Aesthetics

This niche of dudes has relatively distinct goals, so it deserves a bit of attention of its own. Perception varies between subcultures, and while women have a rather uniform preference for healthy, strong and athletic looking guys, different subsets of men shoot for different goals. A bodybuilder would see the “muscular” guy girls are fawning over and think “Psh. Do you even lift?”

So while most guys and gals dig strong human-like proportions, some guys strive to achieve superhuman proportions.

While many professional bodybuilders these days do simply focus on size, there’s often an equally large emphasis on proportions. The ideal shoulder / waist ratio remains the same, but you’d want bigger measurements in both areas. To determine muscularity you’d start by measuring something fixed, like your wrist size, and then building up your relaxed arm, neck and calf muscles to 250% of that size. For a guy like me with 7″ wrists that would result in nearly 18 inch upper arms / calves / neck, which is far beyond what’s attractive to people outside of the bodybuilding community—and these are the proportions advocated by the classic bodybuilder Steve Reeves, who had a relatively slender physique by bodybuilding standards!

His exaggerated physique and remarkable good looks made him one of the first bodybuilding celebrities. He wasn’t just an oddity, he became a celebrity and icon. This brought bodybuilding into the mainstream.

There’s a dark side to bodybuilding too, and steroid abuse is becoming quite common, permeating even novice bodybuilding circles. Steve Reeves was among the early mainstream bodybuilding pioneers in the 40’s, taking relatively low doses of steroids (if any) by modern standards. He followed a routine that was typical of natural weightlifters. He’d do three full body workouts per week, his training volume was moderate, and he primarily used compound lifts that worked many different muscle groups at once.

Years later Arnold Schwarzenegger entered the arena. Like Reeves, he was handsome and charismatic enough to popularize his even more exaggeratedly masculine physique and have massive success in the mainstream.

Professional bodybuilding culture began to evolve as drugs became more potent, and nowadays many guys who don’t even take steroids are accidentally following routines initially designed and optimized for steroid users. Not so long ago this wasn’t a very well researched topic, and many of the bodybuilding pioneers were responsible for figuring out what worked best by simple trial and error. Guys like Schwarzenegger and his friends would try out a variety of techniques, see what worked, and then pass on that information to others. Some of this stuff had merit, some of it was just muscle mythology. That information would then be spread around in muscle magazines, eventually trickling down to the mainstream.

Drugs have a huge impact on what style of lifting is effective though, and information trickling down from the trial and error of guys using steroids (and other drugs) can make it very hard for natural guys to figure out how to train. “Triple split” routines are perhaps the most common example of a bodybuilding routine that trickled down from steroid users and was then adopted by the mainstream.

There’s also some truth to the idea that bodybuilders tend to focus on growing their muscles via metabolic stress (“the pump”) instead of exclusively via mechanical tension (lifting heavy). This can affect how your body adapts, although many of the myths surrounding bulkier guys, like being slow or inflexible, are false. We wrote up an article on the different types of exercise / weightlifting and the muscular adaptions they cause here.

Now that steroids have been around for a few decades, studies are showing them to be the male equivalent of anorexia and bulimia—both typically being the result of anxiety and body image issues. The same drive that causes even very thin women to develop eating disorders results in even already very muscular men taking steroids. (study) Among thinness / muscularity heavy niches, like female fashion and male bodybuilding, these practices can become quite common and even an accepted part of that subculture. That certainly doesn’t describe every bodybuilder though (or even every steroid user).

A parting point: while bodybuilding is often thought to be a vain sport, there’s actually very little correlation between narcissism and the drive for extreme amounts of muscle. It isn’t an obsession with beauty, after all, and more so an urge to develop extreme masculinity. (study)

Classic Male Aesthetics

Most men want a strong dashing ‘bod that’s healthy, muscular, functional, looks good to women, earns the respect of men and doesn’t require an arsenal of pharmaceuticals.

Bodybuilding techniques trickle down into mainstream culture though, and many novice weightlifters mimic their routines, not realizing it’s a highly specialized form of training that likely doesn’t match their current situation or future goals at all. Athletes, actors and classic strong dudes train a totally different way.

We’re better off using big compound lifts (bench press, squats, deadlifts, chin ups, etc) that naturally build muscle mass everywhere. It’s efficient, requiring less time in the gym; it’s functional, meaning our growing muscles directly translate into improved strength and athletic performance; and it’s aesthetic, in that both men and women will think they look rad.

This ensures that you can use your muscles to both literally and metaphorically pick up women.

But there’s still a bit of a discrepancy between how woman want us to look and how we want ourselves to look. See, women place a high priority on balance and function… and don’t typically judge us based on how we look in the mirror. (Women are tricky devils like that.) The result is that there’s a relatively low priority placed on glory-muscles, like our biceps.

If you have badass biceps, sure, girls are going to comment on them, but that doesn’t mean it’s a defining characteristic of your physique. If your girlfriend has particularly dainty feet you might compliment her on them—especially if she’s proud of them—but if she had average feet you’d probably be almost equally as enthralled with her overall appearance. Biceps are kind of like that. Having rad biceps certainly doesn’t hurt, and girls like nice biceps just fine. It just isn’t any kind of big deal.

Most of us guys who build muscle, on the other hand, quite like them. I’m smiling down at mine affectionately right now while I’m typing this up, and when I flex at myself in the mirror they’re right there giving it their all. Improving our back strength is the best way to make them bigger (think chin ups), and improving our fitness levels results in a prominent vein running through them (due to increased oxygen delivery). They’re a pretty good indicator of how we’re doing.

As a result our biceps are perhaps the most visible and impressive muscle on our body—to us.

Women judge our strength primarily through our posterior chain (legs, glutes, lats and traps) and the width of our shoulders. Even from the front the “muscularity” of a man is largely judged by our chests. And it’s our belt size that tells girls whether we’re lean or not, not how vascular our biceps are. Sure, arms are certainly somewhere on the aesthetics list, but they’re by no means any kind of important thing, so long as they’re proportionately sized.

Men judge other men in a similar way—but we add in the arms. Since we judge ourselves partly based on how large our biceps are, we also look for it in other men. As such we typically gravitate towards a physique where the arms are ever so slightly proportionally larger. The most famous example of this is Brad Pitt in Fight Club. He’s got broad shoulders, a tight waist, great posture, solid definition in his chest and an overall athletic look. This, combined with his character’s personality and Pitt’s masculine face, makes it one of the most appealing physiques to women. He also has proportionally large arms and shoulders, making his physique a common goal among men. This is especially true with us ectomorphs, since he’s a good example of an ectomorph who successfully added some muscle to his frame.

One thing we struggle with though is the temptation to over-emphasize our arms and chest at the expense of our posterior chain. This inevitably leads to disproportionately large arms and, ironically, a small chest. An underdeveloped posterior chain results in muscular balance issues which prevent the pec muscles from being properly activated in chest lifts, like the bench press.

We thus often sacrifice our chest, a powerful muscle that actually makes us strong and women actually care about (study), by neglecting our posterior chain—which is the strongest and most physically appealing muscle group out there!

Anyway, by focusing on proportional and functional strength we naturally develop a big chest, so that’s already part of the “strong” package. And the good news is that so long as we’re strong and functional we can increase our arm size and get the best of all worlds. Women won’t dock us any points, since we’re still indicating health and strength, and we get to have a physique that feels right to us, too.

Muscle and Power

For better or worse, women judge each other’s ability to attract men largely based on physical attractiveness. When it comes to men sizing each other up for competition though we don’t much care how attractive the other guy is, and place twice as much emphasis on how socially dominant* they are. (study)

*Social dominance being a combination of physical dominance, confidence, ambition,  social status, assertiveness and charisma.

So while women get jealous of other beautiful women, as men we instinctively infer status amongst one another largely from our strength, posture, athleticism and the strength of our jawlines. From this we get clues to confidence, ambition, assertiveness, charisma and power. (study, study, study)

Most of these benefits max out at a certain point, with the “strong” physique outperforming all others, including much bigger and more highly muscled ones. Where the more muscle thing comes into play though is with physical dominance, which is simply height, muscularity and strength, i.e., total functional mass. This trait has nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with lean mass. The stronger and more masculine someone is the more physically dominant they are, and that’s the advantage that incredibly physically powerful men have. The catch here is that their mass still needs to look functional, athletic and strong. (study)

(Being absolutely incredibly muscular will also win you points among guys who are into bodybuilding, where size can be likened to athletic prowess in their sport.)

Interestingly enough even a guy with wealth, socioeconomic status, ambition and confidence will still have more social success if he’s fit and healthy, both with men and women. (study)

This is becoming more and more true as societies become more and more modern. With gender equality comes a change in how men and women are judged and perceived. Women are being judged a lot more based on their status, intelligence and earning power, whereas men are beginning to be judged a little more on their sex appeal, strength, attractiveness and health.

Aesthetics and Brain Power

As we touched in the woman section, how fit you look is usually an indicator of how fit you are. (This depends on your nutrition and training, of course.) As such increasing your strength and improving your diet can have a huge impact on all of your organs—including your brain.

Strenuous physical activity stresses the brain and promotes adaptation and growth, improving brain function and allowing the brain to better respond to future challenges. As a result a good training program will have an impact on your memory, concentration, mood and ability to learn. (study)

Building muscle is also a matter of nutrition, which is strongly tied to brain function as well, reducing anxiety, increasing energy levels, improving concentration, etc.

This deserves an article all on its own, but long story short, improving your aesthetics can also boost your intellect, make you as emotionally stable as a rock, and increase your enjoyment of life.

This is one reason why people infer so many character traits from aesthetics. When you see a pristine Ferrari you instinctively expect what’s under the hood to be pretty impressive, too.

For better or worse other guys will make similar assumptions about you.

In Conclusion

It’s basic human nature for us to care. Part of being a normal healthy man is caring about the impression we give off, and we know that a lot of that has to do with our strength and muscularity.

It may sound shallow or superficial but it really isn’t. Our physical appearance is such an accurate representation of our health and strength that we really don’t need to be ashamed about caring about it. Becoming better looking (the right way) can make us more ambitious, healthier, stronger, more attractive to women, more respected by men, smarter, live longer and have better brain health.

As ectomorph men we often think we’re at a disadvantage in the muscle department, but we’re actually pretty lucky. Building muscle beyond a certain threshold is challenging and requires both consistency and patience, but as ectomorphs we often experience very rapid growth when we first begin training. If we can do that while correcting our posture and alignment we very quickly start to look pretty good.

With dedication and a good plan we can pop into the “fit” category in a matter of months, and not too long after that, given consistent effort and smarts, land ourselves in the “strong” category.

Ideal Male Body—Thanos' Bony to Beastly Ectomorph Transformation Ideal Male Body—Bony to Beastly Ectomorph Transformation

Easier said than done, I know, but these are extremely achievable goals with huge rewards, both inside and out.

Ectomorph Muscle-Building Supplements (Updated September 2014)

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We’ve gotten a lot of questions about supplements for ectomorphs—which supplements are best for us, what brands we recommend, whether they’re healthy, and whether we need them at all. The answer to that last question is simple: you don’t need them. You can build muscle just fine with or without them. In fact, until you know how to build muscle without them you really shouldn’t be buying them at all. Once you’ve got the fundamentals down though, adding in some key supplements can drastically improve your results, make your life a helluva lot easier, improve your health and even save you some money… if you’re smart about it.

These probably aren’t the supplements you expect though—you’re going to find one them a little weird—and you might not be taking them for the reasons you expect either. Us ectomorphs need to supplement a little differently. So we’ve put together a protocol. We aren’t just recommending supplements, we’re recommending a specific combination of supplements taken at particular times that work incredibly well for ectomorphs looking to build muscle and stay lean.

(This is a research based article, and there’s a lot of research being done into muscle-building nutrition and muscle-building supplements. We’ll been updating this post every month with all the relevant new studies that come out.)

Ectomorphs need to approach supplements differently

Most supplements are targeted at the average guy. The average guy is overweight and looking to get leaner. Maaaybe he’s also looking to pack on muscle while he’s at it. This is the world that the supplement companies are presented with and, understandably, they respond by making supplements that are targeted at these guys. Us ectomorphs looking to build muscle mass thus need something a little different.

Look at BCAAs, one of the most common workout supplements available these days. They’re an ingredient in pretty much every workout supplement out there … yet us ectomorphs don’t need them at all.

See BCAAs are found in protein, and different protein sources have different amounts of them. As naturally skinny guys we’re much better off eating their calorie-rich cousin—whey protein. A classic 30g scoop of whey protein actually has about 6g of BCAAs in it, which is more than a typical 5g scoop of BCAAs has. (Obviously.) Besides, the other nutrients present in whey boost muscle protein synthesis post-workout far higher than BCAAs alone, making whey far superior for us ectomorphs. (study) But if you were the average guy, calorie-light BCAA supplements become a valid option.

This supplement protocol has one type of guy in mind: the naturally skinny ectomorph who’s looking to build muscle, i.e., gain weight. This is about leveraging ectomorph appetite tricks, insulin sensitivity and muscle-building fundamentals in order to allow us to consume enough calories to build muscle.

Do us ectomorphs need supplements?

Hell no. They aren’t magic, and they won’t build muscles out of thin air. Until you know what you’re doing, all the money you spend on supplements will be wasted. You won’t be getting anything out of them. In fact, once you know what you’re doing, you’ll probably realize that you don’t even need supplements, because your results will be so good without them.

  • Crappy program + supplements = no results, frustration, wasted money and giving up
  • Mediocre program + supplements = slow and unpredictable results, if any
  • Great program + no supplements = great, steady, reliable results. You’ll soon have a burly bod’ and bear-like strength.
  • Great program + intelligent supplements = “holy $%& man! Where did all those muscles come from!”

A good program (like ours) that includes both training and nutrition is the #1 place that you want to invest. (Um, we’re also admittedly a little biased… but it’s still true.) The benefits of investing in a solid plan last for life. You won’t eat your way through $200 of information and then have to go buy more. You can invest once, develop a solid training and nutritional foundation, and collect your results over the coming weeks, months and years.

The next crucial ingredient for success is actually doing the program. These two things will get you further than any combination of supplements—guaranteed. No amount of supplements make up for a not getting your ass off the couch. (That includes the people who are stuck in the “research” phase, waiting to know everything before starting anything.)

So, this supplement plan assumes that you’re an ectomorph with a weightlifting and nutrition plan. I’ll even take this one step further—this supplement list is for guys who are already having success building muscle. If you’re still working out the weightlifting and nutrition kinks save this stuff for later.

With weightlifting and nutrition handled though, these supplements will help you transform yourself much faster. This protocol is backed up by research, this is what we do personally, and this is what we recommend to our members.

Albert’s a good example of someone kicking ass with a busy schedule (young doctor with 14+ hour shifts), finding a way to eat enough good food anyway, training as consistently as he can, and supplementing intelligently as the cherry on the cake. The supplements aren’t the key factor in his gains, but they probably helped.

Why this supplement protocol kicks serious bony ass

You can do fantastically well without any supplements—many of our guys go that route and do great. This protocol can have a significant impact while making things a little easier though. The reason for that is simple: this protocol isn’t just a bunch of vitamins and fancy patent protected formulas—it contains a hell of a lot of calories, and calories are exactly what us skinny guys need. Consuming the right kind of calories during the right kind of circumstances is a pretty big deal when it comes to building muscle. In this study guys who added whey protein and maltodextrin into their diet gained an extra 7.5 pounds of muscle over the course of 8 weeks while simultaneously losing fat. An extra pound of muscle each week? Not bad. Not bad at all.

Now I want to be clear here. There’s a lot of marketing and hype about workout nutrition. You know—that magical anabolic post-workout window. That’s way overhyped: nothing trumps overall calorie and protein intake when it comes to building muscle. Whether you take this drink first thing in the morning, while training or right before bed it will still help you build muscle. That’s because the caloric, carb and protein content of the workout drink supersedes the timing of it. (studystudystudy)

We do recommend taking it while training though. Why? Well most studies out there would agree that as far as nutrient timing goes, this is where most of the opportunity lies, especially if you’ve already got some lifting experience.  (study) Is it the magical window that most supplement companies claim it is? No, but it’s still the best time to be taking this stuff. Since insulin sensitivity in your muscle cells will be heightened during and right after training, this gives you the absolute best shot at increasing the rate that you build muscle leanly, as it will invest the nutrients in your muscle mass instead of shuttling them off into your fat stores.

The fact that you’ll be consuming these supplements in liquid form makes this combo even more significant for us ectomorphs. Since liquid calories aren’t very filling, they up-regulate caloric consumption. (studystudy) Downing 1000+ liquid calories while weightlifting is a total breeze, and it makes hitting your daily calorie goals much more achievable. Okay so maybe downing the workout shake isn’t a total breeze—it’s a pretty gruesome drink—but it works!

For us naturally skinny guys this is the Buckley’s of workout nutrition.

We’re making pretty large claims and using at a pretty crazy study to base it on, so we wanted to double check our facts. Who do you go to when it comes to analyzing muscle-building nutrition research? Alan Aragon, obviously. He’s arguably the most brilliant researcher out there when it comes to muscle-building nutrition and supplementation. (I’ve already referenced two of his studies in this article alone.) He’s one of the most unbiased and evidence-based researchers out there, he’s rocking a masters in nutrition, and he handles the nutrition of a pretty fearsome roster of athletes: Olympians, the Lakers, bodybuilders, fitness models, etc. More relevantly still, he has the most respected research review in the fitness industry.

So I sent him the study and asked him his thoughts on our supplement protocol. He was a little dubious and a lot intrigued, so he wanted to take the time to fully review it. He did. He posted a review and breakdown of the study above in the December 2012 edition of his monthly research review. It checked out. The study was properly conducted and the trainees really did gain tons of muscle while losing a bit of fat. Let me add, as he did, that gains this incredibly rapid are only possible in relatively untrained dudes. Perfectly relevant for guys who are still relatively skinny, but if you’ve already built a ton of muscle, while it will still work, you’ll obviously progress a little slower.

So what did Alan think about downing tons of liquid calories to finally overcome our ectomorph appetites (or lack thereof) and build tons of muscle?

“I highly agree with you that the liquid meal can boil down to an appetite & compliance thing rather than a timing thing. No objections there at all. There are plenty of athletes whose energy demands benefit from liquid/refined nutrition, and they don’t necessarily fit the endurance athlete mold.” – Alan Aragon

Perfect.

Plus this stuff is cheap. It’s cheap compared with other supplements and even cheap compared with regular boring old food. I mean if you want to build muscle your calories need to come from somewhere. Whey protein is a very affordable type of high efficiency protein (compared with meat, eggs and dairy, which are also high efficiency protein sources). Carbohydrates are usually pretty cheap, but the maltodextrin that we’re recommending is extremely cheap. Best of all, these simple ingredients we’re recommending don’t just undercut the price of the fanciest and most complicated supplements out there—they perform just as well or better. If there were fancier supplements out there that worked better than these we’d tell you about them. But there aren’t.

As far as brands go we’ve done our best to hook you up with the most reliable ones offering the best products for the best prices. Full transparency: these are affiliate links to Amazon.com, so you’ll earn us around 4% commission if you buy them via the links—which would be fantastic. This are the supplements we use. This is what we tell our members to use.

I’m going to explain the four different muscle-building powerhouse supplements that we recommend. These are hands down the most effective and most thoroughly researched supplements for ectomorphs trying to build lean muscle mass. I know this stuff can often be hard to piece together, so at the end of the article I’ll outline the specific protocol we’ve designed so that you know exactly how and when to take all this stuff.

Oh, and, of course, consult your doctor before beginning any supplement regime that you find on the internet ;)

 

CREATINE

Creatine is the most powerful legal muscle-building supplement. Ever. That’s not just our opinion, the International Society of Sports Nutrition agrees. (study) It’s also 100% safe, with no reported disasters after decades of rigorous testing. (study, study, study) The only reported negative side effect is that sometimes some people get stomach discomfort after consuming it, and that’s just due to taking too much of it at once and/or not drinking enough water. (Creatine will pull fluid into your muscles, so drink a little bit of extra water.)

More muscle. Perhaps more interestingly, studies unanimously show that it builds muscle and improves strength. (studystudystudy, study) Secretly mixing creatine into a trainee’s coffee in the morning radically improves his muscle gains? Pretty fearsome.

Check out this study showing that following a great training program for 8 weeks with post-workout sugar produced 6 pounds of muscle growth, and 9 pounds of muscle growth with post-workout sugar + creatine. Not bad. That’s a 50% improvement in muscle mass due to creatine. (And the post-workout sugar? That’s up next.)

Less fat. You’ll also gain less fat. This is because creatine is a potent supplement for improving insulin sensitivity in your muscle cells—even in those with decent insulin sensitivity to begin with (like most of us skinny guys.) It does this by pulling glucose into your muscles instead of leaving it hanging around to be stored as fat.

How? Creatine helps your body replenish ATP, which increases anaerobic power—the type of power you need to haul heavy-ass weights. Being able to lift more weight increases the mechanical tension you’re placing on your muscles and on your body, meaning that you’ll have pretty fantastic muscle stimulation and a greater acute hormonal response to your training. The real benefit comes from the increased skeletal muscle synthesis and glycogen storage that comes along with having high concentrations of creatine in your system. This means that not only will you build more muscle via your training, you’ll also get more muscle out of the food that you’re eating.

Some guys joke that creatine supports the entire muscle-building supplement industry, and that isn’t too far from the truth. When you start reading supplement ingredients you’ll be amazed at how many of them have a few grams of creatine tucked away into every serving. How many supplements out there would still produce results if you yanked the creatine out of them? Not many. Not many at all.

Think of most supplements like mix drinks. There are a lot of cool colours, flavours and ingredients, but the whole point of them is the alcohol. Creatine is the alcohol. We aren’t really fans of mix drinks, so we’re recommending that you skip all the fancy proprietary blends and just head straight to the good stuff.

Now, as with virtually everything in the supplement world, there are a lot of extremely expensive and fancy variations out there. You don’t need them. Simple creatine monohydrate is still the king of creatine. You’ll save a ton of money and get all the benefits. You also don’t need to get fancy with how you take it, as you may have heard. Mix it into your tea, coffee, water—whatever.

*Creatine is synthesized in a lab so it’s safe for vegetarians and vegans too.

**If you’re a vegan I would say it’s nearly mandatory, as you’ll be more likely to have a deficiency in creatine, which can cause some longterm health problems and reduce your cognitive function. (study)

***Beta-alanine is a similar supplement that can be taken in addition to creatine. It’s newer and there’s limited research available, but it’s very promising so far. Not as promising as creatine, but still promising nonetheless (study, study).

Click here to check out the creatine brand we recommend

MALTODEXTRIN

Most fancy recovery drinks are packed full of dextrose or maltodextrin and cost an enormously scary amount of money. This particular tub is scary because it’s so cheap. At 24 cents per serving it’s almost too cheap to believe. You’d think you were buying a tub of sugar… and you’d be correct.

Sugar is a little confusing, since there are a few different common types. The carbohydrates that you eat are all converted into glucose, at which point your body can store them for use as a fuel source. If you consume them properly you’ll keep all that fuel stored in your liver and muscles (glycogen), instead of converting them into fatty acids (flabs).

One option is dextrose. This particular type of sugar, glucose derived from corn, is one of the cheapest foods on the planet, digests extremely quickly, and is a dirt cheap source of muscle-building carbs. Taken while working out it’s a pretty effective supplement for us ectomorphs trying to build mass. It’s a valid option, but it’s hard to find and hard to stomach (because it’s so damn sweet).

The supplement that we’re recommending is maltodextrin – a glucose polymer. It’s made up of many glucose units bound together. It’s a starch, so instead of tasting like sugar it tastes more similar to flour. It digests a teensy bit slower (probably a good thing), and we’ve found that our members much prefer the taste. It still has no fibre in it, so it’s easy on the appetite and will clear out of our stomachs relatively quickly, leaving us able to comfortably eat more later. (A big deal for us skinny dudes.)

That study in the creatine section is said to have produced “some of the highest non-steroid increases in lean mass” ever seen—badass. While the study was technically studying creatine, the carbohydrates they were giving them were a huge factor in producing muscle growth, which is why even the group or participants just supplementing with sugar did so well. (The training program itself was also a factor. It was a very well designed muscle-building program, which is surprisingly rare for studies.)

“But Shane, won’t consuming all these refined carbohydrates make me fat?!”

No. Perhaps surprisingly, this is actually a pretty good way to minimize your chances of getting fat. This has to do with the heightened insulin sensitivity in your muscle cells that accompanies weightlifting, the synergistic anabolic effect that the protein creates (whey protein creates a very strong insulin response), the fact that we’re strategically creating a calorie surplus and spiking insulin, and the fact that carbs aren’t very easily converted into fatty acids and thus aren’t very easily stored as fat.

To quote the brilliant nutrition researcher and fat loss expert James Krieger, who has a master’s degree in nutrition and has published of some of the best muscle-building nutrition studies out there—”Post-workout carbohydrates shouldn’t cause you any trouble in the long-run as you are extremely insulin sensitive after training. As long as you maintain a good diet, good activity, keep your body fat low, and your fasting blood sugar remains normal, then you should be fine.”

Click here to check out the maltodextrin brand we recommend

We picked this brand because it’s so pure and bare bones. It has one and only one ingredient (maltodextrin). It’s also really damn cheap.

WHEY PROTEIN

Whey protein powder is a cheap and convenient way of getting in your daily protein, but there’s really nothing special about it. It’s the quickly digested protein found in dairy products. It’s processed, but unlike junk food, the processing is fairly minimal. Nutritionally you can pretty much consider it a whole food instead of a supplement. It even has some vitamins in it.

Essentially it’s more or less equivalent to a chicken breast. A chicken breast would taste pretty funky blended up into a fruit smoothie though, so whey is sometimes best ;)

Muscle can only by synthesized out of amino acids (found in protein) so a shortage of those can easily slow down your efforts. Since most of us ectomorphic guys aren’t consuming enough protein to optimally build muscle, adding whey protein into your diet really will most guys build more muscle mass. (study, study)

Whey is especially effective when taken surrounding training. (studystudy) It digests quickly and contains a pretty stellar blend of branched chain amino acids (BCAAs). If you really want to kick things up a notch, it works even better at stimulating muscle growth when combined with a carb source like maltodextrin. (study) The whey protein + maltodextrin combo is about as powerful as they come—it’s no secret—and almost every single workout recovery drink and commercial weight gainer will combine these two ingredients.

Click here to check out the whey protein brand we recommend

It’s a classic whey isolate protein powder from a reputable company, and the whey protein itself is very high quality. An interesting (indie) study recently looked into many of the popular brands of whey protein. The study got a lot of attention because of how controversial it was – a lot of popular brands were making false claims. This brand (Optimum Nutrition) wasn’t, and was thus ranked the highest.

*If you want a non-workout protein powder to take along with meals use this casein protein, but keep in mind it presents no advantage over real food. It’s handy and affordable though if you’re not much one for cooking.

**If you don’t handle whey protein well (allergies) or you’re avoiding it for moral reasons (e.g. you’re a vegan) then you can go with rice+pea protein, or another blend of plant-based protein sources. (The amino acid profile in individual plant-based sources isn’t complete, so blends are ideal.) SunWarrior is pretty fantastic both from a quality standpoint and from a taste standpoint. I use it sometimes and I’m not even a vegan.

 

FISH OIL & VITAMIN D

My personal favourite. It potentially directs more of your calories towards muscles and less towards fat. The research here is still young—just a handful of studies—although it’s rather promising. (study, study, study, study) Fish oil seems to improve carbohydrate storage, protein storage, metabolic rate, and, most importantly, muscle protein synthesis (MPS).

What effect should this have? You’ll gain more muscle and less fat.

The omega-3s in fish oil (EPA and DHA) do this by making the plasma membranes in your cells healthier. Modern diets are deficient in omega 3s, so our bodies are a little off-kilter by default. This will help bring you back to the way you should be already. (study) The side effects include better cardiovascular health, a reduced risk of developing cancers and a reduced risk of diabetes. Many people report feeling “better” after spending a few weeks supplementing with fish oil. This is likely because it can help reduce anxiety, improve your mood, increase motivation, and reduce inflammation and soreness.

Vitamin D is another powerhouse supplement when it comes to muscle-building, staying lean and improving your overall health. Fixing a vitamin D deficiency is more effective at boosting testosterone than testosterone boosters, it significantly improves insulin sensitivity, it’s great for your cardiovascular health, it can improve your bone density, boost your mood, and perhaps even help prevent certain types of cancer. (study, study, study, study) A recent study (January 2014) found that supplementing with vitamin D increased strength even in guys who weren’t deficient. The researchers concluded that vitamin D supplementation was “an attractive complementary approach to enhance the recovery of skeletal muscle strength following intense exercise.”

Why do we bundle it with fish oil? Vitamin D is fat soluble, meaning that it needs to be taken alongside fats in order to be properly absorbed. Having it in fish oil makes taking vitamin D very easy and effective.

We’ve linked out to the Nutrasea with Vitamin D. It’s got the EPA, DHA and vitamin D3 content that dreams are made of.

Click here to check out the fish oil brand we recommend

*As a skinny guy you want to rack up as much as 2g EPA and 1.5g DHA every day. That’s a tough challenge to do with dinky fish oil capsules, so we prefer liquid fish oil. (The purity is higher, too.)

**Fish get their DHA from algae, so if you’re a vegan … simply supplement with algae to get your DHA in.

 

THE PROTOCOL:

Training drink: 30-90 grams Whey + 60-180 grams maltodextrin + 5 grams creatine

A typical guy would want 30g whey, 60g maltodextrin and 5g creatine to create a good hormonal situation (insulin primarily) and optimal recovery from his workouts. That would maximally stimulate muscle protein synthesis and take care of the nutrient timing benefits. (study) You’d want to take this within 1-2 hours of training for optimal results. (studystudy) This is similar to what you’d find in a pre-made workout drink or “recovery” formula. Some of them, like SuperPump, have just BCAAs + creatine instead, because they don’t want the calories from the whey and the maltodextrin. This is good—most guys eat too many calories. (That’s why most guys are chubby.)

We aren’t typical guys who need to be avoiding excess calories though. We also aren’t trying to just “recover from our workouts”. We’re naturally skinny ectomorphs who are trying to add tons of lean muscle mass to our bony ‘bods. We want record-breaking results here that people gasp and whisper about, not three years of arduous work for a few pounds of muscle. (Although that would still be a worthy accomplishment, don’t get me wrong.) We want you guys being (falsely) accused of rampant steroid abuse and top secret military muscle-building experiments.

As, say, a mid-sized 150 pound skinny male you’d potentially want two or three times that amount of protein and maltodextrin to build the maximum amount of muscle. If you’re skinny-fat, perhaps take a single or double dose. If you’re skinny skinny—a ripped ectomorph—then maybe up to a triple dose. (And scale back the dosage as you grow.) No need to double or triple the creatine dosage – just the protein and maltodextrin.

I’m about as stereotypical an ectomorphic as they come, and I personally mix up 90g of protein, 180g of carbs, and 5g of creatine when I’m really trying to gain weight. (When I’m coasting I eat fewer calories and try to get more of them from whole foods. A workout drink this large isn’t something you do forever, this is something you do for a few months to build tons of muscle.)

I start sipping on it as I warm up, and I chug whatever’s left when I finish my workout. That bad boy racks up 1080 calories of exactly the kind of nutrition we want when training. It tastes pretty crappy (think liquid cake), but nothing will guarantee muscle growth like consuming tons of extremely effective calories at the most crucial muscle-building moment. For most of us skinny guys, who often have trouble consuming enough calories, this is the magic formula we’ve been missing.

 

Daily Creatine: Take 3-5 grams every day. Sprinkle it on your cereal, put it in your coffee/tea, mix it with water—whatever you like. On workout days you don’t need to worry about it, since it will be in your workout drink.

It will take a few weeks for your body to reach maximum levels from steadily taking it, so If you want to load up on creatine quickly just take three or four 3-5g doses for the first week (if you take more you’ll just pee it out). Research is unclear about whether there’s an advantage to loading up quickly vs steadily—both ways work wonders. I personally load up steadily.

 

Daily Fish oil & Vitamin D: 2g EPA, 1.5g DHA daily, and 2000-4000IU vitamin D.

If you go with NutraSea + Vitamin D this works out to one tablespoon of fish oil every day. Pretty simple.

Taking vitamin D first thing in the morning works pretty well. That’s when the sun comes up and you begin synthesizing it naturally (if you were living beside a tropical beach). Taking it later at night could potentially interfere with your sleeping patterns.

And there you have it!

If you use our links to buy the supplements, thank you! We appreciate it. If you don’t, that’s cool too. The supplements will work just as well wherever you find them. Here they are all in a row:

  1. Creatine
  2. Maltodextrin
  3. Whey
  4. NutraSea + Vitamin D

And once again, if you aren’t already getting results don’t spend any money on supplements. They aren’t the magic solution—you need a better plan. Think of supplements like a multiplier. If you build zero pounds of muscle and increase your results by 50% … you’ve still built zero pounds of muscle. If you’re gaining a pound of muscle every week and you add in that same 50% increase though, you’re now gaining 1.5 pounds of muscle every week. As an ectomorph who’s tired of being skinny that may be worth your hard earned money. Or it might not be, because, see, either way you’ll end up a beast!

Questions? Ask ‘em in the comments!

17 Ways to Save Money on Groceries and Supplements while Building Muscle

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(Updated September 2014) It’s May 1st, 2010 and Shane and I just graduated from university a few days earlier. We’re living in a high-rise apartment with our good friend Payam in a less than ideal neighbourhood. We’re just starting our “Muscle May” experiment – a one month challenge Shane presented to Payam and me. The idea was to have all three of us roommates hold one another accountable for 30 days of an extreme diet and exercise change.

At this point I have about $500 left on my nearly maxed out credit card, $38 in my bank account, and no savings. To make matters worse I have no income streams, as Shane and I just started up our design business a few days earlier. We’re looking for our next client, are in the process of applying for a business loan, and rent payments are coming up.

“Wait, so I’m going to need to spend more money on groceries?” I say, weighing in at a soaking wet 130 pounds of pure bone and a large head.

“No, you’re going to need to spend a normal amount on groceries. You’re horribly underfeeding your body right now. We all are.” Shane responded.

“How the heck am I supposed to pay for rent, more food and these supplements you keep talking about … like this nitrous oxide–

“– it’s nitric oxide. Nitrous oxide is what you put in your car.” Shane cut me off. “And it’s only for 30 days. Plus, some supplements, like protein powder, are actually cheaper than real food.”

Fast forward 30 days and I’m now 30 pounds heavier than I was before. (22 pounds from the nutrition and training + 8 pounds from the creatine.) I feel pretty damn incredible. But it looks like I  better figure out a way to pay for this new “normal” amount of groceries. Inside are the top 17 tricks I’ve found for cutting costs over the past 2 and a half years without compromising results.

Make a budget but don’t kill yourself over it

I read that creating a budget will make you more financially aware and improve your buying decisions regardless of whether or not you actually even follow it. A budget will give you a good idea of how much you can afford to spend on food (and supplements if you choose to opt for them). A budget might dictate whether or not you buy organic, buy that prime rib roast, or buy butter.

What you don’t need to do is beat yourself up over the budget. You don’t need to freak out, count pennies or cut coupons. The main goal here is to increase your financial awareness of the costs of certain foods and where you’re spending your money. You can use a great tool like Mint.com to help with budgeting – no need for a pen, paper and an oversized calculator.

Skip going organic

Organic foods are usually quite a bit more expensive so, if you’ve got a tight budget, opting for conventional is just fine. There’s actually a lack of scientific data indicating that organic food is even better for your health at all. That isn’t to say that there aren’t any differences, advantages and disadvantages, as some studies indicate that there are, but rather that you likely wouldn’t notice them – especially in the short term. There’s perhaps a bit more ascorbic acid in organic potatoes and vegetables, and perhaps a bit more vitamin C and nitrate  … but we’re talking about very small differences here that aren’t even being reproduced successfully between different studies. (Studies: 1, 2, 3, 4.)

So is going completely conventional going to stop you from improving your health and gaining 20 pounds of muscle? Nope – it won’t even slow you down.

The real organic vs conventional debate comes down to environmental factors, like what pesticides are doing to our earth. That’s a totally different matter, up to our policy makers and our personal choices. On the flip side, there are potential opportunities and advantages that science may present. We’re going to leave this one up to you, your wallet and your values.

Choose cheaper cuts of meat

“Cheap cut” doesn’t mean the meat is worse – it all comes off the same cow of the same health. The muscles that a cow uses the most frequently and the most intensely become tougher, and thus less desirable. It has nothing to do with what’s good for your body. So, for example, eating stew cuts of beef would give your body the exact same building blocks as a tender steak, you’d just need to either cook the meat slower and longer (to make that collagen in the meat nice and tender), pound the heck out of it with a meat tenderizer, or buy ground beef where the muscle/collagen tension is physically ground out. During Muscle May, Shane and I ate a lot of flank, plate, and blade steak. It didn’t taste as good as a sirloin steak since we didn’t know how to cook much back then but it did the trick. Cooking with cheap cuts is a great way to keep costs low, which is why our recipe book includes recipes like stew and chili. I still buy lots of stew cuts today and cook a huge stew once a month.

Now at this point you might be thinking, but Jared, what about grass fed beef – that does come from a different cow! Similar to organic veggies, organic grass fed beef has been hyped left right and centre. Some studies have come out showing its superiority and the health crew have gone wild.

One advantage people talk about is that grass fed beef has a higher omega 3 content – and it does. In order to get a gram of omega 3s from conventional beef you’d need to eat 416g of beef fat, whereas to get that same amount from organic grass fed beef you’d need to eat “just” 114g of fat. To put that in perspective, you’d get twice that amount from a single walnut. So let’s be real here – we aren’t getting significant amounts of omega 3s from our beef. Since the fatty cuts are the expensive ones, and grass fed beef has low fat content to begin with, trying to get your omega 3s from grass fed beef would bankrupt a millionaire. (study)

Another argument in favour of grass fed beef is that it’s richer in antioxidants but, similar to the argument for omega 3s, it’s far more cost effective to get that from cheaper goods (like veggies).

If  you’re worried about antibiotics then dodge the fatty cuts (which are more expensive anyway). Almost all the antibiotics and toxins that are in a cow are stored in their fat, so just don’t eat the fat lining the edge, and when you’re buying ground meat go extra-lean.

Go part-time vegetarian (the manly way)

I realized Shane and I were eating pretty much like a vegetarians during some of the harder months in our business. Meat and dairy isn’t cheap (milk, greek yogurt, cheese, etc.). What you can do instead is have a couple peanut butter and jam sandwiches (basic carbs, fats and protein). Although it lacks some key components, like vegetables, I can’t think of a cheaper bulking meal. If you’re short on protein just toss in a whey protein shake.

This presents a muscle-building and health dilemma though, since animal products contain dietary cholesterol, and dietary cholesterol is tied to natural testosterone production. (Our bodies create testosterone out of cholesterol.) Less testosterone means less muscle, more fat, a weaker immune system and less masculinity.

The solution here is chicken eggs. One egg has the same amount of dietary cholesterol as a hearty 8oz steak, and contains a staggering list of muscle building nutrients and high quality healthful fats.

Keep in mind that dietary cholesterol isn’t any kind of villain. It’s trans fats, like those found in fried foods, that will give you cholesterol problems. If you’re a lean healthy ectomorph, a diet rich in hearty and healthy dietary cholesterol is great. (Studies: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

So feel free to cut costs by getting the bulk of your calories and protein from dirt cheap dishes like (homemade) refried beans, lentil stew, etc., and then whip up some eggs to keep yourself a masculine muscle-building machine.

Carbs don’t need to be expensive

You’re an ectomorph doing strength-training – 50% or more of your calories should probably be coming from carbs. Potatoes, bread, and rice are some of the cheapest calories out there, and your body can use them to build fearsome amounts of muscle. Potatoes are the healthiest of the trio, and once you start lifting heavy weights there are a lot of vitamins and minerals in them that are great for stimulating muscle growth … and you can buy a 5 or 10 pound bag for only a couple bucks. Sweet potatoes and yams are pretty fantastic, too.

(No, fast food french fries don’t count – but feel free to make them yourself in your oven.)

Supplements can be cheaper than whole foods

This is because some supplements are also made up of macronutrients (protein, carbs, fats) and often have none of that pesky micronutrient stuff that your body needs to feel and work well. Once you start training you may realize that you suddenly need a lot more protein, and a scoop of protein powder is a lot cheaper than a chicken breast. It’s not as rich in vitamins and minerals, but so long as you’re eating a balanced diet made up mostly of whole foods, you’ll be okay. Aside from usually being cheaper, supplements are generally in powder form and downed as a liquid, i.e., they’ll be easier to squeeze into your day without taking too much of your time or appetite away.

Some supplements that replace whole foods:

  • Fish oil replaces fats, and is the exception to the lower in nutritional content rule. Fish oil is rich in EPA and DHA which are two of the healthiest omega 3s out there and great for staying lean and building muscle.
  • Maltodextrin and dextrose replace carbs. If you buy these at a supplement store they can be expensive (check out the tub of waxi maize next time you’re there) but bought at a grocery or bulk food store they’re the cheapest macronutrients out there.
  • Whey, casein, egg albumin, pea and rice protein powders replace whole food protein. Try to get some unprocessed protein in your diet too, but feel free to sub these guys in to save some money.

Keep in mind there are also a ton of supplements that don’t add calories. Many of these are vitamin and mineral supplements of varying effectiveness, but the really expensive ones that muscle-builders often squander their money on are a type of supplement called ergogenics. (If you’re a supplement newbie you’ll probably recognize the king of ergogenics: caffeine. It’s used to power a ton of supplements, from NO2Explode to Superpump.)

These supplements contain a whole slew of pump-up ingredients. They’re sort of like the Redbull of working out, and they won’t make you big – just wired. These supplements are expensive for a few reasons: they’re trendy, require a ton of marketing and promotion, require a ton of research and development, they’re kind of addictive … and supplements in general have a ridiculous profit margin. You can make equally awesome gains with or without ‘em, so they should be the first thing you cut when trying to cut costs.

(One exception to the rule is good old creatine monohydrate. It’s classic and effective, the novelty has long since worn off, and it’s actually pretty affordable. You’ll find that the trendy “new and improved” derivatives of creatine variations are expensive though, so stick to monohydrate.)

Drink our home-made sugar/protein drinks surrounding your workout

Speaking of cheap supplements, this is the absolute cheapest way to crush 1000 calories of body-building nutrients. We designed our home-made workout drink for results above all else, and it’s just an added bonus that the ingredients are so affordable.

Just so you know, some of the links below have affiliate links out to Amazon so we’d get a small portion of the sale (around 2-3%) in case you see anything helpful! Thanks, we appreciate it!

Maltodextrin (60% of the drink) is one of the cheapest foods on the earth. You can buy pounds of the stuff with the nickels and dimes accumulating in your change pocket.

Whey protein  (30% of the drink) is the cheapest source of protein out there, too. And since you’re putting the drink together yourself, you’re not paying for the marketing and research costs that are normally tacked onto a pre-packaged weight gainer or intra-workout supplement.

This our homemade approach, and it weighs in at something like 1/7th the cost of Optimum Nutrition’s Serious Mass. Why is ours so much cheaper? Because you aren’t paying an arm and a leg for marked up maltodextrin, marketing and (profit) margins. It also doesn’t taste very good.

Go straight to the source (farmers or farmers market)

Speaking of profit margins, supplement and health food stores are known for having the highest. Grocery stores, on the other hand, are known in the business world for having the lowest margins but they do still have them. If you live in a rural area with farmers nearby or if you live in a city with a farmers market, you could save yourself some bucks or up the quality of your food by cutting out the middle man.

Shop online for the best deal

Another way to avoid paying for the costs of maintaining and operating a retail space is to order online. If the cheapest supplements this month are on Amazon.com, grab ‘em there. If you found a wicked deal on Bodybuilding.com, go for it. Do a little pre-planning for when you’ll need to order supplements again so you won’t need to go to the mall to get emergency protein that’s $20 dollars more than online. Be careful where you order from though – shipping or duties/taxes could make your planned bargain a loss. If you know you love the supplement, you can buy in bulk to avoid paying for that shipping and handling over and over again, too.

Some good supplements at good prices:

  1. Maltodextrin – the cheapest carb on the planet, and fantastic in workout shakes.
  2. Whey protein – isolate (high quality) with a bit of added glutamine.
  3. NutraSea – fish oil for the buff and healthy beasts out there.
  4. Creatine Monohydrate – the most effective and the most cost-efficient kind.

If something is on sale, buy a ton of them.

Almost all food has an expiry date … if it doesn’t, it might not be real food. But some expiry dates are for a year or two from now. When your favourite protein powder is on sale for 30% off – buy as much as you can without going over your budget. When my favourite peanut butter goes on sale, I’m buying 12. Shane has his entire freezer full of frozen berries that he bought half off. Here are some items that are worth stocking up on if you see them on sale:

  • Peanut or basically any kind of nut butter
  • Cans or jars of nearly anything (coconut milk, tuna, beans, jam)
  • Supplements with a long shelf life (almost all of them)

Buying from a bulk-store like Costco or Sam’s is another great way of buying in bulk. The USDA did a study and 86% of food is cheaper at a bulk-store, which is awesome, but keep in mind that also means that 14% of food is actually more expensive at big bulk stores. So pay attention (without being neurotic).

The last piece of advice I have for buying in bulk is to keep it to the basics – foods you know you’ll never grow tired of. If the thing you’re buying in bulk has a flavour, don’t buy something that sounds like it could be good like watermelon or banana flavoured because you already know it’s going to taste awful. Stick to the basics and don’t buy food in bulk that isn’t already a staple in your diet.

Swap out the junk food

Eating a nice, big, healthy meal before you shop is the best trick to curb any impulse junk food cravings. Aside from not being good for your mental health, your mood, fat gains, or probably your skin – junk food is expensive. Remember how I said I didn’t have much more money to spend on food? I replaced my daily bag of chips with another chicken breast, I swapped out my eggo waffles for a dozen eggs, and my delicious cans of Dr. Pepper were swapped out for milk. Damn, that Dr. Pepper was a tough one.

Skip the processed food

Even if food is labeled as healthy, the more processed it is the more expensive and junk-foody it is. For example, some people like buying the yogurt with the jam on the bottom. Seemingly healthy … and deceptively more expensive. See, even if you’re paying the same price as normal yogurt, a portion of that expensive and nutritious yogurt has been replaced with cheap and nutritionless sugar. But it’s still the same price as the plain yogurt.

If you want a healthy way to eat flavoured yogurt, buy plain yogurt and add in fresh/frozen berries or a dollop of raw honey. If you want a cheap way to eat yogurt, just buy a cheap jar of jam and mix the flavour in yourself – or get used to the taste of plain yogurt.

Usually the more work that goes into something the more expensive it is, but some foods are processed as a way of cutting costs, making them cheaper than that same food au naturale. It used to upset me that I had to pay more for real peanut butter than for processed peanut butter … until I understood why.

Ground up peanuts (let’s call that “peanut butter”) are more expensive than Skippy, Kraft, Peter Pan, Jif or whatever else because those brands take out the precious peanut oil and replace it with a cheaper and less nutritious oil, like soybean oil. And then they mix in sugar – the cheapest ingredient on earth. Look at the ingredients of Peter Pan – there are like 7 ingredients in there that have nothing to do with peanuts. Your peanut butter should just say ‘peanuts’ or ‘roasted peanuts’ and, perhaps, ‘salt’.

Don’t eat out and learn to be a good cook

Obviously, eating in is much cheaper and 99% of the time healthier too, since you control what’s in it. I would say it’s better to invest in something like the 4 Hour Chef for 25 bucks and learn how to cook well forever than blow money by going out every time you want to eat well. 4 Hour Chef is not your mom’s cookbook with a bunch of hard-to-make recipes. It’s a book full of simple lessons that bring you from a non-cook to a damn-good cook over the period of a couple months. Unlike a recipe book, it focuses on building blocks of knowledge rather than just following steps. The meals are cost efficient and health conscious, too.

I used to hate cooking and now I love it. The biggest switch for me was buying a good knife that I keep sharp, never cooking hungry, and always having meals I cooked in bulk stored in the freezer so I don’t need to cook when I’m not up to it. I blend up a quick shake and then start cooking. If I’m already starving, I won’t bother cooking at that point, since it becomes a test of willpower and mood control. I’d much rather go for a quick peanut butter and jam sandwich and worry about cooking once I’m satisfied. If you’ve got a wife or kids to look after, prepare a quick snack and then start cooking. No reason to make it stressful.

These days I eat out because I love going to great restaurants. I now only go to art restaurants where the food is prepared and served beautifully. I don’t bother with franchises or lacklustre restaurants anymore. With the money you pay to eat there you could buy a higher quality steak from the butcher and BBQ/panfry it yourself for much cheaper. You do know how to cook a steak right? Remember, it doesn’t cost more to be a good cook. It just takes some knowledge (Youtubing) & quality practice.

Learn to cook more dishes with less ingredients

We typically throw out 50% of our food because it has gone bad. Why has it gone bad? Take a look in your fridge … how many ingredients are in there slowly dying? If you improve your skills as a cook, you can keep minimal ingredients yet still have lots of variety using different spice combinations and different cooking techniques (braising, frying, baking, ziploc sous-vide, etc.). Keep dried spices and canned foods on hand for variety, and avoid buying bundles of fresh herbs, like parsley unless you can consistently use them up.

Aside from less food being thrown out, eating the same ingredients more consistently will allow you to track your calories effortlessly while you’re trying to bulk up.

Only buy in-season or frozen foods

Buying foods out of season have a cost. It’s hard to understand what “out of season” means when we always have foreign fresh foods available to us but rest assured you will pay a bit more for out of season fruits and veggies, exotic or not. I eat frozen foods all the time and so long as you don’t nuke ‘em, they taste pretty damn good. They’re fresh and healthy, too, since they’re frozen at peak ripeness and top nutritiousness.

Eat your current cupboard

If you’re really broke (and trust me, you’ll know if you reached that point) you’ll begin to realize that the weird stuff in the back of your cupboard actually sounds really, really good. Almost gourmet like. Suddenly eating a can of chickpeas with canned tuna using a spoon sounds like the best idea. Dust off that can and dig in!

Don’t cheap out on the things that matter

This article was written with the intention that your goal is to get beastly and save money. Don’t think you’re doing your fitness goals any favours by skimping on calories or the amount of food you’re eating. Those 200-300 calories every day you’re skimping on could be enough to supercharge your muscle growth.

Don’t cheap out on your gym either. Shane and I train at a gym called 99 Sudbury, which is by no means the cheapest gym in Toronto. We train there because we love it. We think it’s the best strength training gym in Toronto. The members/staff are nice, the training area looks badass, they’ve got all the equipment we need, and most of all it gives us the motivation to get up and get out. All of a sudden training isn’t a chore – it’s as fun as grabbing a beer at the local bar with your friends. If your gym isn’t motivating you (because you need to always need to wait for equipment, it has harsh white walls, you don’t like the crowd, or it isn’t an environment suitable for strength training) maybe it’s time to find one that works better for you. The point of money is for you to spend it on things that make life better, so if spending it increases your enjoyment of life then it’s money well spent.

Lastly, don’t cheap out on your workout program. It’d be a shame to buy more groceries, a gym membership (or home-gym equipment), gear, supplements … and then use a less than ideal program that could leave you with no results, put all your “gains” in the wrong places, or leave your body more injury prone than ever before. Prioritize what you’re willing to invest in and maybe leave the tub of N02XPLODE back on the shelf.

  1. A good plan
  2. Calorie rich and relatively nutritious food (or supplements)
  3. A membership at a rad gym (or home gym)
Only then should you be buying new shoes, donuts, parsley, Superpump, a new TV, weight gainers, or Call of Duty 9 for Xbox.

Closing Words

And there you have it! You may have noticed I didn’t mention coupons – I personally don’t bother with coupons. I find that usually goes beyond being frugal and crosses into cheapskate territory (there is a big difference). Paying attention to sales is enough for me.

We also aren’t saying never buy your buds a round of drinks, go to a show, take your girl out on a date, or pay a premium to support the values that you believe (say, never paying for slave labour). Part of the beastly lifestyle is never letting anything become an unhealthy obsession, compromise your values, or become stressful to the point that it lowers the quality of your life.

So if you want to eat out – be realistic, budget it in and eat out guilt-free. To paraphrase the financial author Robert Kiwosaki  it’s not too helpful to advise people to live within their means – that advice will crush anyone’s spirit. It’s all about expanding peoples’ means. These are ways to maintain a high quality of life without wasting money, not how to live like a poor person so you can be buried in a bedazzled gold coffin.

– But I do know the reality that at certain points in our life, most of us will need to pay careful attention to our budgets and make sacrifices in order to accomplish our goals. So I hope this helps a bit man!

P.S. when it comes to gym gear there’s no reason to go crazy. Throw on an old band tee, any old (non-denim) shorts or sweatpants, and stick to cheap flat-soled shoes like Vans or Converse. (With lifting all you need is a flat sole – no need for expensive spiderman shoes.)

P.P.S. if you’ve got any bits of wisdom to share, leave it in the comments below.

Ectomorph Weightlifting – Why Skinny Guys Need to Lift a Little Differently

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(Updated September 2014.) There are two things we ectomorphs often forget when getting into weightlifting. The first is that when we first start taking it seriously, well, we’re still novices. We can’t exactly be expected to perform lifts that require high degrees of athleticism – athleticism that we don’t necessarily have yet. This is off-putting, because we often desperately want to get bigger without being held up for months with all sorts of posture and mobility work. Luckily, we can develop mobility, strength, stability and power simultaneously with size. But we do need to learn how to move and lift right from the get-go though, otherwise we’re setting ourselves up for building an imbalanced body that looks funky, performs poorly and is vulnerable to injury.

The second thing we often forget is that we don’t have the same bone or muscle structures that most bodybuilders and powerlifters have. Most of those guys have highly specialized bodies, accomplished both through decades of training… and also their genetics. They’re often born with bodies that suit the lifts they do. Just like the tallest guys are drawn to basketball, weightlifters typically gravitate towards the lifts that they naturally excel at.

This means that the guys you’re watching do the bench press are often the worst ones to get your cues from. The lift is very different for them—they’ve got big muscle bellies, short thick bones, stubby limbs and barrel chests. We’ve often got long tendons, long slim bones, long lanky limbs and shallower rib cages.

Taking their cues is like asking a 7’2 guy how to dunk a basketball. He may very well say “uh just reach up and put it in.”

Overall we’re just longer people. We make better decathletes than shot-putters; better quarterbacks than linebackers. Hardly anything to be upset about—it’s not like thin guys can’t kick ass at athletics and build amazingly powerful bodies. We just need to take a different approach, and it’s not the approach you’d likely see the biggest guys in the gym taking.

But if we want to be strong muscular dudes we really do need to lift. Unlike many other body types, we can’t rely on our genetics or everyday physical activities to build us any muscle. (More on that here.) So let’s talk about lifting like ectomorphs so we can turn ourselves into big burly dudes.

Let’s start by digging into the three big lifts a little bit. Obviously these aren’t the only lifts you’d use, but usually they make a solid foundation to build a program around. They’ll also allow us to explain three of the five fundamental movement patterns (hip hinges, squats, upper body presses, upper body pulls, loaded carries).

Ectomorph Deadlifting

If you’re familiar with physics, you’ll intuitively know that our bone structure defines our lever lengths and affects the range of motion we lift weights through. This stuff plays a huge role in how much we can lift. A guy with gorilla-like arms can easily deadlift weight off the ground. He hardly needs to bend to grab the barbell and doesn’t need to lift the weight back up very high.

In physics terms that means he needs to exert a large force, sure, but since the distance travelledisn’t very far, there isn’t much “work” (force x distance) being done. Deadlifts are made even easier by having a short torso, which means there isn’t much spinal stabilization required. Plus, short lever lengths lead to rad leverage.

If an alligator-type guy were to attempt a deadlift he’d need to bend down ridiculously low because of his short little arms (also resulting in bad lifting mechanics) and then lift the weight through a huge range of motion—all while stabilizing an incredibly long torso. A huge amount of work is being done, a lot muscle surrounding the spine needs to be present to keep the spine stable, it requires impressive hip mobility, and that man needs to be wickedly strong to overcome really poor leverage.

As such the world’s best deadlifters tend to look like Lamar Gant. Gant could deadlift over 600 pounds at a bodyweight of 120. Let me introduce you to the king of ectomorphs:

Most of us ectomorph have much longer torsos though, often leading us to believe that since we have long fragile spines we probably shouldn’t be deadlifting. That’s just asking for disaster, right? It makes sense that we should leave the deadlifting to the short muscular guys with short stable spines – the guys that don’t need to worry about popping a disk… right?

As guys with long fragile spines and with relatively little muscle protecting them, we, more than anyone, need to be doing lifts that build up stability in our torsos. That means building a stable core and packing huge slabs of muscle onto our lower and upper back. This will protect our long and precious spine.

And the best lift for developing a bullet-proof back, of course, is the deadlift. (Loaded carries are pretty good too.)

The last thing you want to do as an ectomorph is neglect strengthening your spine, build up a ton of muscle, get married while looking buff in your tux, get a little bit drunk at the wedding reception, go to carry your bombshell bride over the threshold… and throw out your still-fragile ecto-back.

If this sounds a little farfetched, just try to think up a scenario where you’d be lifting something and your back wouldn’t be involved at all. It’s kind of tricky. It hardly ever happens. Hell, you can’t even stand up and do a bicep curl without relying on your back for stability. And forget sweeping!

That’s why no amount of lower or upper body strength matters in the real world if you can’t transfer that load through your torso. You can’t squat big, deadlift big, overhead press, carry things, play sports, carry your lover around, etc.

The short stocky barrel-chested guys have stability in their torso naturally. We need to build it. 

Many of us start out looking like crooked lollipops when viewed from the side—what with our long narrow bodies bent out of shape by years of postural/weightlifting neglect. Deads’ll fix that right up. Check out how much lower and upper back musculature one of our members, Brett, was able to build after 10 weeks of focusing on building up his posterior chain:

Even Lamar Gant, seemingly a rare breed of ectomorph with a short torso, actually isn’t as atypical as it first seems. He had a severe case of scoliosis growing up, hindering his back development and causing him a lot of problems. He decided to pursue weightlifting in an effort to correct his spinal curvature and strengthen the muscles surrounding his spine. So, far from being a genetic superhero, he entered the weightlifting arena skinny and with a crooked back.

His back is still crooked, but it’s now far from fragile:

The deadlift isn’t a lift reserved for the naturally strong of back, it’s really quite the opposite. If you assumed that ectomorph deadlifting was a recipe for disaster though don’t worry—I’m not going to make fun of you. Especially since you’re correct. We’ve got some work to do before we can dead like Gant.

For powerlifters, who need to follow a strict set of lifting regulations, the deadlift solution is to rock a really really wide stance, bringing their legs outside their arms. The “sumo” deadlift. This allows their torso to remain upright and means they don’t need to work as hard to stabilize it. It also shortens the range of motion and allows them to lift way heavier. Perfect for their sport. The downside is that instead of building up fearsome back strength, they build up fearsome quad strength.

Quads are cool, but if you’re already emphasizing squatting movement patterns elsewhere in your program you don’t need a second quad-dominant lift to focus on. It also doesn’t help us accomplish our main goal: a rock solid bulletproof back.

Luckily, since we aren’t powerlifters, we have the option of modding the lift by reducing the range of motion. So we take the barbell inside a squat rack, set it up the barbell raised up on the safety bars, and start with rack pulls. This keeps the dead an amazing exercise for building up back strength and stability, while also letting us safely lift heavy enough to stimulate some muscle growth. As you improve your mobility you can lower the bar lower and lower, requiring more and more hip mobility and back stability, until eventually you’re doing a full conventional deadlift—correctly and safely.

At that point your long arms become an advantage, and you should be able to hoist some pretty nice numbers. There’s no sense rushing right there though, as building up hip mobility and back strength is far more important than winning the powerlifting competition you aren’t in.

Ectomorph Bench Press

When it comes to pressing movements (overhead press, bench press, squat, etc) you want the opposite: a big barrel chest and stubby alligator-arms. Due to great lifting mechanics and a short range of motion, you’d hardly need to lower the weight at all and pressing it back up would be a breeze.

Us ectomorphs typically aren’t the most stubtastically built men, and we’re often spotted sporting a long lanky everything. This can make our first time on the bench a really frustrating experience, as the odds are totally stacked against us. We often awkwardly struggle to press tiny amounts of weight while we watch other guys rock it out smoothly and effortlessly.

The problem isn’t that we suck at building muscle though—we don’t—the problem is that we’re trying to bang out routines designed by stocky people for stocky people. Lamar Gant, the ectomorph deadlifting king, was also able to break a world record with his bench press despite having the worst possible physique for it. If he can do it we sure as hell can.

When it comes to the bench press most powerlifters curve their spine to all hell to shorten the range of motion (like Gant, up above). Since the rules state that the bar needs to touch their torso in order to count, they get a little creative. Instead of bringing the bar down low, they can bring their torso up high. Their belly then meets the bar halfway, keeping their shoulders in a healthy position, improving their leverage and shortening the range of motion.

You’ll do better by keeping your back straight and simply stopping when your upper arms reach sufficient depth for optimal muscular development (parallel with the floor). You don’t want to drop it any further than that, as too much rotation in that joint will risk doing damage to it.

We’re of the belief that weightlifting should make you stronger, not weaker. Damage done to joints in the process of building bigger muscles doesn’t really fit with that objective.

One trick we use is rolling up a towel and putting it on our chests, simulating a larger ribcage. Even with your now-appropriately-thick-ribcage, you’ll still have a larger than average range of motion, since your arms are so long … and that’s actually pretty great news when it comes to building muscle. The more total work you do, the more growth you can stimulate.

Ectomorph Squatting

Squats are a tricky beast for us ectomorphs too, and by now you might be able to guess the fix. As you’ve probably heard a thousand times, the lower you squat the better. That’s true. Deep squats are one of the best ways of involving the biggest and most powerful muscle groups in your body. You’ll be building up your quads, hammies, calves, core, posterior chain, ego and glutes. The squat works over 200 muscles and it does a better job of training your abs than the plank does.

The benefits keep compounding the lower you can go with perfect form. The deeper you squat the more your gains will translate into hearty real world strength (study), the more glute activation you’ll get (study), and, since muscle hypertrophy is positively correlated with range of motion, the more muscle size you’ll build.

So deep squats are a badass lift, especially for us ectomorphs who are seriously eager to add some thickness to our bodies.

…But just because rockin’ out a deep squat rocks doesn’t mean that you should be doing them. At least not yet.

Many of these classic exercises are actually quite advanced. Moreover, couches, cars (buses, etc) and chairs are all notorious for reducing people’s ability to squat like champs.

So we’ve got to come clean about our athleticism (or lack thereof) and start where we’ve got to start. Exceed the mobility of your hips and all of a sudden you’re causing knee and lower back stress. You only get the benefits if you can execute the lift properly, and building up the hip mobility required to squat deep properly takes time and conscious effort. If your back is flailing around like a fish at the bottom of your squat, your knees are hurting, or your lower back is rounding over, you’re squatting too low.

Like with his bench, Gant has a horrendous body for squatting. He’s got a tiny torso and enormous legs. #ectomorphproblems

To make up for it, he had to develop pretty unbelievable hip mobility in order to get to depth. But he did:

So as an ectomorph you should probably squat, and you should probably squat deep… eventually.

(One thing to keep in mind is that while the studies are all in agreement that the deeper you go the more muscle activation you’ll get, they also used the same load for the varying depths. That was an oversight. Obviously when you restrict range of motion you can haul heavier weights, so there are advantages and disadvantages to all ranges of motion that aren’t necessarily reflected in these studies. The heavier load you’d be able to handle with a reduced range of motion may make up for inferior squat depth. You can work with what you’ve got and build a whole helluva lot of muscle while also working on your depth.)

As for lifting safely, learning solid technique and building muscle every step of the way, keep leverages in mind. The further in front of you the load is, the more upright you’ll be able to keep your torso, and the less hip mobility you’ll need to do the lift safely. So start with goblet squats, then progress to front squats, and gradually work your way down deeper and deeper until maybe one day you’re comfortably past parallel when doing beautiful full back squats.

How to Lift  as an Ectomorph

It’s pretty typical to be a little atypical. When it comes to any lift there’s always a chance that it won’t quite suit your body or your experience level. As someone who would call themselves thin, skinny or an ectomorph, it’s quite likely that’ll be the case for a good number of the lifts popular in the bodybuilding and strength training industries, as they’re dominated by stocky guys with decades of lifting experience.

That isn’t the case with weightlifting in general though, as many lifts are geared more towards athletes, and athletes come in all shapes and sizes. There’s plenty of research done into lifting with a wide variety of body types.

Whatever style of lifting you do, a good rule of thumb is that lifting should feel good. You shouldn’t feel pain in your joints, you shouldn’t feel pinches, and you shouldn’t be worried that a limb will pop off.

Lift with a weight that’s challenging yet comfortable and generally stay away from failure during your heavy sets—at least during your first few months of training. As a relatively untrained ectomorph looking to build size and strength you probably shouldn’t be squatting, deadlifting or benching to failure every week, if ever. That’s where form deteriorates, recovery times become enormous, and injuries become more common.

There are exceptions to every rule, but in general if anything it’s the littler and more isolated exercises, like bicep curls, that you’d want to risk going to failure on, not the big heavy compound strength and mobility builders.

Focus on the details of perfecting form when practicing and warming up; focus on lifting when you’re lifting. Our goal isn’t to turn you into a rigid lifting robot; you’re still supposed to lift like a rugged beast. Developing perfect textbook technique is something that happens over years of training, not before you ever do your first squat. There’s plenty of time to focus on perfecting your form while warming up and practicing your lifts. You can check yourself out in the mirror, hold a broomstick against your back to keep it straight, etc. When it comes time to actually lift weight though, it’s often easier to loosen up a bit and focus more on lifting “naturally”. Holding onto tension and getting too cerebral while lifting can often be more troublesome than just selecting a weight you’re totally in control of and then lifting it.

There’s no need to be lifting the most you absolutely can or forcing yourself through ranges of motions your body can’t own yet. Weightlifting isn’t about how much you can lift today, it’s about how much more you can lift tomorrow.

 Good luck!
TaylorP's Bony to Beastly Skinny Muscle-building Ectomorph Transformation

Milk, Muscle and Marcel

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(Updated July 2014.) One summer I decided I was going to bulk up. This was back when I was 130 pounds and sick and tired of being 130 pounds. I was working at an ad agency as a junior designer on the illustration team. I was new there, and also newly determined to gain 20 pounds. Drinking an entire bag of milk (1.3 litres) each day was part of my plan to do that.

Err … okay that’s not entirely accurate – I didn’t quite drink the entire bag each day. A couple months into the summer one of my particularly caffeinated coworkers started complaining to everyone that by the end of the day, each and every day, I would always finish the milk, leaving none for her afterwork coffee. She was appalled that I was so inconsiderate. I don’t blame her – drinking 1.3 litres each day of communal office milk is certainly an office foul. Shame on Shane.

When this was brought to my attention I felt awful. This was a really awkward situation. First, I had to tell her that I knew what she was saying behind my back, then that I understood her concerns … and then that I wasn’t drinking communal milk – I was bringing my own bag of milk in with me each morning. She’d been using my milk for her coffee throughout the day each day. At that point someone pointed out that there were communal milk and cream cartons in the door of the fridge. She wasn’t impressed: “How on earth would I know that? Who brings in milk to work like that?! You even have your own milk pitcher here … ”

Who brings milk to work like that? Desperate skinny boys who are trying to build muscle, that’s who. Milk’s a controversial drink though, and I’ve learned a lot since then about building muscle. So what’s the lowdown on milk?

Introducing “Muscel” Marcel

Muscle, Milk, Marcel – Bony to Beastly Ectomorph Transformation

Marcel was one of our earliest members of Bony to Beastly. For over a year now he’s been one of the friendliest, most positive and most helpful guys in the community. He’s an Australian kid with an athletic build who assured us that he was an ectomorph. We didn’t believe him – he looked pretty buff – so he dug up some of his before photos.

Ectomorph indeed.

Marcel had already gained 40-50 pounds from training heavy and growing up (from 18 to 20) and was looking for a program that would help him past the plateau he’d hit at just under 180lbs.

He was telling us that at this point all he was managing to gain was fat. He had been trying GOMAD (gallon of milk per day) and then adding in weight gainer shakes on top of it to pump his calories up even higher. His strength wasn’t moving up anymore, he was feeling terrible and he was getting fatter.

I’d been there too. My “fat Shane” days were back when I was consuming ludicrous amounts of calories – many coming from weight gainer shakes. I mean, add in a ton of processed sugar and processed protein into your diet, combine it with a massive calorie surplus and you’ve got a recipe for two things: muscle and fat. During my “fat” days though I wasn’t even getting stronger or more muscular! Neither was Marcel.

That’s because there’s more to the puzzle than just calories, of course. Is milk a good source of nutritious calories?

That’s a tough question. There’s a lot of anti-milk media out there. Vegans have always been (understandably) at odds with milk, but ever since Paleo came along all of a sudden milk is more controversial than coke. (Err … the drink, not the drug.)

Interestingly enough though, Paleo isn’t actually totally at odds with dairy – at least not for us ectomorphs (and Paleo isn’t really designed for us anyway). Anyway, to quote one of the biggest names in Paleo, Robb Wolf: “Dairy is great if you place a premium on muscle/weight gain. My go‐to approach for a mass gain protocol is simply Paleo plus dairy. There are all kinds of people recommending the same approach; I think EliteFTS is calling it the Mountain Dog Diet. Former NFL lineman John Welbourn has seen remarkable results with his football program combined with Paleo + Dairy.”

Milk does have an impressive resumes when it comes to building fearsome amounts of mass. Check out 50’s strongman Paul Anderson, back when being a strong man was virtually unheard of:

Paul Anderson – Milk Monster (Not an Ectomorph)

Paul Anderson is one incredibly inspiring and incredibly scary example of milk’s amazing ability to make monsters out of men. On one hand, he became the strongest man in the world through smart training and consuming humungous quantities of milk. On the other hand he also got really really really fat and died in his 60’s ( … which actually isn’t so bad for a guy weighing nearly 400 pounds).

Paul Anderson – Milk Monster (Not an Ectomorph)

 

Milk: Muscle Saint or Monster?

Milk is pretty controversial, so the first things we need to consider when looking into a study or article concerning milk are the various biases. The dairy industry is a huge powerhouse (especially in the US) with a lot of money and political power behind it, vegans are against milk because it comes from domesticated animals, some people have milk allergies and intolerances, magazines are always primed to publish novel and controversial findings, some people come from cultures where milk is or isn’t socially acceptable, some guys spent their entire childhoods consuming loads of milk, etc. Overall some people love milk and some people hate it.

I don’t love it or hate it. I don’t have a moral issue with it either, and I’m not affiliated with any dairy lobbies or anything. I could never drink milk again and be totally happy. Or I could drink a litre a day for the rest of my life and still be totally happy. If it’s healthy and helpful I’m in … if it isn’t – I’m out. I’m pro-health and pro-results, so whenever I look into stuff relating to food I always try my best to be open-minded to whatever the science and research indicates.

So let’s dig in:

  • We’ve been consuming animal milk for over 10,000 years. We eventually more or less settled on cows’ milk because it has a very mild and rather pleasant taste. (Carnivores have especially weird tasting milk, and thus we’ve never much been a fan of, say, dog milk.)
  • Milk contains zinc, selenium and magnesium – three vitamins that bodybuilders and strength athletes often supplement with because of their effect on anabolic hormone production (like testosterone). It’s often fortified with vitamin D as well, which most people are deficient in. (It also contains vitamin A, vitamin b12, vitamin b6, niacin, thiamine, riboflavin, folate, potassium, calcium, etc.)
  • The protein in milk has a favourable and balanced breakdown of amino acids (BCAAs), making it great for inducing muscle growth. We can process it to create whey protein powder and casein protein powder – two of the most famous muscle-building supplements out there. To quote Alan Aragon, arguably the most educated and evidence based nutrition expert out there: “Cow’s milk has among the most biologically available protein fractions in the known food supply. It’s a particularly potent dietary source of nutrients for the growth and maintenance of lean tissue in humans. Isolated whey and milk protein are among the highest-rating proteins across the various protein quality indexes.” (source)
  • In the 1900s we became more aware of bone health and started to understand exactly how rich in nutrients milk was. Understandably, it became immensely popular and bigger industries started to get involved. At this point we started sterilizing and pasteurizing our milk. The sterilization process removes some of the nutrients, but also makes it safer to consume.
  • Raw milk isn’t pasteurized, and thus supposedly retains more nutrients. It isn’t guaranteed to be free of bacteria though, so in some countries (and many US states) the legality of it varies. Moreover, studies are finding that the pasteurization of milk doesn’t seem to actually reduce the nutrient content of it anyway. (study) If you have a trusted source raw milk can be a good option. For most pasteurized milk is a better bet.
  • We can ferment milk to create cheese, yogurt and kefir. All three can contain impressive amounts of probiotics. Probiotics (good bacteria) are great for our immune system and digestive health – two things we want in peak condition when skinny and trying to gain weight … and always … but especially when skinny and trying to gain weight.
  • The protein found in the milk that we drink is mainly casein, which digests very slowly and steadily. (In supplement form casein isn’t as popular as whey protein, but it’s a popular and promising protein supplement as well.)
  • Chili peppers contain an oil called capsaicin, which makes our taste buds sting. The casein in milk binds to fats (e.g. oils). It neutralizes the capsaicin and removes the pain. Water, beer, juice, etc., – they all just spread it around, often making it worse. Milk is thus the best drink to have alongside spicy food.
  • Casein may also be (very mildly) addictive. Our bodies break it down into casomorphins, which is the nerdy younger sister of endorphins. The casomorphins in milk have about 1/10th the painkilling effect of morphine.
  • Milk contains lactose, a very very slowly digested sugar, which some people have trouble digesting (making them bloated and nauseous). To digest lactose we use the digestive enzyme lactase, which some people have more of than others. Generally if you consume milk your body will start producing more lactase so you can better digest it. This means that even people who are lactose intolerant now can often become tolerant. Sometimes though, people still don’t produce enough lactase. It’s not common, but some people remain lactose intolerant despite regular consumption of milk. So they came out with lactose-free milk. Lactose free milk isn’t actually free of lactose – those tricksters – it just has the digestive enzyme lactase already in it, reducing our need to produce our own. All of a sudden we can digest the milk. (Since whey protein is just protein – no sugar, i.e., no lactose – most lactose intolerant dudes can still consume whey protein isolates.)
  • Some studies indicate that some cultures digest milk better than others. People with Northern European blood handle it well, whereas many people of Asian and African descent struggle with it. (study)
  • Switzerland, Australia and Sweden are in the top 10 countries for largest consumption of milk … and in the top 10 countries for longest life expectancy.
  • Some people are actually allergic to milk, which is a whole different ballgame. Those people, and they probably know who they are, it should go without saying, shouldn’t be consuming milk. That’s fairly rare though.
  • Most experts agree that milk is great for bone health and bone density, due to its calcium content. Some vegan experts disagree, and some even disagree that calcium is good for you (which would also mean avoiding spinach, soy and almonds). Robert Heany, one of the more respected researchers of bone health, put together a meta-analysis of all the studies looking into bone health and concluded that milk and calcium were fantastic.
  • The “wholesomeness” of milk varies from country to country. Some milk, depending on where you live and what brand of milk you buy, may come from cows who were given hormones and/or antibiotics. The United States is pretty loosey goosey with their regulations, whereas many other countries, like Canada, Australia, Europe, Japan etc., restrict most of that stuff. Consuming antibiotics and hormones is very probably bad for us, but it’s uncertain whether consuming the small (nearly undetectable) quantities found in milk would produce any negative effects in us. Also, pasteurizing the milk may completely neutralize the bad stuff. I haven’t found any studies definitively showing that these kinds of milk are totally safe … or any showing that they aren’t. Some countries err on the side of caution, some err on the other side.
  • Organic milk is very similar to regular milk … but in the States a key difference is that the cows aren’t given hormones or antibiotics. Most tests can’t detect a difference but this may be a safer bet for Americans, as most (if not all) of the studies linking milk to bad things, like cancer, are using processed milk from big industries that are giving their cows antibiotics and hormones. The good news for people living in the States though is that expensive hormone-free milk there is still cheaper than regular milk is in other countries, which is hormone-free by default and always expensive.
  • Milk is incredibly balanced. 2% milk is 27% protein, 38% carbs, 35% fat. That’s a balanced meal on it’s own. (Looking for a meal while on the go? Pop into a corner store and grab a litre of milk.)
  • Whole milk is the most anabolic. For some reason it seems to produce the best muscle growth. At first this was thought to be because it was higher in calories, but it turns out that even if you’re consuming the same amount of calories from skim milk as you are from whole milk, the whole milk still produces more muscle (even though the same caloric load of skim milk would have almost double the protein). This may because the processing of whole milk is less extreme, or that since many of the vitamins and minerals in milk are fat soluble, that whole milk contains more muscle-building micronutrients. When in doubt, go whole. (study)

What happened to Marcel and Me?

I had never been able to gain 20 pounds before, and oh man had I ever tried. The milk was just one component, but a really damn useful one. That bag of milk that I rather affordably enjoyed consuming each day added 700 calories, 45g of protein, 63g of carbs and 26g of fat into my diet. Not bad.

That brought me up to a not-quite-so-skeletal 150 pounds – into the realm of normalcy, finally – and put a stop to the skinny jokes once and for all. More importantly, it gave me the confidence I needed to go on and gain another 40 pounds. Now, at 190 pounds, milk is still a staple part of my diet, especially when busy or travelling, since it’s so accessible (and delicious).

Shane Duquette the Bony to Beastly Milkman

And Marcel? He stopped with the gainers but kept on with the dairy. When Marcel described his diet it sounded something like this: “So I had breakfast along with a couple glasses of milk, and then a snack with another glass of milk, and then some milk, and then lunch with milk, and then I had some fish oil capsules washed down with some milk, and then dinner, and another glass of milk before bed.”

Marcel has just just crushed the 208 pound mark – and at a similar body fat percentage to when he started. That puts his total weight gain, 78 pounds, at more than mine (60 pounds). Prrrretty sweet for a 20 year old ectomorph who’s only been training for a couple years now. Best of all, after his massive success Marcel is now in the middle of a 16 week personal training course so that he can help other people accomplish their goals too.

Marcel-Bony-to-Beastly-Ectomorph-Transformation-208

The How-To Part

We’ve essentially got three options here, depending on how you feel about and respond to milk:

  1. If you’re looking to add milk into your diet start small – a cup of whole milk a day – and work your way up gradually. All of a sudden loading up on tons of dairy might overpower your body’s ability to digest it. (If you feel bloated or nauseous you’ve gone too far too fast – your body isn’t producing enough digestive enzymes yet.)
  2. If you already drink milk, you might want to try experimenting with drinking even more to see if you can build muscle even more quickly.
  3. If you’re allergic, intolerant or morally opposed – no worries. You can still build equally impressive amounts of muscle without it. This is just an option, not any kind of requirement.

So should you drink milk? That’s totally up to you. If you do decide to drink milk though you’ve got one incredibly powerful muscle-building food on your team. (study, study, study, study)

How to Build a Badass Home Gym

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I gained my first 20 pounds using a rusty old barbell and bench that my dad and I found on the side of the road. It wasn’t expensive, it wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t safe and it worked pretty damn well. It wasn’t the first time I’d tried to build muscle – far from it. I’d already tried a couple gyms, a personal trainer and martial arts. This time though, in my minimalistic rickety home gym, things finally started coming together.

… sort of. I didn’t really have any idea what I was doing. I was awkwardly following an advanced bodybuilder routine and just skipping all the exercises that I couldn’t do or didn’t understand. At first I had my burly friend Louis pick up the barbell, curl it, and put it on my back so that I could squat. 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.

Anyway, my training was good enough for me to grow, but it was far from great. Very far. Luckily I was just starting to fall madly in love with performance nutrition, which more than made up for my questionable setup and awkward pro-bodybuilder approach to training.

You don’t need any kind of fancy setup to build muscle. If you’re smart about this, you don’t even need the rickety bench and rusty barbell that I had. You do need to master some not-so-fancy lifting fundamentals though. The fundamentals are what pack on slabs of lean mass, get your adrenaline firing, ramp up your testosterone, and let you effortlessly lift your girlfriend up over your head without shaking uncontrollably and straining your lower back. That’s what actually gets you big and strong. Done properly, they’re also what build up rock solid posture and radically improve your health.

Best of all, the big heavy fundamental lifts don’t require much equipment. Hell, you can build tons of muscle with just one brutally efficient piece of equipment.

My First 20 Pounds

Despite my best efforts I started out at a pretty bony 130 pounds. This isn’t me after attempting a marathon, struggling with an eating disorder or intentionally losing weight or anything, this is the heaviest I’d ever been. And I’d been trying to gain weight for 6 years at this point. That guy on the left is a guy who’d already tried building muscle at the gym and spent a year doing martial arts. I was also not only certified to be a lifeguard, but also certified to teach lifeguards how to be lifeguards. I was a pretty good swimmer and spent a lot of time swimming laps. Despite my best efforts though, at 6’2 I weighed the same as my 5’6 girlfriend – and she had better abs than I did. It’s hard to show you what that looked like back then because I started destroying evidence as soon as I started growing. By the time I’d hit 150 I’d already pruned my Facebook of all the photos that showed me at 130. Unfortunately (for my dignity) the best I can do  for a true before photo is me in a unitard.

The middle shot is me right after having finished a home workout (you can see the bench on the left), weighing in 20 pounds heavier than I’d been four months earlier:

famous-ectomorph-transformation-shane-duquette-bony-to-beastly-home-gym

After my second year of university I got a summer job as a junior designer at a great ad agency back in my hometown of Ottawa – Canada’s friendly capital. I moved back in with my parents, and, since they were paying for groceries, I decided this would be a wonderful time to bulk up. (No supplements either, just food.) My new coworkers found it amusing, but, not counting the milk incident, they were incredibly supportive. It was a blast of a summer. I learned a lot about illustration, a lot about design and a lot about muscle. By the end of the summer I’d successfully gained 20 pounds and grown out of all of my clothes. Since then I’ve gained another 40.

I don’t want to mislead you though. The overhead lighting in my basement was pretty flattering and I’d just finished working out. Buffed up to 150 pounds I was still the smallest of all my friends:

How to Build a Home Gym / Home Workout – Lean & Little

What that summer did though was show me that I could gain weight. I’d built a ton of muscle, I was exercising regularly, and I had doubled my strength. Things were good. My confidence was up, I felt great all day long, and for the first time I knew that I was able to actually do this. Not only that, I was able to do it well. 20 pounds in four months felt miraculous. I didn’t know that was possible for anyone, let alone me. Even among my friends I went from being “skinny” to being “lean” – big difference in the impression I was giving off.

After that summer I moved in with another skinny guy in my university program: Jared. A couple years later, when we graduated, the confidence and muscle I’d built that summer was what helped me convince him to be my training partner. The transformation the two of us made was what brought us to Marco’s attention, and eventually led to the creation of Bony to Beastly. (That whole story here.)

From that point on we mainly used the gym. Jared and I worked from our home office, so we looked forward to taking a break from work and heading off to the gym. (We still do.) When the gym closed down for renovations though we busted out my old rickety bench and rusty weight plates and set up a state-of-the-art office gym:

How to Build a Badass Home Gym / Work Out at Home – The Rickety Old Bench

Marco’s like us, except backwards. He works at the gym as a strength and conditioning coach, so he looks forward to heading home and training alone at his home gym. It’s his muscle-building meditation time.

The point of all this is that home gyms work. They work well. Even totally crappy borderline dangerous ones like mine.

Over the years we’ve learned a lot, started up Bony to Beastly and coached hundreds of guys into each gaining dozens of pounds of muscle. Their success doesn’t have much to do with equipment, but rather mastery of the fundamentals of lifting and nutrition. Some guys train at home, some guys train at the gym – both work equally well. So we’ve spent a lot of time trying to intelligently figure out the absolute best way to build a badass home gym.

So how do you do it? We need to consider a few things.

Progressive Overload

The first principle we need to optimize a home gym for is progressive overload: “the gradual increase of stress placed upon the body during training.” Our physiques will slowly change and improve to meet the demands that we place on it, and our bodies, however thin, are capable of some pretty damn fearsome adaptations.

… But many of us let our bodies adapt to sitting, typing and strolling. We do it day after day, year after year, and then we get frustrated that our physique doesn’t look, feel and perform the way we want it to. If we want a strong masculine physique we’ve simply got to change the stimuli. We’ve got to get our bodies eagerly transforming to lift heavier and heavier things until we’ve got a strong stable platform that can carry around hundreds of pounds and fill out a t-shirt while doing it.

Instead of backs hunching over to bring our faces closer to a computer monitor, glutes turning off to make for better sitting platforms and shoulders internally rotating for more convenient typing … we start developing new muscle fibres, our bones become denser and heavier, our biceps swell up with glycogen (muscle fuel), blood vessels stream down our arms to improve oxygen delivery, our body fat is stretched thinner over larger and more powerful musculature, and we start becoming shaped by our muscle mass instead of our bone structure.

This makes sense intuitively – we all know that muscles grow when we stimulate them. The progressive overload part is where a lot of us fail though.

Do you remember the first time you had to use a keyboard? Maybe. Chances are, whether you can remember it or not, it was a pretty awkward time for your fingers. Your typing was definitely slow and clumsy, and you needed to carefully aim each awkward finger. Now you’re a keyboard wizard. You think of a word and your fingers nimbly and automatically make it appear on the screen.

Weightlifting isn’t so different. You start off awkward and clumsy, your lifts look a little funky and the weights you’re lifting aren’t very heavy … but eventually you become strong, athletic, healthy and muscular.

Or at least you should.

If we try to jump right to the heavy part we wind up sore, our muscles wind up beaten to a pulp, our immune system gears down, our postures collapse under the weight we’re struggling to lift … and we wind up frustrated, lazing around in bed, blowing our noses, and dreading our next workout. This isn’t the Biggest Loser. Working out shouldn’t suck.

More often than not though we mess it up the other way around: not progressively lifting heavier and heavier things. Going from 15 pushups to 60 pushups won’t make you any stronger – nothing is getting heavier. Aerobics and calisthenics (body weight exercises) are exercise, and exercise is great for your health. It’s far from worthless, don’t get me wrong, and it’s way better than doing nothing. If that’s all you can do, do it. It can also be a valuable part of a progressive overload program. The problem is that if we rely on our body weight to build muscle our workouts soon become too light and the stimulus stops being enough to make our bodies grow bigger and stronger. It works well initially, but if we’re trying to get bigger than Richard Simmons we’ve got to progressively up the heaviness.

You start slow, you make some mistakes. You start off lifting within your means and you gradually lift more and more. Over time your technique improves and you start lifting heavier and heavier weights. Each step of the way your body responds by growing bigger and badder, stronger and more stable.

So we need a piece of equipment that allows us to lift heavier and heavier over time. We aren’t trying to encourage endurance adaptations, so it’s not about doing more reps, feeling sore, feeling the burn, getting our heart rate up, aerobics, etc. We’re trying to encourage strength, size, postural and power adaptations, so this is about progressively lifting heavier.

Master the Five Fundamental Movements

We need to learn the five fundamental human movements. Marco learned these from strength and muscle legend Dan John back in the day and it really helped us make this muscle stuff a whole hell of a lot simpler.

The five movements are: the press, the pull, the hinge, the squat and the carry. That’s it.

Home to Build a Home Gym / How to Train at Home to Build Muscle: Hinges (Deadlifts) and Squats Home to Build a Home Gym / How to Train at Home to Build Muscle: Pulls and Presses Home to Build a Home Gym / How to Train at Home to Build Muscle: Loaded Carries

(Shown: dumbbell sumo deadlift, goblet squat, one-arm two-point supinated hinge row, one-arm press and cross carry with limited edition kettlebells.)

Presses, like the bench press, build up your shoulders, chest, triceps and abs.
Pulls, like the chin up, build up your back, shoulders, biceps, forearms and abs.
Hinges, like the deadlift, build up your back, butt, legs, abs and forearms.
Squats, like the back squat, build up your legs, abs, butt and back.
Loaded carries, well, turn you into a true beast. They build up your core, your forearms, your traps, your bones, and build up all kinds of spinal support and stability. Stuart McGill, the leading expert in spinal health, calls these a “moving plank” and considers them one of the most important tools for developing a strong body that resists injury.

The more overlap the better. You’ll see that your abs, obliques, forearms, shoulders, back and hips are getting a lot of attention. They need it. We’re teaching them how to work together in a variety of different ways. We aren’t talking about isolating muscle groups, we’re talking about getting as many of them working at once so that we can get wicked strong at the most natural human movements as effectively and efficiently as possible.

We hit every major muscle group each workout. No need to split the body up into individual body parts or find a bajillion different ways to isolate and target each different muscle fiber. As the old adage goes: the more muscle fibers involved in a lift, the more merry and muscular you’ll become. The bodybuilding split is a technique that trickled down from modern pro-bodybuilding. That’s a very very advanced and specific niche career path, not the fundamentals of becoming a genuinely and visibly strong dude whose health you can smell from a mile away.

Let’s say you’re trying to learn how to type – would it make sense to spend Monday practicing typing with just your index finger, Tuesday practicing typing with just your middle finger, Wednesday typing with just your ring finger? Obviously not. You’d want to learn how to use everything together. Not only that, you want to practice typing actual words, learning actual movement patterns and building up muscle memory so that you can do it without thinking.

That’s how you become a fearsome typist.
That’s also how you build a fearsome physique.

Just like typing, soon being a strong dude will become intuitive both in and out of the gym. When you start your lawnmower you’ll be doing a perfect pull, when you carry your groceries you’ll be doing a perfect loaded carry, when you pick up your wife and lift her over your head you’ll be doing a perfect hinge and then a perfect press.

So when it comes to building a home gym we don’t need to find ways to do cable flies and lat pulldowns, we just need to find a way to account for each of those five movement patterns. (We’ve got you covered – sit tight.)

Minimum Effective Dose

We need to find the minimal dose that’s maximally effective. The fewest number of movements that allow you to build the most muscle and strength. The fewest pieces of equipment that will allow you to do everything you need to do. That’s how you build an efficient workout, and that’s how you build a badass gym.

If you sign up to a gym you’ll have a vast array of equipment that makes all of this pretty easy (albeit slightly overwhelming and confusing). That’s great, but when we’re trying to put together a home gym we want to do the opposite: keep equipment to an absolute minimum (while still getting maximal results). This is especially important if you’re a young guy like me living in a tiny shoebox in a big city, a college kid trying to train in his bedroom or dorm room, or, well, anyone really – less space taken up by equipment means more space to move. It also saves you from wasting money on equipment you don’t need. You can buy a few high quality, safe and effective pieces of equipment and have everything you need for the rest of your life.

Safety and Simplicity

We need to make the workout safe and simple to do alone in the comfort of your home. We aren’t trying to spend six months mastering a handstand pushup so that you finally have the balance and stabilizer muscles you need to start building up your shoulders, and we aren’t trying to do experimental techniques that might throw out your back or gimp your posture. We also want to avoid being pinned under bars and dropping barbells on your head.

So, for example, what you don’t want is one of those barbell bench press benches with a rack for the barbell behind it. You know, ones like my rickety old bench.

There’s a simple reason for that: doing the barbell bench presses by yourself is sort of risky and not very effective. Not only is it impossible to take the weight off the rack using perfect form (you’d need a spotter giving you a proper hand-off) you also run the risk of not being able to lift that barbell back up. I haven’t missed a bench press ever since I stopped lifting to failure, but it took me a while to figure out my limits and how to stay within them. Even now I still always use a spotter. (Thanks Jared.)

Back in the day when I was furiously training away in my parents’ basement using my rickety old side-of-the-road bench, I got trapped under the barbell a couple times and had to shout for my little sister. The first time she promptly dropped her Harry Potter novel and came sprinting down the stairs to help me get it off. The second time she put her book down carefully and jogged down the stairs. The third time she started to realize that she was the bright one in the family … but she still saved me. That’s what little sisters are for after all, right? The fourth time she wasn’t home and I had a horrible time getting the damn thing off.

I also have to admit that the bench kind of scared me. I was never sure if it would collapse under my weight (although admittedly I didn’t weigh very much) and I was never very certain that I’d be able to safely rack the barbell. I was a long lanky dude with very little control over my limbs. That was a really bad idea. I was lucky that I didn’t drop it on my head while trying to put the barbell back on the rack. That little barbell holder thing was pretty small and I nearly missed many times.

(If you don’t take my advice and do barbell bench presses at home anyway, don’t put clamps on the barbell to hold the weights in place. That way if you wind up pinned under the bar you can dump the plates off to the side without having to shout for help. This is especially important if you don’t have a little sister.)

So we need a gym that let’s us lift heavy with minimal equipment – safely.

With all of that in mind, here’s how to build a beastly home gym:

Get a Big Heavy Adjustable Dumbbell

How to Build a Home Gym / Home Workout – The Best Heavy Adjustable Dumbbell

So what’s the absolute simplest piece of equipment that allows us to effectively, safely and progressively overload our muscles through the five fundamental movements?

A really damn heavy adjustable dumbbell or, even better, a pair of them.

You can start light and progressively load them up heavier and heavier each week. You can safely drop them if you get stuck. You can build up tons of lean mass.

Some lifts you can do with just a couple dumbbells:

The Press: Floor Press, Half-Kneeling Press, Pushups, Tricep Extensions
The Pull: Hinge Row, Bicep Curl, Hammer Curl
The Hinge: Dumbbell Sumo Deadlift, Suitcase Deadlift, Romanian Deadlift, Swings
The Squat: Goblet Squat, Split squat, Lunges (backwards)
The Carry: One-Arm Farmer Carry, Racked Carry, Cross Carry, Waiter carry

What I’d get: Badass & Basic Adjustable Dumbbells (100lbs each)
Fancier: An Expensive Adjustable Dumbbell (90lbs – single)

At this stage in the game that’s everything you need to progressively build up a bigger and more muscular physique.

You can 100% follow a fully periodized and expertly put together muscle-building program with a set of dumbbells – you just have to strip the routine down to the five fundamental human movements.  So if your plan calls for a back squat or a leg press you can just sub in a goblet squat. A pair of dumbbells definitely allows you to do our Bony to Beastly Program.

(If you aren’t following a plan, well, that might be your issue right there.)

(These Amazon links are affiliate links, so if you purchase something after following the link we’ll get a small 4% commission, which would be sweet! If you decide to get this stuff using our links – thank you! The three of us really appreciate it.)

 

Upgrade: Sturdy Adjustable Bench

How to Build a Home Gym / Home Workout – The Best Adjustable Workout Bench

When that’s going well and you’re happily building muscle there will probably be a time when you’re eager to upgrade your home gym and expand on the list of exercises you can do and the range of motion that you can do them through. An adjustable bench allows you to turn your floor press into a bench press, your hinge rows into the dumbbell rows that all the guys at the gym do (aka 3-point dumbbell rows), and unlock some new badass strength lifts like the pullover.

Some of many:

The Push: Dumbbell Bench Press, Incline Bench Press, Military Press
The Pulls: Dumbbell Row, Bat Wings, Chest Supported Row, Pullovers, Prone Y’s
The Squat: Bulgarian Split Squats, Step Ups

What I’d get:  a top of the line adjustable workout bench

Keep it sturdy, well proportioned and simple. You don’t need a bench with any sort of weird leg attachments or “bonus” features on it. You don’t need to be doing leg curls or anything – they’ll just get in the way. Go for quality and function, not fanciness.

They’re both sturdy as hell and can support tons of weight (700+ pounds). A lot of the benches are rickety things made for, well, I don’t know really, since they don’t support very much weight and their proportions make lifting a very awkward thing. My feet didn’t reach the ground with mine …

Upgrade: Power Cage and an Olympic Barbell

How to Build a Home Gym / Home Workout – The Best Power Rack / Squat Cage and Barbell Set

You may eventually find that you become too strong for your dumbbell setup. Even the 90 pound adjustable dumbbell that we recommend will soon become too light to dumbbell deadlift. Your legs will become so strong that your goblet squats will start to become harder on your upper body than your lower body. Plus, you may want to start adding in some cool hearty strongman lifts like the barbell (overhead) press or the Yates bent over row. Maybe down the road even some Olympic lifts. Tons of fun to be had with a barbell.

Power racks also offer you hands down the safest way to lift big weights. They’ve got safety bars, meaning that if you set it up properly they’ll be your spotter for you and safely catch any weight that you drop. You can set up your barbell bench press in there and rest assured that you won’t get pinned under the bar or drop it on your head, you can back squat without needing to worry about not being able to stand back up, etc.

A power cage and an Olympic barbell set give you absolutely 100% everything you need to train for the rest of your life. We aren’t talking about building 20-30 pounds of muscle anymore, we’re talking about building as much muscle as your frame will allow (which is probably more than you think) over the course of a lifetime.

The Push: Bench Press (with safety bars), Incline Bench Press
The Pulls: Chin Ups, Pull Ups, Yates Bent Over Row, Barbell Curls
The Hinge: Deadlifts, Rack Pulls, Romanian Deadlifts
The Squat: Front Squats, Back Squats, Box Squats

The power cage / squat rack that we recommend: The Best Power Cage
The Olympic* barbell set that we recommend: Badass Olympic Barbell Set

Both of these are top of the line pieces of equipment that you can use for decade after decade. They’ll help you lift really damn heavy really damn safely. The power cage has a chin-up and pull-up bar so you’re covered there, too.

*I highly recommend going Olympic with your barbell, even if you don’t plan on doing Olympic lifts. Olympic  means that there are sleeves that rotate freely on either side of the barbell. These revolving sleeves make the barbell much easier on your grip, allowing you to lift more weight and build more muscle. “Regular” barbells don’t allow the weight plates to rotate freely, meaning the barbell will always be trying to rotate out of your grip, peeling your hands open. It’s good for your forearms … but bad for everything else you’re trying to strengthen and grow.

 

Bonus Gear How to Build a Home Gym / Home Workout – The Best Kettlebell, Ab Roller and Foam Roller

This is stuff that isn’t even remotely necessary, but hey if you love lifting and want to take it to the next level this stuff can be great to have around. It’s also great if you prefer training at the gym but like having a couple small pieces of equipment around home so that you can still do quick super efficient workouts when you can’t make it to the gym.

An Ab Wheel (with free washboard!). There are many many ways to functionally train you core, but for guys who have mastered the plank and who want to encourage a bit more abdominal hypertrophy and build up truly fearsome core strength, all without stressing their back or ruining their posture with crunches … this thing is super effective and super duper cheap. It’s not necessary at all, but it’s almost as fun as barbell curls.

A Kettlebell. If you’ve got an adjustable dumbbell you can technically do all the kettlebell moves: dumbbell swings, dumbbell turkish get ups, etc … but they’re kind of awkward. Adjustable dumbbells aren’t the prettiest or most streamlined things out there and you never know if a clamp will shake lose, so it can be nice to have a simple little cast iron hunk of metal with a handle on it for when you’re looking to get a little more explosive. I recommend 20 pounds and 50 pounds for starters … or you could get limited edition chimp and gorilla ones like Marco and I have (36 and 72 pounds).

A Foam Roller. I love these things. If you’ve got any kind of muscle soreness, mobility issues or you just really dig massages this is a pretty good purchase. They reduce arterial stiffness and thus may improve cardiovascular health (study), they may increase your range of motion without reducing your muscular power (study), and they increase flexibility without reducing muscular strength (study). Since static stretching can reduce power and strength output if you do them pre-workout, this makes foam rolling a wicked way to warm up. (You can use it whenever as a massage and to reduce arterial stiffness, but the mobility you gain is temporary – it won’t become permanent unless you also build strength through that range of motion, e.g., by lifting weights through the five fundamental movements afterwards.)

A Pre-Workout-Drink Home Brewery Kit: Nothing makes for a better training session than a freshly brewed pot of coffee – and you don’t need even need Starbucks! (Although the caffeine content in their drinks is wild, and caffeine is a pretty powerful ergogenic, i.e., performance enhancing, stimulant.)

I’m actually not entirely joking with this one either. Sometimes when you’re training at home it helps to build a ritual around it. You may find yourself saying “well I know I should train for an hour today … but I dunno work was kinda like long and stuff and I’m kind of tired.” It happens to the best of us, so it helps to stack the odds in our favour.

If you train in the morning lay out your training clothes at the foot of your bed. When you wake up, go have a hot shower to warm up your muscles and a hot cup of coffee to get your energy levels up. Then put on some up-tempo music to increase your training performance (study) and get to training.

If you train after work same thing – create a ritual around your workouts. Brew yourself a nice cup of coffee when you get home, maybe watch a couple training videos to get in the right head space, foam roll your muscles to get some blood flowing and loosen yourself up, put on some loud music and really get into the zone for that 45-60 minutes that you’ve set aside.

Conclusion

You don’t need to get fancy, you just need to get smart. If you stick with heartily made quality pieces of equipment, like the ones we’ve recommended, you really can’t go wrong. These things don’t ever go out of style and they don’t break, so 20 years from now if you decide to sell them instead of giving them to your kids, well, you can.

Here are the links again all in one place:

Must have: Badass & Basic Adjustable Dumbbells (or a Fancy Dumbbell)
Should have: A Sturdily Built Adjustable Workout Bench (or Cheaper)
For the lifelong lifters: A Quality Power Cage and a Classic Olympic Barbell Set
Totally optional: Foam Roller, Kettlebell and Ab Wheel

Check for some secondhand options first! You might get lucky.

And there you have it! You now know exactly how to build a home gym that will allow you to build all kinds of muscle and strength, improve your posture, improve your health, improve your cardiovascular health and performance, and look pretty damn strong and impressive.

The Skinny on “Just Eat More”

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(Updated April 11, 2014) As a skinny guy, each and every time I tried to build muscle people would tell me two things: “just eat more” and “just lift heavy.” Then they’d look at me like they’d just solved all of my problems – totally confident they’d given me the information I’d been missing all my life. I was quite familiar with being skinny though, so I was also quite familiar with that advice.

I’d even tried it. Many times.

We’ll cover the lifting heavy part in another post. Both are really misunderstood and fascinating topics, and I think going into some depth could be really helpful. In this article we’ll cover the eating more part – the part that hits really close to home for me. Literally close to home – even my mother would tell me to just eat more.

That’s because in a world where the average first worlder is overweight, us skinny guys, hardgainers, ectomorphs, dreamboats – whatever you want to call us naturally thin guys – we’re outliers. Even when it comes to building muscle we’re often slotted into a footnote – “Oh yeah, and for hardgainer ectomorph body types, you’ve got a fast metabolism and stuff so you’ll need to eat more. Eat carbs – lots of carbs.”

That “just eat more” advice would work fine for most people, but the fact that we aren’t most people is precisely why they’re giving us that advice … and also why that advice is rather naive. I mean, for most people eating lots of food and gaining weight is second nature. If you tell the average dude to “just eat more” he’d be able to. He’d probably get fat, but he’d be able to do it. Hell, he’d probably even like it.

Little do people know that they’ve just casually told us to climb the mount everest of ectomorph challenges.

Eating more is rough. First, our physiology makes it hard to get into a caloric surplus. Second, most mainstream approaches to muscle make it even harder, since they either totally ignore appetite issues or, worse yet, they’re cleverly designed to reduce our appetites. Third, even when we do manage to get into a caloric surplus, our adaptive metabolisms kick in.

By trying to simply eat more and lift heavy we often find our results underwhelming and unsustainable. Ironically, as skinny guys we often have the most natural potential for muscle growth … since, err, we’re so far away from our genetic potential …

Anyway, we should be seeing extremely rapid gains – especially at first. Gaining 2+ pounds of muscle per week is pretty much unheard of in the muscle-building world, and yet us skinny guys are able to do it pretty consistently.

Appetite can bottleneck our results, yes, but most of the news is actually pretty good. In this article we’ll cover ectomorph physiology and appetite, and how overfeeding, building muscle and staying lean differs for guys like us. Turns out we’ve even got some incredible natural advantages when it comes to leanly building muscle – advantages that we can leverage.

Different goals, different physiology

The Skinny on how to Eat More as an Ectomorph – Building Muscle despite a huge metabolism and a small appetite

I’m not a neuropsychologist, so I’ll be the first to admit that a lot of this neuropsychology of appetite stuff went a little over my head – especially at first. Nobody else is writing about this stuff from an ectomorph perspective though, so if we want to get to the bottom of this we pretty much need to do it ourselves.

The first thing I did was sign myself up for some research reviews analyzing all the studies done into appetite and satiety (aka fullness). How little attention was given to us naturally skinny guys became more and more evident the more and more research I did. There haven’t been many studies looking into healthfully gaining weight since the Second World War, when famine was running rampant through Europe. Nowadays the smartest people are all feverishly conducting research into preventing overeating. That’s not wrong – obesity is a far more widespread problem than ours – but it means that when we read things we need to need to be constantly asking ourselves “does this apply to me, or are they assuming that I’m overweight?”

That can be really damn confusing.

Lots of popular approaches to fitness, nutrition and muscle-building bundle up weight-loss tricks along with them. During my first few attempts at building muscle I lost weight – even though I was doing programs seemingly designed to build muscle. I attributed this to my own lack of potential. Now, sixty pounds later, I’m realizing that my failed efforts were largely due to a lack of understanding. Our potential is just swell.

That lack of understanding is pretty understandable. For example, maybe you’ve read about intermittent fasting – about how strategically reducing the number of meals you eat will help leanly build muscle. Little do we know that it’s a dieting strategy designed for people with enormous stomach capacities and ravenous appetites. Since these guys love eating big meals, it’s a diet designed around eating fewer meals instead of smaller meals. Martin Berkhan, the creator of LeanGains, and arguably the most influential intermittent faster out there, is notorious for his insatiable appetite and epic cheesecake binges.

Reducing meal frequency and increasing portion size can help people comfortably consume fewer calories overall (study) … but these are not the woes of an ectomorph. What intermittent fasters are desperately after – being able to eat fewer calories without going crazy – is what we do by default. We need exactly the opposite – a way to comfortable increase the amount of calories we eat.

Or maybe you’ve read about Paleo – about how avoiding grains, beans, peanuts, dairy and junk food can help you become lean and muscular. This approach works for many people, but this is still a restrictive approach to nutrition. It’s a diet designed around comfortably eating less. Again, we need the opposite. Restricting the foods that we eat should be the last thing on our to-do list.*

*If you’ve got an allergy, dislike a food, feel bad after eating a food, can’t afford a food, etc – no worries. The benefit of a non-restrictive approach to nutrition is that once you understand the fundamentals of nutrition you can eat however you like. A healthy and balanced approach to nutrition is very flexible. If you believe in a plant-based diet, prefer Paleo or enjoy intermittent fasting – no problem.

Since most people eat too much, the emphasis in most diets is on what to remove. Since we’re actively trying to eat more, the first thing we should be doing to our diets is cleverly adding things in. We don’t really need to be restricting anything.

So, since most diets are based around the physiological needs of people who overeat by default, let’s start by understanding a little bit about our physiology regarding appetite so that we can realistically and efficiently build muscle.

Ectomorph Insulin Sensitivity.

Insulin is one of the main drivers of appetite. When we eat, our insulin levels go up. As our insulin levels go up our appetite goes down, leaving a nice pleasant feeling of fullness behind. This is one of the reasons that we know when to stop eating.

Many of us ectomorphs tend to be rather sensitive to insulin. This means two things. First, that our insulin rises eagerly in response to food: in goes food, up goes insulin. Second, it means that our bodies are hyper-sensitive to insulin: up goes insulin, down goes appetite. This is good as far as health and appetite regulation goes … but bad as far as eating enough to build muscle goes. We certainly aren’t about to overeat by accident, since our bodies are so good at regulating our appetite.

Beefy dudes are generally much less sensitive to insulin. Since their response is blunted, their process looks more like this: in goes food, in goes a little more food, up goes insulin, up goes a little more insulin, and finally down goes appetite. By the time their insulin gets high enough to trigger a feeling off fullness they’ve already eaten a whole lot more food than us.

The fact that we’re insulin sensitive, while seemingly a pain in the ass, is actually a tremendous asset. More insulin sensitivity in muscle cells and less in fat cells will direct more nutrients toward muscle and less toward fat, making building muscle very leanly very easy. We hit the genetic jackpot with this one, and we want to hold onto it at all costs.

Luckily, so long as we approach building muscle cleverly, we can not only hold onto our insulin sensitivity, we can improve upon it. Being lean increases insulin sensitivity. (study) Heavy weightlifting increases insulin sensitivity. (study) So does building up more muscle mass. (study) So if you take a skinny guy with a genetic advantage already and then put him on a hearty muscle-building program, well, he’ll be an insulin sensitivity powerhouse.

At this point it’s probably worth mentioning that the last thing we want to do is recklessly dirty-bulk our abs away* with a ‘see food’ diet, where you try your best to eat everything in sight. Our body types are the best at rockin’ those kinds of diets, but that doesn’t mean that those diets are any good for anyone, even us. If were to go about gaining a bunch of fat we’d be reducing our insulin sensitivity every step of the way. (study) I’m not saying that to scare you or anything though. If you gained a little bit of fat it wouldn’t be any kind of big deal –  you’d be able to burn it off in a jiffy.**

*Back as a skinny guy I didn’t have abs. I’m much leaner now than I was at 130 pounds, because nowadays I have 60 more pounds of muscle on my body and I lift weights three times a week. If you don’t have abs now that’s not any kind of concern. If you’re a naturally thin guy you can probably get them relatively easily if you want them.
**Members, here‘s our guide for guys who are either ‘skinny-fat’ or who bulked their abs away and want them back.

I’m not even a guy who cares all that much about how lean I am. I spent so much of my life being skinny that these days I just want to be big and strong. A lot of our members are the same – we’re more keen on building up burlier biceps and broader shoulders than worrying about being super duper lean. What I mean is that we may as well run with our natural strengths – being able to build muscle very leanly.

So having heightened insulin sensitivity is a tremendous asset, and it helps to take advantage of it. But while it helps us build muscle quickly, leanly and healthfully … it certainly doesn’t help us overcome our appetites.

(Appetite tips are coming, don’t worry.)

Ectomorph metabolism

Many of us ectomorphs are like caloric bottomless pits. No matter how much food we shovel into our mouths our weight refuses to budge on the scale. Some experts argue that most people burn around the same amount of calories – that us ectomorphs just underestimate how much we eat. So why does it often seem like we’ve got these furnace-like ecto-metabolisms that make it impossible to gain weight?

Well that’s because those experts are wrong ;)

While we do burn about the same amount of calories as everyone else while we sleep (BMR), when we’re roaming around and being active (TEA), while we exercise (EPOC), and when we digest food (TEF) … we’ve also got our ectomorph metabolisms kicking things into overdrive in a far more elusive way.

William Sheldon – the 1940’s psychologist who coined the terms ectomorph, endomorph and mesomorph – described our body type as being ‘fidgety’. He was trying to link up personality types to body types. Huge fail. You can’t predict someone’s personality based on his body type. All of his psychological body type stuff has been disproven in pretty much every way imaginable.

As far as the underlying physiological qualities go though, his categorizations are still rather useful. You can’t tell how adventurous someone is based on their body type, but you can tell a lot about their body type from their body type. (Obviously.) When it comes to building muscle that can be incredibly useful.

And it turns out Sheldon was onto something with his “fidgety ectomorph” thing.

See, where our metabolisms tend to differ from other guys is in our non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). These are the calories burned through our subconscious activity – things like heat production, fidgeting, postural control, etc. (study)

That’s what does us in calorically.

Most people are fairly frugal with their calories, trying to store as many as possible for a rainy day. Not us. We’re caloric high rollers, baby, and we’re all about spending calories like there’s no tomorrow.

For example, I don’t get cold. Ever. I live in Canada and don’t even own a winter coat. I don’t own a car either, so I do a lot of roaming around outside in frigid temperatures and generally feel just dandy. My friends joke that I’m a human furnace. I also pace when I talk on the phone, roam around the gym between sets, tap my feet along to music and just generally find sitting still really damn difficult.

How much of an effect can this have? A pretty huge one, apparently. A study looking into metabolisms found that regular people burned 3% more calories sitting in a chair than they did lying motionless on their backs. Add in some fidgeting though, and they burned 54% more calories just by casually relaxing in a chair. The same is true with standing. Casual standing burns just 13% more calories than lying on your back, whereas ecto-standing burns 94% more calories. (study)

The Skinny on how to Eat More as an Ectomorph – Us hardgainers burn a lot more calories (way higher metabolism)

Over the course of a day that works out to a 600 calorie difference if you spend most of your time sitting, and a 950 calorie difference if you spend most of your time standing. And that’s just the fidgeting part of this – that doesn’t account for heat production, postural control, etc.

As far as posture and body position goes, James Levine, the leading subconscious energy expenditure researcher, recruited ten obese people and ten lean people and measured their body postures and movements every half-second for ten days. (He did this by using kinky high-tech undergarments.) The lean people spent two more hours standing than the obese people, burning an estimated 350 more calories each day (again via NEAT). He also found that this held true even when lean people gained weight, leading him to believe that this is largely genetically predetermined. (study)

To put this into perspective, most people’s calorie requirements fall within the range of bodyweight x 13-23. For a 150 pound guy that’s the difference between burning 2,000 and 3,500 calories each day. That’s a huge difference.

And that’s actually only the beginning. Things get really interesting when you start overfeeding us.

A hardgainer’s response to overfeeding

Different people respond very very differently to overfeeding. In one study, the participants were overfed by 1000 calories per day for eight straight weeks and instructed not to exercise. (study)

At the end of the eight week study some guys gained 0.79 pounds of fat and some guys gained 9.3 pounds. That’s more than a tenfold difference in how much fat was stored.

This puzzled researchers for a long time, but it’s now attributed to subconscious movement. When overfeeding almost everyone’s metabolism will rev up, but it’s usually not nearly enough to offset the effects of overeating. Us hardgainers respond to overfeeding by turning up our caloric furnaces far higher than your average person – producing more heat, moving more, fidgeting more, etc. Other studies have found the same ecto-phenomenon. (studystudy) This keeps us lean, but it also keeps us small.

So that “just eat more” advice is pretty damn shoddy. Our metabolisms eagerly adapt to any attempts at overfeeding, making our attempts feel totally futile.

Luckily, we aren’t simply trying to gain weight, we’re trying to build muscle. This is actually a highly desirable trait. People are probably quite jealous of you for it – and rightly so. You know how chubbier guys often do all kinds of cardio when trying to build muscle? If they don’t … they often risk building up fat alongside their muscle. Us ectomorphs don’t really need to worry about the cardio because we burn  off the surplus calories automatically.

With a good enough nutrition and weightlifting program this won’t much get in the way of building muscle. Our body’s adapt to the training stimulus by building up extra muscle before sending the extra calories off to the furnace. Calories that ‘need’ to be invested in your biceps aren’t extra calories, after all. This can be a huge asset, since it makes some of us extremely resistant to fat but not muscle.

So, combined with our heightened insulin sensitivity, we can often get away with eating large caloric surpluses, building as much muscle as our bodies will allow … and any caloric excess not used for building muscle won’t get stored as fat – it will get tossed in the furnace. This allows us to leanly build muscle more rapidly than your average guy, who needs to add in cardio while keeping a strict eye on his caloric surplus. As with most of these things though, that depends on the ectomorph, and everyone can hit a point where the excess calories do eventually start spilling over into fat. We tend to get a pretty wide berth though, especially when our nutrition fundamentals are in order.

Overfeeding & food aversion.

That fact that we’re awesome at building all kinds of lean muscle when we’re in a hearty caloric surplus is all well and good … but the problem remains that eating a huge caloric surplus is really damn hard.

During the 70’s the obesity researcher Ethan Sims spent his time running a decade’s worth of overfeeding studies on American prisoners – men who were in a totally controlled environment and were at the nutritional whim of the research team. Force-feeding and then starving prisoners is perhaps a little ethically questionable by modern standards, but hey, this was the 70’s. (study, study)

One interesting thing that the researchers found was that many of the subjects slowly started growing bored of food during prolonged periods of overfeeding, finding it more and more difficult to sustain the willpower needed to overeat. Some even developed an aversion to food – they just didn’t ever want to eat. They’d want to skip breakfast, and then as the day went on sometimes their appetite would come back, but sometimes it wouldn’t. Some men even dropped out of the study because they couldn’t handle eating the volumes of food they were being asked to eat.

Overeating is a lot harder for some of us than a lot of people realize, especially when we’re talking about overeating by a fairly significant amount. This is especially true with us naturally leaner hardgainers:

“One of his volunteers, for example, began at 132 pounds. He struggled resolutely for more than thirty weeks to gain weight, ate great amounts of food, and reduced his activity to less than half its former level, but was never able to push above 144 pounds. He simply didn’t have the willpower to get fat.”

Story of my life.

Well except for the fat part.

Interestingly, this study also shows more good news for us naturally thin guys: while the number of fat cells varies even among lean guys, we likely have a modest number of fat cells compared to people who struggle with being overweight. Perhaps partially because of this, the leaner guys gained modest amounts of fat and then were able to return to a lean state far more quickly than the others. Better still, the participants gained 23 pounds of fat on average and still had the same number of fat cells as when they started. This suggests that even when we store a fair bit of fat, our fat cells simply increase in size instead of increasing in number, making it relatively easy to get back to being comfortably lean again. Long story short: our potential for gaining fat is small, and if we do it’s easy to burn off.

Stomach capacity

If you’re anything like me you may have realized that attempting to eat enormous meals doesn’t work very well. Back in skinnier times my girlfriends could always eat me under the table. Since they were keen on eating less and I was keen on eating more, well, we all found it rather disheartening.

Turns out that stomachs come in different sizes. In a 2001 study researchers discovered that obese people had markedly larger stomachs than people of normal bodyweight, and that binge eaters had larger stomachs still. Stomachs are sort of like balloons, with the balloons coming in different sizes and capable of being inflated to different degrees. (study)

Are we stuck with our stomach sizes? In another study, scientists recruited a group of obese men and women and split them into two groups: one group ate what they normally ate, and the other was forced to eat itty bitty meals. Four weeks later the group that ate normal sized meals, not surprisingly, had the same stomach size as when they started. The itty bitty meal group, however, had reduced their stomach size by 27 to 36 percent. (study)

More relevantly, the researchers in the first study posit that binge eating behaviour was the cause of the larger stomach sizes. The binge eaters weren’t born with larger stomachs, but rather their stomachs adapted to their eating habits by growing larger. This suggests that by gradually eating larger and larger meals we could gradually increase our stomach sizes, sort of like how stretching out a balloon makes it easier to inflate. This certainly lines up with my own experiences. After having gained 60 pounds my stomach capacity has seemingly doubled, allowing me to effortlessly eat much larger meals. I don’t get eaten under the table on dates anymore, either.

With that said, we don’t even need to increase our stomach sizes. Simply eating more meals, or adding snacks between meals, can work pretty well. I suspect that’s why many bodybuilders consume lots of meals – because they have so many calories they need to consume. Perhaps that’s why there’s all that mumbo-jumbo mythology about needing to eat every three hours to build muscle. The myths are false – you can eat however many meals you want – but that doesn’t mean that snacking every couple hours isn’t a great idea as far as fitting food in our stomachs goes. Nothing says they need to be fancy either – just a handful of trail mix, some fruit or a glass of milk between meals will add up over the course of a day, making it a easier to hit your nutrition goals.

Heightened dopamine sensitivity

Eating food causes the release of dopamine, and that release of dopamine causes feelings of intense pleasure. In fact, that’s how our bodies let us know that we’re doing something pleasurable – by releasing dopamine.

Not surprisingly, it’s pretty common for people to get bummed, tired or stressed and automatically turn to food, knowing that if they eat enough of it they’ll stimulate the release of dopamine and thus feel better. It’s not a physiological hunger thing – they don’t need more food –they eat simply due to the pleasure response that their body has in response to calorie rich food. This is your typical scenario where the heartbroken gal drowns her sorrows in a tub or ten of Ben & Jerry’s.

When enough dopamine is released it eventually satisfies that insatiable craving or urge. Some people are more sensitive to it than others, and thus some people need to eat a hell of a lot of food in order to stimulate a large enough dopamine response to satisfy their cravings. Our bony hearts, however, are mendable with relatively small portions of ice cream.

… but turning to ice cream in tough times isn’t even something that skinny guys tend to do in the first place. Eating for that pleasurable hormonal response is more of a beefy person thing. (study, study) Moreover, our stress response is often far more affected by other factors – factors that turn our appetites off. When we get stressed, bummed or tired we often lose our appetite entirely or forget to eat. In tough times we tend to find ourselves losing weight, not gaining it.

So if you get in a fight with your gal she might storm off and raid the fridge, meanwhile you’re busy forgetting to have dinner.

Hunger & Weightlifting

This applies to other stressors as well, like weightlifting. Lifting heavy things makes many guys ravenous, whereas I’ve always found that it makes me less hungry. According to a study published in Physiology and Behavior, some people compensate for the calories burned by eating more … whereas others respond by eating less. They suggest that this may relate back to dopamine sensitivity and our hedonistic response to food, i.e., how primed our brains are to food pleasure and reward signals. This lines up with other studies as well, and seems especially pronounced when the type of exercise is heavy weightlifting. (study, study, study)

This is one reason why some guys go to the gym and lift weights and wind up way bigger and stronger in no time – their bodies automatically up-regulate their food intake (or they already eat enough). Since rate of bodyweight change is largely determined by the degree of the caloric surplus, this is one reason why weightlifting alone seems to make some guys automatically gain weight.

A recent meta-analysis (January 2014) compared the results of all studies looking into exercise and appetite. The study found that, on average, exercise caused people to eat a little bit more … but not by enough to compensate for the amount of calories they burned by exercising. So maybe after exercising we’ll naturally eat an extra 200 calories, but if we burned 300 by exercising … we sure as hell won’t be gaining weight. (study)

Luckily there’s a good fix for this one, and we wrote up a big blog post on ectomorph workout nutrition here.

Muscle & Metabolism

One big worry I used to have is that if I were to successfully build muscle, well, I’d surely just lose it again. I worried that as soon as I stopped overfeeding my muscles would shrivel up back up and be skinny again.

Luckily I was dead wrong. Building muscle can require consuming a lot of calories (among other things) and that can certainly be challenging, but maintaining muscle is a whole different story. Your calorie demands drop back down into the realm of normalcy, for one. A pound of muscle only burns around 6 calories per day, so adding even 20 pounds of muscle to your frame won’t really make your life much harder. (studystudystudy) That’s only 120 extra calories you’ll need to eat. That’s a small glass of milk.

Sometimes we can lose weight if we turn to a life of inactivity and Pop-Tarts, but so long as we stay strong and healthy our hard-earned muscle mass will stick around just fine. You don’t need to eat that much protein to maintain your muscle mass, and you don’t even need to lift weights all that often*. Plus, if we do lose muscle mass, it’s generally pretty easy to build it right back up in a jiffy. Re-building muscle is a whole lot easier than building muscle.

*Although it would certainly be good for your health, longevity, brainpower, energy levels and mood if you kept up a regular weightlifting routine.

HOW TO EAT MORE

The Skinny on how to Eat More as an Ectomorph – Building Muscle despite a huge metabolism and a small appetite

If I were to share every useful strategy I’ve come across, this post would be a hundred pages long … but I do want to conclude this article by sharing a few actionable tips and one of the more fascinating appetite studies I’ve come across.

You know how when people are trying to lose weight they’re encouraged to eat lots of voluminous and fibrous veggies (like broccoli) since they’re so low in calories and take up so much stomach space? Don’t you wish there was a study that looked into which nutritious foods were easy to eat whole hell of a lot of? Luckily, there is one: A satiety index of common foods.

I adore this study with a passion. I mean, they took a bunch of the most common foods, figured out how filling they were, and then figured out how many more calories people would naturally eat in their next meal based on how filling their previous meal was. The goal of the study, of course, was to figure out how to fill people up with fewer calories so that they could lose weight without feeling hungry … but given that a lot of the not-so-filling-foods are actually pretty healthy, it can also be applied to leanly building muscle without feeling full. To make things a little easier still, I organized the foods into categories and remade their results graph:

Ectomorph Appetite – which foods are filling, and thus easy to eat more of

Some of this stuff will be pretty obvious. Obviously fish is more filing than donuts. Eating 1000 calories of junk food is pretty easy, whereas you’d be hard pressed to shovel down 1000 calories of fish, no matter how bottomless your pit.

Some of the stuff might surprise you though. Would you have guessed that 250 calories coming from potatoes was three times as filling as 250 calories coming from bananas? Even more impressively, potatoes are seven times more filling than a croissant. Potatoes are also pretty damn nutritious, making them pretty much the best food ever if you’re trying to lose weight. Prrretty crazy.

 

Does how filling something is affect how many calories we eat? In this case, yes. The researchers found that with these 250 calorie meals, for every 100 point difference on the satiety scale, there was a corresponding 50 calorie difference in how much was eaten in the next meal. That means that if you ate an itty bitty 250 calorie croissant (47 satiety) for lunch you might eat an 800 calorie dinner, whereas if you ate a huge 250 calorie potato (323 satiety) you’d eat a 650 calorie dinner. Over the course of a few meals that would add up to several hundred calories without you even noticing the difference. You’d still be eating a comfortable and natural amount … except all of a sudden it might be enough to build muscle.

So what makes a food more filling than another food? The researchers concluded that a combination of three things make a food fearsomely filling:

  • High protein content.
  • High fibre content.
  • High water content.

Considering that protein is the building block of muscle, fibre is incredibly important when it comes to digesting large amounts of food, and water is kind of the most essential thing out there … this is tricky. These three things are both essential for building muscle and yet simultaneously make eating enough to build muscle a challenge.

The solution? Get the protein that you need to maximally build muscle in, but get most of your calories from carbs. (More on that here.) Drink water between meals, but not necessarily between bites. (studystudy) You don’t necessarily want to be filling your stomach up with water at the same time as you’re packing it full of food. And as far as fibre goes, getting enough is key, since it will allow you to process the large amounts of food you’re consuming, but more fibre is not always better. Fibre will tend to take care of itself if you get around 80% of your calories from whole foods, but eating too ‘clean’ can lead to getting more fibre than you need, making this a little harder than it needs to be.

Long story short: now’s not the time to be loading up on low calorie watery fibrous foods like broccoli, lettuce, watermelon, etc. Go for the higher calorie and denser fruits and veggies instead. Bananas, grapes, peas, etc.

Should we start adding in tons of hyper-palatable (junk) food? Probably not. They’re very easy to consume in large quantities, but they’re lower in micronutrients, very low in fibre, and often contain a ton of fat. Us ectomorphs tend to build muscle the most leanly when the majority of our calories are coming from carbs. Junk food tends to throw our fat intake way too high … often making our gains a little fattier.

Like I said at the beginning of this article though, as skinny guys we need to emphasize adding things into our diet, not taking things out. Removing all the hyper-palatable food from your diet is going to leave a caloric hole. Now isn’t the time to cut out the ‘bad’ stuff, it’s time to add in the good stuff – nutritious whole foods. Moreover, if 80% or more of your diet is made up of whole foods you’re doing pretty swell from a micronutrient and fibre standpoint, so with the high calorie diets we’re eating that certainly leaves room for some desserts.

Struggling to eat enough? It’s time to get clever. So, given that potatoes are incredibly filling, should we eat them? Sure. There are lots of ways to increase the energy density of them, too, so that we can still get our calories in easily. Looking at that chart, homemade french fries might do the trick. We’ve also got a recipe for stew that’s quite easy to eat a lot of.

Are there even easier ways to eat a lot of calories? Probably. Rice isn’t very filling, and that’s Marco’s go-to bulking staple. Our chili recipe isn’t very filling either. It’s also indulgently delicious and savoury, incredibly healthy, full of a wide variety of whole foods that build muscle wildly well, and you can cook up 14 servings of it in half an hour and have an extra thirteen servings of it in the freezer for later. That’s my go-to bulking staple.

Making things easier still, you don’t even need to cook! Muesli takes seconds to prepare (just pour into a bowl and add milk), it’s made up of nutritious whole foods, it’s easy to eat a ton of (see chart) and it’s delicious – especially if you add in some dark chocolate and berries. If you want the on-the-go equivalent, snacking on trail mix combines the appetite wizardry of dried fruit* and nuts too.

Snacking itself also makes it easier to eat more calories. Generally having a snack will cause you to eat only just slightly less in your next meal. For example, if you eat a 300 calorie snack, you may only reduce the size of your dinner by 100 calories. You’ll still effortlessly come out ahead by 200 calories. (study)

Then there’s liquid calories, which are incredibly easy on the appetite. (study) Our bodies hardly count liquid calories as calories at all, making it really easy to get in a lot of ‘bonus’ calories. Milk is great for that – it’s cheap, quick and incredibly good at building muscle. Smoothies are fantastic too, especially since you can blend up so many nutritious foods. And having a high calorie workout shake is pretty helpful too.

There are dozens of ways to make eating more achievable, efficient, affordable, effective, enjoyable, etc.

(For members, I’ve put an article on the member forum with a sample meal plan optimized for all these things, a few more studies, links to a bunch of our recipes that bring a bunch of these principles together, and a few more tips, tricks and strategies for how to apply this stuff to leanly building muscle.)

*Dried fruit isn’t in this study, but it’s in a few others. Water is one of the three main factors that make a food filling, so taking the water out of fruit makes it easier to eat a ton of. Other studies found that energy density (calories / volume) is a key factor, so the fact that dried fruit is smaller helps too. Eating 10 plums is very very difficult. Eating 10 prunes is very very easy. Dried fruits are also quite healthy. Raisins, for example, are full of fibre, antioxidants, calcium, magnesium, phosphorous, and potassium.

CONCLUSION

To say that this was a huge challenge of mine is an understatement. “Just eat more” kept me up at night, had me browsing articles for hundreds of hours trying to find a way around it, had me trying all kinds of weight gainers and fad diets. None of it worked, and so for most of my life I thought it was physically impossible to overcome the dastardly hardgainer trio: a really high metabolism, a really small appetite and a really small stomach. I didn’t just think this was tough, I thought it was impossible. I though I was just $%^& out of luck.

Every once in a while though I’d think “okay enough is enough – I’m fed up with being skinny” and I’d give it another try. Over years of research, personally experimenting, recruiting guinea pigs (like Jared), and then starting up the Bony to Beastly Program and helping other guys master this stuff … now we’re actually really quite good at this stuff. Eating well is easy and enjoyable.

Plus, due to homeostasis (our bodies regulating our body weight), once our bodies adjust to their new muscular burliness, our appetite will naturally increase to accommodate our ever so slightly higher caloric needs. There is an adjustment period, but it soon begins to feel just as effortless as ever. It’s the changing part that’s challenging, since our bodies are programmed to resist change. Although those regulatory systems kept us small in the past, they can also keep us strong and healthy in the future. Moreover, due to the increased insulin sensitivity that the weightlifting and added muscle mass give us, it eventually becomes pretty easy to stay strong and fearsomely lean without ever really needing to do any cardio, restrict our diets, feel miserably hungry, etc. Nowadays I hover between 180-190 pounds just as easily as I used to hover between 125-130 pounds.

This was a really big deal for me, so if you’re in the same boat I was in then I really hope this article helps.

Questions? Tips and tricks? Success stories? Drop ‘em below.


The Skinny on “Just Lift Heavy”

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(Updated September 2014) I wasn’t like some guys. Puberty didn’t automatically plumpen my pecs, and my weight never accidentally inched upwards on the scale. When I exercised, even when trying to build muscle, I’d need to watch out that my weight didn’t drop even lower. When I did gain weight, it was ephemeral. After every failed attempt I was sure that my skinny genes would keep me in my skinny jeans for the rest of my life… but it wasn’t genetics that were the problem, it was the fact that I wasn’t training properly for my body type or goals.

Following a mainstream approach to nutrition and fitness won’t get us the bodies we’re looking for, since most of them are designed to make us eat less and move more. They’re designed to help us lose weight or improve our fitness levels. That makes sense for most people, but obviously not for us.

There’s genuine muscle-buliding information out there though, especially when it comes to weightlifting. Building up bigger muscles is a relatively common hobby for men. That’s where the mainstream advice for skinny guys comes in: “Just lift heavy, man!” Yep. Lifting heavier would have helped… but it’s not quite that simple, and by leveraging science we can do a whole helluva lot better.

So let’s look into a few types of training that people commonly ask us about: bodyweight training (e.g. callisthenics, P90x), high intensity power training (e.g. Crossfit), strength training (e.g. powerlifting and 5x5s) and hypertrophy training (e.g. bodybuilding).

Then we’ll talk about what the evidence suggests is the best way to optimize muscle growth for us naturally skinny guys.

People normally do a whole slew of things to build muscle, so it’s very hard to root out what the actual source of it is. Is your muscular friend muscular because he goes to absolute muscular failure? Some guys claim that you need to lift hard. That only the last rep counts. That you’re wasting your workout if you aren’t going to absolute failure and beyond. They might even totally believe it. But is it the first 9 reps that are causing muscle growth, or that final really awkward looking 10th rep that made them red in the face?

Consider this story.

The Dynamic Resistance Fitness Course™. Back in the 1920’s Charles Atlas came up with a muscle-building program for skinny guys. This was back in the good old days when skinny guys didn’t even know that they could build muscle.

Atlas, buff man that he was, knew he could create an insatiable urge to build muscle in ectomorphs all over the world. So he came up with a system that he could market. He called it the Dynamic Resistance Fitness Course™, and he placed advertisements in magazines, reaching out to skinny guys who were eager to buff up and strut their bod’s on the beach. Ectomorphs all over the world began eagerly placing their orders, finally confident they could build up enough muscle to woo bikini babes.

Charles Atlas – How to lift to build muscle as a naturally skinny ectomorph

His theory was that you could “pit muscle against muscle” to create the tension needed to build muscle. You’d clench your triceps, say, and then contract your biceps against that tension. He claimed that the resistance you could create would would make it similar to lifting a weight. As your muscles became stronger the resistance you’d create would become more intense, allowing you to become stronger still. Best of all you could do it right from the privacy and comfort of you own home. No equipment required. And I mean, what skinny guy who’s new to building muscle doesn’t want to do it secretly? Brilliant.

In the 1940’s Charles Atlas was accused of false advertising in court, or so the legend goes. Bob Hoffman, founder of York Barbell™ and a veritable weightlifting legend, was fairly certain that calisthenics (aka bodyweight workouts) weren’t very good for building muscle. He suspected that Atlas was sneaking in weightlifting workouts to get his hearty manly man physique.

On the stand, Atlas insisted that he did his calisthenics program daily. When asked if he also used dumbbells or barbells, he remained adamant that his bodyweight workouts were how he maintained his burly physique … but he admitted that he used weights “on occasion” to test his strength. Pressed further, he admitted that he “tested his strength” three to four times per week …

Not surprisingly, the dynamic resistance style of training is relatively uncommon these days.

Even if Charles Atlas was maintaining his muscle just with bodyweight workouts, another thing to keep in mind is that maintaining or rebuilding muscle mass is a breeze compared to building it for the first time. If you see a muscular guy happily maintaining his muscle mass … that doesn’t have very much to do with what you need to do to build muscle. This is good news – once you have your muscle it will be easy to keep it or rebuild it – but it doesn’t help us if we’ve always been skinny.

Here’s another story.

The Colorado Experiment. Back in 1973 the famous bodybuilding equipment inventor Arthur Jones decided to test out his experimental approach to bodybuilding on his protégé, Casey Viator. Over the course of 28 days Viator trained using a series of very heavy lifts, largely done on machines, and often done using a very slow tempo. Over the course of those 28 days he gained an astounding 63 pounds of muscle. To make the story even more remarkable, Arthur Jones had Casey Viator following an extremely minimalistic workout routine. He was training just three times per week and each workout averaged about thirty minutes.

The Colorado Experiment – Is this a good way to build muscle as a skinny guy / ectomorph?

But there are other ways to tell the story. Arthur Jones was looking for the most incredibly transformation the world had ever seen so that he could promote his new line of Nautilus™ bodybuilding machines. Casey Viator would be the perfect candidate for this. He had a bodybuilding career full of steroid use, and a previous history of steroid use is known to make building muscle easier in the future. He had lost a couple dozen pounds of muscle mass over the course of the past year due to losing a finger and getting an infection. He had some of the best muscle-building genetics the world had ever seen (he had won the title of Mr. Universe at age 19); and he was extremely skilled when it came to training intensely and eating ludicrously enormous amounts of food.

In the two months leading up to the experiment, Viator then intentionally lost a couple dozen more pounds of muscle by following a strict starvation diet (800 calories per day) and by strictly avoiding heavy lifting. Casey Viator was being paid a tremendous amount for every pound he gained, and all of this was strategically designed to make his transformation as dramatic as possible. It worked. Viator gained 63 pounds of muscle in four weeks!

There are a few cases of people using a similar approach to rebuild muscle and doing very well. Arthur Jones followed the same protocol as Viator – starvation diet, detraining, recovering lost muscle – and managed to rebuild 17 pounds of lean mass in a month. Recently, best-selling author Tim Ferriss was detrained and underfed in the year leading up to his own experiment, and was able to rebuild 34 pounds of lost muscle mass in a month.

This is not to undersell their techniques or their results. These are people achieving otherworldly gains that deserve to make headlines, and their minimalist techniques, given their unusual circumstances, make a whole lot of sense. The stimulus required to rebuild muscle is small and they’re thus able to rebuild muscle mass with only an itty bit of training extremely quickly.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell what actually builds muscle. Sometimes people build muscle by doing totally traditional weightlifting behind the scenes and then also do a very peculiar and marketable type of exercise on the side that they tell everyone about.

There are lots of very bizarre muscle-building techniques that have been marketed over the years, and, err, I feel like I’ve tried my fair share of them. These are novel ways to train and I understand the appeal. They make training easier and more accessible, and previously unheard of methods also bring about the excitement of maybe, just maybe, achieving previously unheard of results.

I’m not saying that you won’t get results using these programs – you might – but it turns out the that the very things that make these routines unique are also what make them a poor choice for your typical guy trying to build muscle. The results tend to come from the fundamentals, whereas the gimmicks might make the program less effective, but more interesting and marketable. They make the program sexy … at the expense of your results.

Some of these techniques make sense for nearly everyone. Viator lifted weights three times per week and he lifted heavy. This works well.

On the other hand, some of their techniques aren’t very effective at all. There have been a number of developments in the muscle-building world in the past several decades and we now know that slow lifting is ineffective compared to a more moderate lifting tempo (study, study, study). A new study that came out last month put another nail in the coffin – intentionally lifting slower reduces your ability to build muscle. (study) Moreover, low volume training is ineffective compared to higher volume training (meta-analysisstudystudystudystudy, study, study, study).

Check out the results of a low volume squat routine compared with a higher volume squat routine (extrapolated for a 150 pound man):

One Set Squatters: 0 pounds muscle, 0 pounds fat. (Strength up by 36 pounds.)

Four Set Squatters: 0 pounds muscle, -3 pounds fat. (Strength up by 46 pounds.)

Eight Set Squatters:  5 pounds muscle, -2.5 pounds fat (Strength up by 82 pounds.)

Looking at the one set squatters, the average was a zero pound gain but that doesn’t mean that everyone gained zero pounds. Some guys gained weight, others lost weight. This is why you’ll see some guys succeed even when doing suboptimal training programs – because they naturally build muscle easily. The same is true the other way. Sometimes people do a halfway decent training program and get nothing out of it even though most other people do. (I would have been the guy losing muscle …)

This is a well studied phenomenon. In one study they put the participants on a 12 week arms-only weightlifting program (bicep curls and tricep extensions). The vast majority of people added around 2 inches to their arms, a few gifted participants were able to add 5.3 inches, and the few “non-responders” lost 0.1 inches. This can likely be explained by nutrition, which wasn’t monitored, but nevertheless some people naturally respond very favourably to weightlifting and others do not. (study)

We aren’t genetically cursed or anything – us skinny guys can build muscle wonderfully well – but we certainly shouldn’t be doing types of exercise that don’t even work well. We just aren’t the genetically elite that, against all odds, manage to build muscle when doing things that don’t reliably build muscle. We instead need to stack the odds in our favour (including nutrition). If you do this well enough, naturally skinny or not, your cleverness may soon have you seeming exceptionally genetically gifted.

WHAT CAUSES MUSCLE GROWTH

Okay. So first things first, when evaluating different types of training it’s important to have a clear grasp of a few muscle-building fundamentals. A muscle will be encouraged to grow because of three things, in (probable) order of importance:

Mechanical tension. This is the tension placed on the muscle by the weights that you’re lifting. The heavier the weight (study) and the larger the range of motion (studystudy, study), the more muscle you’ll build. This is the most important factor when it comes to building muscle. The tricky part is that if the tension isn’t intense enough it won’t stimulate any muscle growth. (study)

Metabolic stress. This is the “burn” or the “pump”. This will cause your body to produce local growth factors in the muscles you’re training, which can cause muscle growth. This is the second most important factor, and again it requires a fair amount of tension on the muscle in order to stimulate muscle growth. (study)

Muscle damage. This is how much damage you inflict on the muscle. The muscle soreness you feel the next day (or the day after that) is caused by inflammation as your body sends nutrients in to repair the damage. If the type of stress you placed on your muscle  is the type of stress that would cause your muscle to grow bigger and stronger, then your body will attempt to rebuild that muscle bigger and stronger. (study)

The more overall sets and reps you do the more growth you’ll be able to stimulate via these three factors, so long as you can recover fully from the workouts. (meta-analysis) As you saw in the squat example, this is very important. Similarly, the more often you hit a given muscle, the more your muscles will grow, again, so long as you can fully recover. Programming your workouts is thus a balancing act of trying to stimulate maximum amounts of mechanical tension, metabolic stress and muscle damage while still being able to properly recover.

So let’s look into some popular training styles and how they can help you accomplish your muscle-building goals. I’ve focused on the four most common ones that we get asked about and then included our own approach at the end.

GENERAL FITNESS TRAINING

Muscle-building programs for skinny guys – calisthenics versus p90x

CONDITIONING & CALISTHENICS (E.G. P90X)

My roommate in university was a muscular guy who naturally weighed in at a beefy 200 pounds. Over the course of a couple years he managed to lose twenty pounds by biking and doing bodyweight workouts (P90x and ab workouts) in our living room. Even though he probably lost a bit of muscle, he wound up looking pretty buff, since he had so much muscle to spare.

I was very different. Even though I would have been thrilled to look like the after shots, well, I didn’t have all the muscle (or fat) that the guys in the before shots had. My starting point was 130 pounds. I couldn’t do a conditioning program, lose some weight, and wind up looking ripped. Willem could. Here’s me after gaining my first 32 pounds (by lifting heavy), and Willem after losing his first 20 pounds (by lifting light):

Mesomorph vs Ectomorph – totally different approach needed to get an aesthetic physique

These programs are for him.

For fat loss. A twelve week study looking at body composition when losing weight found that all participants lost 21 pounds on average, regardless of whether they were doing no exercise, light workouts, or heavy workouts. Their body composition afterwards was quite different though. The ones who weren’t exercising lost 14 pounds of fat and 7 pounds of muscle, the ones who were doing light resistance training lost 16 pounds of fat and 5 pounds of muscle, and the ones who were doing heavy weightlifting lost 21 pounds of fat and 0 pounds of muscle. (study)

An even more recent study found that the lighter weightlifting group lost 13 pounds – 7 pounds of fat and 6 pounds of muscle. The heavier weightlifting group lost 18 pounds, losing 22 pounds of fat and gaining 4 pounds of muscle. (study)

For muscle-building. If you’re eating in a calorie surplus and gaining weight you can make slight improvements at first if and only if these workouts are relatively heavy for you. If you can’t do 10 push-ups, you will indeed need to build up muscle size and strength to be able to get there. As a result, in beginners these workouts can stimulate a little bit of muscle growth at first. (study) Beyond that very early stage though, it doesn’t matter how gruelling the workouts are, or how fearsomely your muscles burn with a hellish fire … if the stimulus isn’t heavy enough it won’t cause you to adapt by becoming bigger and stronger. (study, study, study, study, study) If you keep eating in a calorie surplus, at a certain point you will begin to gain fat.

Remember—sweat is your fat crying, not your body building muscle.

Yes, calisthenics can be progressed to be quite difficult. Planches and handstand pushups require a ton of stabilizer muscle strength and a ton of balance. This makes them rather impressive (and fun) … but the very thing that makes them impressive also makes them rather poor at building up muscle mass. Even with advanced progressions of bodyweight workouts the limiting factor will very rarely be mechanical tension in the targeted muscle, but rather stabilizer muscle strength and/or balance. As a result, your balance and stabilizer muscle strength will improve while your muscle size will remain more or less the same.

Summary. If your goal is building muscle or cutting, these workouts fail at the most important criteria for growth: they aren’t heavy enough. Combined with a calorie deficit you will lose weight (both muscle and fat). Combined with a calorie surplus you will gain weight (both muscle and fat).

These are general fitness workouts though, and they will indeed help make you fit and healthy. This will improve your energy levels, your mood and even your cognition (as will most other types of exercise). Moreover, they can also help you lose weight, as they will help create a calorie deficit by burning calories.

HIGH INTENSITY POWER TRAINING (E.G. CROSSFIT)

There are a lot of routines that involve doing weightlifting for the purposes of improving general fitness. These are common in Men’s Health, group weightlifting classes, and when doing sports specific training. Some of them are very advanced, too. CrossFit, for example, involves doing a lot of highly technical advanced lifts in a gruelling and competitive way. Part general fitness, part extreme sport. In fact, it’s a workout that’s so sport-like that people will sit on the couch and pay to watch CrossFit on TV.

CrossFit isn’t for sissies, and it’s actually pretty damn effective at what it’s designed to do – make you incredibly fit in a very versatile way. There are a lot of claims that CrossFit encourages poor lifting poor, but I think that’s a little harsh. There are people who practice poor lifting form in all styles of training, and it doesn’t seem to me like CrossFit is particularly problematic. Nevertheless, it has a debatably (very) high injury rate, given how advanced the lifts are and that you’re (oftentimes) supposed to do them well beyond the point of fatigue

… but the studies invariably also show that it will indeed make you wicked fit. I would say that the results of the studies looking into CrossFit are very positive, and like callisthenics programs I don’t think it’s a fad, nor should it be. (studystudy)

Is it good at building muscle? Well you’ll certainly build a whole hell of a lot more muscle by doing CrossFit than by reading blog posts. We have a few relatively advanced guys in our program who also do CrossFit, and, well, they tend to be pretty damn badass dudes. If they’ve got a good grasp of muscle-building nutrition they often come in having gained a decent amount of muscle mass too. Heavy-ish weightlifting, even when done for the purposes of general fitness, can be good for that. While it doesn’t rival other forms of exercise designed to build muscle, CrossFit can indeed make you bigger and stronger, especially if you’re relatively skinny starting out. (study)

With general fitness programs designed to make you fit in every way possible, it’s understandably hard to make consistent size/strength gains. After all, it’s a program designed very specifically to make you athletically fit, so any mass gains are more of a side effect rather than the intended outcome. You’ll usually fail with your central nervous system (aka overall fatigue) rather than with the muscle group that you’re trying to grow. When you do fail with the muscle group you’re training it’s often due to muscular endurance instead of muscular strength, which leads to endurance adaptations more so than muscle-building adaptions. The weight used, since it’s used so athletically and with such varied rep ranges, is only occasionally heavy enough to cause muscle growth, the volume and frequency for any one muscle group is sporadic, and most of the lifting is done in the sagittal plane (at the expense of the transverse and frontal planes). As a result your muscle development may not be that balanced. (study)

Summary. These are not programs designed specifically to build muscle, but you may build a bit of it anyway! As far as fitness oriented styles of training go this is by far the best way to go. It’s also very advanced, and probably something you’d want to do after you’ve built up a helluva lot of muscle.

MUSCLE & STRENGTH TRAINING

Muscle-building programs for skinny guys – bodybuilding vs strength training

Alright so now we’re into the types of training that aren’t about fat loss or general fitness, but rather about building up more muscle mass and strength. Heavy weightlifting is without a doubt the easiest way to optimize all muscle-building factors, since you’re moving heavy objects by stretching and contracting your muscles. As a result, virtually every type of training designed to build muscle will involve lifting heavy weights. There are many ways to do this though. One of the more popular approaches is to focus on getting stronger (strength training/powerlifting) and the other popular approach is to focusing on getting bigger (bodybuilding).

There are some less common ways that people lift, like Olympic lifting. It’s a sport in and of itself, and it’s commonly used to train athletes to be explosive, and it’s used in sporty competitive training programs like CrossFit. The lifts are very difficult to learn, they require a lot of equipment, there’s only mechanical tension in the concentric part of the lift (since you drop the weight after lifting it), there’s no emphasis on metabolic stress, and they’re often done far away from failure in order to minimize muscle damage and reduce the risk of injury. This is well known in the muscle-building community, and you rarely see people doing them with the goal of building up muscle mass.

STRENGTH TRAINING (POWERLIFTING)

Now we’re at the heart of the “just lift heavy” argument. That’s what strength training is all about – damn heavy deadlifts, squats, bench presses, overhead presses, etc. This involves lifting very heavy weights through a large range of motion. This is excellent for stimulating mechanical tension, which is the most important factor when it comes to building muscle. Since your muscles will be so eager to grow (aka your muscle cells will be very insulin sensitive) this will mean that a caloric surplus will cause your body to preferentially build muscle instead of storing fat. Brilliant.

The lifts are compound lifts too, which means you’ll hit many muscle groups at once. The squat uses something like 200 muscles. Not all of these muscles will grow maximally, of course. Many are stabilizer muscles, and not even all of the prime movers will be limiting factors. (If your quads are the limiting factor, then it’s your quads that are getting the best stimulus for growth.) You’re going to see a decent amount of growth in many of the muscle groups worked though: your butt, hamstrings, calves, lower back, etc. As a result your workouts will be fairly efficient.

Classic strength training is also based around barbells. This means you’ll do a great job of building up stabilizer muscles, balance, tendon and ligament strength, etc. It’s safer too, since your body will be able to use natural movement patterns and distribute the stress in a biomechanically sound manner. (Counterintuitively, free weights tend to be safer than machines.) Furthermore, the strength that you build will transfer to virtually every other type of manly strength activity, whether that’s advanced callisthenics, CrossFit, carrying your wife over a threshold, flexing and unflexing your pecs to the rhythm of your favourite song, carrying an old woman out of a burning building, etc.

We get a lot of guys coming into our program who didn’t make any progress even when following a hearty strength training program. This is probably not a training problem, but rather a nutrition problem. If you’re trying to lift heavier and heavier weights each week but your body doesn’t have the nutrients it needs to build up more muscle mass, it will be forced to make neural adaptations, i.e., it will learn to use the muscle it already has more efficiently.* This isn’t always bad. This is how you’d get stronger while staying inside your weight class. This is bad when you’re a skinny dude trying to build muscle … because, err, well we don’t want to stay in the featherweight weight class.

*These are called “neural” gains because your  body will grow new neurons to allow you to optimize the unfamiliar movement patterns you’re practicing.

So this is indeed an effective way to build muscle mass … but this still isn’t a mass-building approach to training. This is a strength-building approach to training. If you’re a skinny guy trying to build muscle mass this may not be what you’re after. Here’s where the “just lift heavy” argument falters:

Volume is optimized for building up muscle strength. The weights are so heavy that it imposes a huuuge stress on our central nervous system. As a result we fatigue very quickly. We fatigue before we’ve maximally stimulated our muscles for growth. 

To illustrate this point, consider the deadlift. If you’re doing a heavy 5×5 with a deadlift you’re going to be absolutely destroyed by the end of it.  But you’ve only done 25 reps. That’s nowhere near the optimal amount if you’re trying to develop muscle size. Yes, you could do 10-15 sets of five reps and build maximal amounts of muscle … but it would take you hours to do your workouts and your central nervous system would be fried to a crisp. You’d very quickly become overtrained, not to mention you’d grind your joints to the bone. (study)

Strength-building versus muscle-building lifts. A deadlift is an excellent exercise for strength. After every rep you set the weight on the ground, get back into a great position, and then lift the next rep. You’re essentially doing a series of single rep lifts. You also need to set the weight down relatively quickly, or you risk causing excessive damage / injury on the way down. This means that mechanical tension isn’t constant throughout the lift and the time under tension is very small. Perhaps the best lift known to man for strength … but surprisingly mediocre for size.

Form is optimized for lifting more weight, not building more muscle. A common example is the bench press. If you’re powerlifting or strength training you’ll bring your elbows in right close to your body so that you can press with your triceps and shoulders, and you’ll create an arch in your back to limit the range of motion and improve your leverage. This will radically reduce your ability to grow your chest, but substantially increase the amount of weight you can lift.

The accessory lifts aren’t designed to build muscle mass. A good strength training program will use accessory lifts designed to blast you through plateaus on your big lifts. It’s common to do rack pulls to work on locking out a deadlift, or add chains to your bench press to even out the strength curve. These accessory lifts are designed to improve your strength on the big lifts, not designed to build muscle mass.

If you’re wondering if accessory lifts are needed at all (some minimalist 5×5 programs don’t really use them), a study that came out May 2014 looked into how doing just squats compared with doing squats, leg presses and leg extensions. The volume was equated, so both groups were doing the same amount of weightlifting overall. The multi-exercise group did far better than the squat-only group. They both grew the same overall amount of muscle, presumably because the weightlifting volume was equal, but the greater variety of exercises resulted in more balanced muscle growth – all heads of the quads grew proportionally. Surprisingly, it also resulted in a far greater increase in strength! (study)

Summary. Strength programs are ideal for developing badass strength. They’re also pretty damn decent when it comes to building muscle when gaining weight. Similarly, when losing weight these programs will help preserve all of your muscle mass. However, in the longer term these programs can be fatiguing and tough on your joints and the overuse / injury rates are somewhat high – comparable to CrossFit. (study, study, study) Because of how much stress very heavy lifting will put on your body, it may be wise to begin by bodybuilding to give your tendons and stabilizer muscles time to adapt to the stresses of lifting, and to give yourself an opportunity to practice your lifting technique with lighter loads.

Note: Make sure that if you’re jumping straight into strength training that you’re doing a program that’s appropriate for beginners. A proper strength training program will be, but these are not the ones you tend to find online. It’s extremely rare that someone can just put a barbell on their back and squat with anything close to decent form, it’s even rarer that someone can deadlift a barbell off the ground with decent form, and I’ve never even heard of anyone picking up a barbell and pressing it overhead with enough technique that it’s even remotely safe. Rushing right to doing these big compound lifts is often dangerous and ineffective – especially if you’re a naturally skinny guy, since our bodies are longer and thinner. More on that here.

HYPERTROPHY TRAINING (BODYBUILDING)

A good bodybuilding program will be designed to make you muscular in a balanced, symmetrical and aesthetically pleasing way. If you’re bulking then bodybuilding will build more muscle mass, and if you’re cutting then bodybuilding will maintain all of your muscle mass so that you can exclusively burn fat. If you’re trying to optimize your body composition or aesthetics then this is the type of training you’re after.

Since muscle size and strength is so closely correlated, there are actually a lot of similarities between a good bodybuilding program and a good strength training program. Bodybuilders also tend to build their routines around compound free weight lifts like squats, chin-ups, bench presses, deadlifts, overhead presses, etc.

Bodybuilding tends to build more muscle for a few reasons:

More emphasis on metabolic stress. Powerlifters focuse on getting strong via mechanical tension, whereas bodybuilders focuses on getting big via metabolic stress. Instead of loading up the bar with as much weight as possible and lifting for 1-5 reps, a bodybuilder will focus on using perfect form for 6-12 reps. They’ll focus on building up a mind-muscle connection, feeling the burn, and working towards getting a pump.

Less central nervous system fatigue, more muscle damage. Strength training is very taxing on the central nervous system, since the rep ranges used are so low. Bodybuilders spend less time lifting maximally, which means less central nervous system fatigue, which leaves your body with more resources to build muscle. Because of this bodybuilders are able to do more sets, more reps, more lifts, and train more frequently.

More slow twitch fibre growth. Powerlifters tend to exclusively lift heavy weights. Even if you’re doing a 5×5 program, which is light as far as a powerlifting goes, you’re still just stimulating your fast twitch muscle fibres, and thus only growing your fast twitch muscle fibres. Bodybuilders maximally grow their fast twitch muscle fibres too, but by mixing in lighter rep ranges (12-30 reps) they also grow their slow twitch muscle fibres. While slow twitch muscle fibres have less potential for growth, they can add a significant amount of mass to your frame when properly developed. This may be especially true for us hardgainers, as we may have a higher proportion of slow twitch fibres compared to guys who are naturally very muscular.

Accessory lifts added in to improve aesthetics. Some argue that if you’re already doing compound lifts you don’t need accessory lifts. This is true. A strength training program might not include bicep curls because they won’t improve your big competition lifts. Moreover, strength training programs are so taxing on your ability to recover that you’d risk overtraining by adding in a bunch of superfluous accessory lifts.

But if you want burlier biceps, curls sure help. With a bicep curl you’ll load up your biceps with maximal mechanical tension, fail based on bicep strength, you’ll use a full range of motion with your biceps, etc. Adding in some bicep curls on top of your compound lifts is a no brainer if you want bigger biceps.

Chin-ups are good for building your biceps – probably the best lift for building your biceps – but they also have their limitations. Your biceps cross two joints (your shoulder joint and your elbow joint) so you aren’t getting a full stretch or full contraction. The range of motion is deceptively small. In addition to that, your biceps might not be what you’re lifting with, or they might not be your limiting factor. This is true for me – my back grows when doing chins, not my biceps.

Even the studies that people use to argue that compound lifts are all we need make me want to do curls. (study, study) Check this first one out:

Chin-ups are great for building your biceps, but bicep curls are pretty good too

The participants that did curls in addition to their chin-ups did indeed grow girthier guns even though they didn’t gain as much weight. I suspect that the differences in arm size would have been even more pronounced had both groups gained a similar amount of weight. (Note: the sample size was so small that this could very well be a coincidence at this point– we can’t say for sure.)

This is true with many lifts. In a bench press the long head of your triceps is working through such a ridiculously small range of motion that you won’t be stimulating it at all. Plus, for many guys it’s the shoulders and medial/lateral heads of the triceps that do most of the pushing, so the chest won’t be the limiting factor and thus won’t grow. As a result you’d want to include a few sets of overhead tricep extensions and pec flys. (study)

You’d also be adding in aesthetic and performance enhancing lifts like reverse flys or IYTs, which will build up the under stimulated and under developed back side of your shoulders, overhead tricep extensions so that you can finally target the long head of your triceps, etc. These aren’t very well stimulated with big compound lifts, but they can have a huge impact on your aesthetics (and posture!).

Summary. Hypertrophy programs are ideal for developing a buff physique, and also pretty decent when it comes to getting fearsomely strong. When losing weight these programs will preserve all of your muscle mass. These programs are also fairly appropriate for people just starting with weightlifting, since the rep ranges are more moderate.

COMBINED STRENGTH & SIZE TRAINING

Muscle-building programs for skinny guys – bodybuilding AND strength training

This is the approach that uses all the available techniques/research to create the burliest physique possible. You could think of it as the CrossFit of muscle-building. While CrossFit combines a bunch of different styles of training in an attempt to train for maximum fitness, this approach combines a few different techniques and approaches in an attempt to train for muscle.

You could just as easily call this a subset of bodybuilding, since it will maximally build size … but there are a few things that are common here that aren’t necessarily prevalent in the bodybuilding world. You could call it a subset of strength training too, since quite a few top powerlifters use it to build strength … but there are a few things that aren’t common in the strength training world. Some people realize this is the handsome child of both bodybuilding and powerlifting, so in some circles it’s called “Powerbuilding”.

It’s not new or revolutionary. Most old-time strongmen used a variety of different training styles, lifts and rep ranges to build their physiques. A hundred years ago, Eugen “the Father of Modern Bodybuilding” Sandow used a combination of heavy compound barbell lifts and lighter dumbbell lifts to build his muscle. The golden age lifters did it in the too – Arnold Schwarzenegger was a top level powerlifter and bodybuilder. And it’s still going on today. Ronnie Coleman is an untested world class bodybuilder and powerlifter. Perhaps more relevantly, Layne Norton is a top natural bodybuilder and record holding powerlifter. It’s not a controversial approach to training either. Good luck finding a study that doesn’t show that this is without a doubt the best way to build muscle.

This approach will usually involve:

Equal emphasis on mechanical tension and metabolic stress. A combined approach will focus on getting strong via mechanical tension while also focusing on getting big via metabolic stress. A wide variety of rep ranges will be used, typically ranging from 3-20, but perhaps going as wide as 1-30.

Lifts designed to get you fearsomely strong. Like strength training, you’d use heavy squats, deadlifts and bench presses. You’d also use accessory lifts designed to improve your big lifts so that you can get consistently stronger and blast through strength plateaus. Building up more strength will also help you lift heavier weights in the higher rep ranges, which can improve your ability to build muscle mass in the longer term.

Lifts designed to build muscle mass. Like bodybuilding, you’d use lifts and rep ranges that optimally build muscle size, like moderately heavy romanian deadlifts, dumbbell bench presses, curls, and dumbbell rows. You’d also use accessory lifts to build mass in your goal areas and bring up lagging body parts. Building up muscle size is closely correlated with strength, and can often help people improve their heavy lifts.

Maybe some fitness techniques. For example, it’s common to organize lifts into small circuits and/or supersets. You’ll build the most muscle if you’re able to lift heavy and with good form, after all, so it’s advantageous for the given muscle group to be fully rested before using it again. This can take several minutes, so oftentimes you can fit in another lift. This can improve your general fitness and work capacity, allowing you to recover better between sets/workouts in the future. It will also keep your workouts short and efficient. Plus, of all the types of exercise out there, this is perhaps the best bang for your buck as far as your health and longevity goes.

Bigger emphasis on periodization. You’ll be alternating periods of more intense volume with periods of more intense rest. This will yield the most muscular gains, prevent overtraining, and also build up your overall work capacity, which will allow you to better build muscle in the future. You’d also alternate periods where the emphasis is on bodybuilding with periods where the emphasis is on strength training. This will help keep you consistently progressing.

Summary. A combined approach to lifting is ideal for developing the burliest physique possible, both in terms of strength and size, and both in the shorter and longer term. When losing weight these programs will preserve all of your muscle mass. These programs are also fairly appropriate for people just starting with weightlifting, so long as the lifts and rep ranges are properly progressed and periodized.

This is the approach we use. We use every piece of research to find the optimal way to build muscle, and at this point there’s enough evidence that it’s pretty clear that the best way to build muscle is to strategically combine the best practices of both bodybuilding and powerlifting. As a result, this approach is common with the nerdier of muscle-builders.

There are many ways to structure things. We train three times per week. Each workout takes about an hour. We hit every major muscle group each workout. And each workout we use a variety of lifts and rep ranges designed to make us both big and strong. This has us building size as quickly as possible, strength as quickly as possible … and even improving our posture, health and fitness.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

This may or may not sound like good news. The fact that muscle-building programs are the best programs for building muscle is an awkward truth for us skinny guys. When you don’t have much muscle, it can be intimidating to start a style of training where the amount of muscle you have on your body is indicative of your success (or lack thereof). It would be much more pleasant if we could build up muscle mass as a by-product of doing something that we’re already good at. This is why I spent so long trying to get fitter and stronger doing things like swimming and martial arts – because I felt like I wouldn’t be judged as harshly based on my lack of muscle mass. Not surprisingly, this kept me skinny.

(People at the gym won’t actually judge you harshly, in fact they’ll probably be thrilled that they have someone they can pretend they aren’t flexing in front of. On that note, you can build a home gym if you prefer training at home. It’s not as difficult or expensive as you may think. Here’s what we recommend.)

The good news is that the better your training program, the more your muscle cells will be doing everything they can to grow as quickly as possible. They’ll be incredibly insulin sensitive, meaning that more of the food you eat will be invested in building muscle, and less will be invested in storing fat. The quality of your training will determine how quickly you can build muscle, and also to a large degree how resistant you’ll be to storing fat.

The further away you’ve been from training optimally, the more exciting this news is. You may think that your genetics are keeping you skinny, but by optimizing your training for muscle growth you may actually find that you can grow at an incredibly rapid pace.

Bony to Beastly – Ectomorph transformation (before and after)

All Your Skinny-Guy Muscle-building Questions Answered

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Bony to Beastly—Frequently Asked Questions (skinny-fat, cardio, protein, bulking, cutting, home gym, callisthenics, bodyweight workouts, ectomorphs/skinny guys, etc)

Back in the day my girlfriends would treat me like a rickety old ladder that might, at any moment, collapse under her weight. Now, against all odds, I get skinny guys asking me for muscle-building advice.

Over the past couple years we’ve gotten many thousands of questions from skinny guys all over the world, and I’ve done my best to diligently and thoroughly answer all of them.

The interesting thing is that a lot of the questions—even the super weird ones—come up a lot. I mean, there are some differences too. Some of us consider ourselves “skinny-fat”, some of us are straight up skinny, and some of us are already pretty good at this stuff and looking to become really good. Still, we’re more similar to one another than we often realize. Lots of guys in the community open up about a weird issue they’ve been having… only to have three other guys chime in with, “No way—me too!”

I figure for every question we get, there are at least ten more guys asking it who didn’t email us. So this section of the website is for them. For you, I hope.

We cover juicy skinny topics like:

  • How do I know if I’m an ectomorph? I’m sort of naturally skinny.
  • I’m skinny-fat. Bulking just makes me fatter. Cutting just makes me skinnier.
  • As a skinny guy, can I use calisthenics (bodyweight workouts) to build muscle—Frank Medrano style?
  • Is heavy strength training—a 5×5 routine, say—good for a skinny guy trying to build muscle?
  • Can I build muscle without going to a gym? What equipment would I need?
  • How do I get leaner and more muscular. Is it possible to build muscle and lose fat at the same time?
  • How important are supplements? How much does creatine actually help?
  • Should I be doing cardio? What I’m skinny-fat—should I do cardio then?
  • Can I build muscle even if I’m a vegan/vegetarian?
  • What do I do if my schedule is crazy busy?
  • Are machines safer than free weights?

We tried to go into a lot of detail, provide a ton of practical information, and back up all of the controversial stuff we’re saying with sound scientific evidence.

And if we haven’t already covered your questions, just let us know :)

Read the FAQ Here

Should Ectomorphs do Cardio?

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Weightlifting, training for a triathlon and chugging along on your mum’s treadmill will all result in your body adapting to the given training stimulus. You’ll create more blood vessels, develop more mitochondria in your cells, trigger gene expression and transform your body right down to a molecular level. You’ll become better at what you’re training to do and collect on the corollary benefits: health, fitness, energy, longevity, intelligence, etc. You’ll also spend more of your life feeling awesome, since exercise affects your neurotransmitters and releases endorphins.

Exercise in general is great, and you’d be hard pressed to find someone who disagrees. Different types of exercises accomplish different goals however, and since there are limits to how quickly you can adapt, and training for several goals at once can mean that it takes you longer to accomplish them.

… or maybe not. Is it possible that cardio could help us skinny guys build muscle even more rapidly and even more leanly than just weightlifting alone? An even more controversial question is whether doing only cardio is effective at improving our body composition, health and handsomeness. Not all of us skinny guys are particularly inclined to lift weights, after all, and not all of us ectomorphs are looking to build up big burly biceps. In fact, many of us, because we’ve struggled with weightlifting, strength training and muscle-building in the past, would rather stick to our natural strengths – endurance stuff.

This is a blog for ectomorphs looking to leanly build muscle, be healthy and look awesome. So, how does cardio fit in? What are the pros and cons of cardio?

Health: Cardio vs Weightlifting

We’ll start here because the general assumption seems to be that cardio is synonymous with fitness, so that’s why most people do it – because they want to be healthy. Cardio stands for cardiorespiratory training, where the goal is to maintain an elevated heart rate using exercise. It’s a catch all term for activities designed to strengthen your heart and lungs – ellipticals, running, rowing, p90x, biking, aerobics, Richard Simmons, etc. Most people know that cardio isn’t really designed to make you look better, so it gets cred for being the non-narcissistic wholesome form of exercise that’s done purely for the health benefits (or the love for the sport of running, biking, swimming, etc).

Weightlifting (anaerobic training) is meant to build up muscle size and strength, bone density and tendon strength, and in so doing accomplishes quite a lot. Weightlifting improves insulin sensitivity, as does having more muscle mass. (studystudy) Doing it well makes being big, burly and lean a breeze, since it makes you more likely to shuttle the calories you eat into muscle instead of fat. Since being a strong and lean man is incredibly healthy, it also makes being healthy a breeze. Lifting heavy weights also reduces anxiety, counteracts the effects of aging, and reduces your risk of dying from, well, pretty much everything. (study, studystudy, study) A little known and peculiar fact is that just 1-2 hours of heavy weightlifting – done cleverly – can give the same benefits to your heart and lungs as four hours of jogging would. If you’ve ever done a heavy set of deadlifts followed by a heavy set of chin-ups you know what I mean – that stuff gets your heart rate up pretty damn well and has you sleeping like a baby at night.

So why is cardio the default form of exercise for fitness and health? Apparently after the first and second World Wars, while Russia and parts of Europe continued to value strength, the West became fascinated with cardiovascular ‘aerobic’ fitness. It became a media craze that lasted for decades and worked its way into our culture on a deep level. It’s not that strength training isn’t as fitness friendly as cardio, it just wasn’t swept up in the marketing craze that aerobics was.

Instead of strength and power, endurance became associated with physical prowess and fitness. Running a marathon was the benchmark of fitness, whereas it could just as easily have been deadlifting 400 pounds. One isn’t necessarily healthier than the other after all, they’re just different. Strength training makes you big, lean and healthy, and gives you excellent muscular size, speed, strength and power. Cardio and aerobics training makes you svelte, light and healthy, and gives you excellent muscular endurance and oxygen delivery. Both are valid forms of exercise with their own sets of strengths and weaknesses.

Are there health downsides to cardio or weightlifting? Sure, some. Plodding along on treadmills, concrete and asphalt can be hard on your feet, the cartilage in your knees, and your joints. With weightlifting, some guys wind up with cranky shoulders from bench pressing poorly, and some guys have sore backs for weeks after reckless deadlifting.

Most of those risks can be minimized by doing things properly. Learning how to run correctly and wearing proper footwear will solve most of the downsides of cardio and aerobics. Understanding the fundamentals of good lifting will solve most of the downsides of strength training, and serious injuries associated with weightlifting are surprisingly rare to begin with. Weightlifting results in eleven times fewer injuries than playing soccer, for example. (study)

In fact, injuries are even more common in people who don’t lift weights. Stronger men are less susceptible to injury both in and out of the gym because we learn and practice proper movement patterns, develop good postural alignment, gradually develop denser bones and build up tons of protective muscle to stabilize our spine and joints. Having strong spinal erectors, for example, is an excellent way to safeguard your back against injury – especially for us longly spined ectomorphs. Similarly, having a strong pair of glutes reduces the risk of lower back injuries. (study)

So, when done properly, weightlifting should make you healthier and reduce your risk of injury. When you lift a couch or rev up your lawnmower you’ll be densely boned, strongly tendoned, and cozily protected underneath a thick layer of muscle.

Losing Fat: Cardio vs Weightlifting

Exercise in general is a great tool when trying to lose fat. You can lose fat just through solid nutrition, sure, but adding in exercise can allow you to burn fat faster, as you’ll be burning more calories. Burning calories isn’t usually an issue for us. Since we’re a community of naturally thin guys, we rarely encounter people who struggle with being overweight or obese. We do get guys interested in fat loss though. We get a lot of skinny guys who are concerned that they’re skinny-fat, some guys come to us after having inadvertently bulked themselves into some fat, and some naturally thin guys want to play to their strengths and rock even lower body fat percentages. So losing fat certainly deserves a bit of attention.

The problem is that after perusing some pop culture mags, we often think adding in jogging, HIIT  or cardio on top of our strength training is the best way to lose fat. That isn’t necessarily true, and that whole “eat less and move more” stuff isn’t advice meant for guys like us to begin with. Let’s take a step back for a second. To effectively lose weight all you need to do is get into an energy deficit. There are two ways to do this: consume fewer calories or burn more calories.

The benefit of cardio is that it burns calories without increasing your appetite. It would be fairly using for losing fat if you went and burned off a bunch of calories and then came home and ate extra calories to make up for it. But it doesn’t work that way. People exercise and burn calories, but their appetite doesn’t go up. (study, study) Since appetite is such a huge struggle for most people, that’s a pretty huge deal – you can cardio yourself into a calorie deficit without feeling hungry. (Us skinny dudes do fine by simply eating less.)

Exercise can also very slightly raise your resting metabolism. Since your metabolism is what’s steadily burning calories all day long, it plays a huge role in how quickly you can burn fat. The effect that exercise of any kind has on your metabolism isn’t all that significant though, and us ectomorphs tend to have impressively high metabolisms by default … so we don’t really need to emphasize making it even higher. As far as metabolism goes though, a good rule of thumb is that the more joints and muscle groups involved the better, and the heavier you go the better. (The more muscle mass you can get doing intense amounts of work the better.) So while cardio will increase your resting metabolism by a bit, heavy squats, deadlifts, presses and chins would boost it even higher. A single 30 minute full-body strength training session will increase your metabolism for 38 hours. (Study.)

Your metabolism is also affected by the amount of muscle you have on your body, but again the effect there is surprisingly small. Each pound of muscle burns about 6 calories per day at rest, so adding twenty pounds of muscle to your frame would burn an extra 120 calories per day. That’s a glass of milk, four prunes, or a small mouthful of peanuts. Nothing to write home about.

(While that’s bad news when trying to burn fat, that’s great news for those of us worried about having to eat more to fuel our ever more muscular bodies. Building muscle doesn’t increase how much you need to eat by all that much.)

So there’s the calorie deficit part of fat loss, which usually isn’t very difficult for us. That’s the part that gets your weight moving down. Weight loss, of course, isn’t synonymous with fat loss.

For guys like us it’s the muscle maintenance part that’s the tricky part. When losing weight our bodies can get energy from stored fat or by breaking down muscle mass. So for us guys who also care about how much muscle we have, driving ourselves into a calorie deficit via cardio can be counterproductive, as it doesn’t protect us against muscle loss. A bigger calorie deficit via cardio will just increase the chances of us shedding muscle along with the fat. That’s where strength training comes in. Strength training, if you’re trying to keep your muscle around, is pretty damn near necessary when trying to lose fat.

Let’s look at a study.

First, the simplest option: dieting. The participants who ate at a controlled calorie deficit dropped 21.1 pounds over 3 months. 14.6 of that was fat and 6.5 pounds of that was muscle. That’s quite lot of muscle loss!

Now let’s look at option #2: aerobic training (i.e. cardio). This group ate at a controlled calorie deficit and added in 3 weekly hours of endurance training. They dropped 20.1 pounds.  Not quite as big a number as the dieting group, but 15.6 pounds of that was fat, so it wasn’t quite as good for weight loss, but slightly better for fat loss. These guys ‘only’ lost 4.5 pounds of muscle. That’s pretty good for your average person just trying to get ‘smaller’. Getting ‘smaller’ is every skinny guy’s worst fear though. When trying to lose fat we aren’t trying to get smaller, we’re trying to get leaner. Hell, when I’m trying to lose fat I’d rather come out bigger.

Option #3: anaerobic training (i.e. strength training). If you add in 3 weekly hours of strength training you’re up to 21.6 pounds of weight lost—the most impressive yet. The really impressive part though is that 21.1 pounds of that was fat! That’s five more pounds of fat loss than the cardio group, and only 0.5 pounds of muscle was lost. Visually you can imagine how dramatic a change that would make to someone’s physique, not to mention they’d come out ripped and muscular, not simply smaller.

Now, I should point out two things:

  1. The strength training group was also doing aerobics. The cardio-centric work might have accounted for around one pound of that fat loss. (As you can see in option #2, cardio added in about an extra pound of fat loss compared with just dieting.) It’s safe to assume that removing the cardio would have still resulted in by far the most fat loss, and other studies support that conclusion.
  2. The diet wasn’t optimal. As a beginner it’s quite possible to build muscle while losing fat, especially if you’re starting off 20+ pounds overweight or relatively under-muscled (as almost all of us ectomorphs are). Hell if you’re fat, skinny or skinny-fat you can expect much better results than this as far as muscle is concerned.

To put that into perspective, I took a couple of my old progress shots and faked up a “weight loss” before and after, which is similar to what a skinny or skinny-fat ectomorph would accomplish through dieting or dieting + cardio. My posture is slightly worse in the after shot, which can’t really be helped, since it was taken when my posture was still very much a work in progress.

Cardio for skinny guys and ectomorphs - weight loss

And here’s weight loss consistent with option #3: strength training and cardio. I only did 30 minutes of cardio per week though, not 3 hours. Over 4 weeks I dropped from 172 lbs to 162 lbs. By this time Jared and I were in touch with Marco, so my posture improved a ton. As I lost fat it chiselled out the muscle underneath, making my chest look a whole lot bigger. (I also improved my posture.)Cardio for skinny guys and ectomorphs - fat loss

So if you’re trying to lose fat should you run? If you’re comparing it to couch-riding, then yes. If big lifts are an option though then you’ll see much much greater results there.

If you have the time and energy for both, well, do both! Running will burn extra calories allowing you to eat a little more and still get/stay lean. You could also eat a little less, which us ectomorphs are often rather good at. Recently I’ve been researching and experimenting with appetite (blog post coming soon!), and when it came time to trim back down after months of overeating, I lost 20 pounds of fat just by continuing on with my same ol’ Bony to Beastly weightlifting plan and combining it with a calorie deficit. No cardio:

Cardio for skinny guys and ectomorphs - no cardio

 

Muscle and Strength: Cardio vs Weightlifting

Weightlifting is traditionally geared at building up muscle size and strength, and it does it extremely well. It’s an incredibly effective way to build up muscle mass (even for us skinny guys). Cardio is designed to improve your cardiorespiratory system, so it’s not really doing much in the muscle-building department. Training for endurance can produce small muscles gains in extreme beginners, but it caps out very early. Even bodyweight strength training and weightlifty aerobics programs like p90x cap out very early on the muscle front, which makes sense – that’s just not what they’re designed for.

So if you’re training to build big strong muscles while training to develop your cardiorespiratory system (or muscular endurance) you’re aiming at two opposite ends of the fitness spectrum at once: being big, fast, explosive and strong vs being able to lithely and steadily chug along for miles.

If you’re trying to build muscle efficiently you pretty much need to lift weights, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do cardio as well. The downside is that you risk run into a certain degree of training ‘interference’. The upside is that you’ll still make pretty substantial progress towards both goals. Ectomorphs often love running, for example, since they find they’re well suited to it naturally, and there’s no need to stop. We have lots of guys who love to run, play sports, do martial arts, etc. come into our program, and they get kickass results.

In fact, in some ways it may even help.

Some studies show that your strength, speed, power and size gains would be reduced by only 20-30% if you add in heavy endurance training to your strength training. (Study.) Similarly if you add in strength training to your endurance training it would take you longer to become a master marathoner. The effects are fairly proportional, so the more running you do the slower you’ll build strength, speed, power and size. In return for those sacrifices you’ll build endurance though, so if endurance is key for what you do then it’s certainly valid to train both simultaneously.

If you’re relatively out of shape then to a certain extent both types of training can help with both. As a classic ectomorph just starting out, say, you’d build a small amount of strength by doing aerobic work, and you’d build a small amount of endurance by strength training. I noticed this quite a bit when I first started. See, despite my long lanky limbs I was a crap jogger … until I started building up my strength. After a few months of strength training I found I could all of a sudden jog pretty effortlessly—without ever having trained my endurance. Were I trying to become a jogger though, I would have improved my ability to jog much more quickly had I trained by jogging.

Most people aren’t trying to train for a marathon while simultaneously trying to build muscle. It happens, but it’s relatively rare. Adding in modest amounts of cardio into a muscle-building program is very different. For example, 15-30 minutes of cardio once or twice a week on top of a heavy weightlifting routine wouldn’t be significant enough endurance training to result in any interference at all. In fact, strategically adding in a bit of cardio, depending on what type of cardio you do, can sometimes accelerate results. One recent meta-analysis looking into concurrent training (strength training + endurance training) found that while lots of jogging reduced strength and hypertrophy, small amounts of biking actually increased it. (study)

With us ectomorphs though, since cardio burns calories without increasing our appetite, we’re often best leaving it out unless we love it. It’s not bad, but it means we need to eat even more, and eating enough to build muscle is often challenging enough for us already (although a big emphasis in our program is clever eating strategies to make that easier).

We’re often quite insulin sensitive and rocking rather high metabolisms anyway, so – with a good muscle-building program in place – it’s not like we’re at risk of gaining much fat with or without cardio. We tend to be able to build muscle pretty effectively and leanly with or without cardio added in.

So cardio can be worked into a muscle-building program, but you’d need be mindful of the type of cardio you do and the amount of cardio you do. If your goal is building muscle then you’ll see better results if you emphasize building muscle.

Aesthetics: Cardio vs Weightlifting

Cardio isn’t really something a non-overweight person would do to improve how they look. Cardio won’t make you significantly more muscular or less fat, so it won’t really make you look any better. It’s really only an aesthetics tool for people struggling to lose weight. (Weightlifting would work well for that too, and also keep more muscle around – but for many overweight guys maintaining muscle isn’t really that big of a deal.)

As guys who are naturally thin and have no trouble with overeating, running will often take us further away from our aesthetic goals. We’re much better off pursuing weightlifting, as that’s a style of training designed specifically to make us bigger and stronger as efficiently as possible. There are subsets of weightlifting designed specifically to make you look better, too (namely bodybuilding). So as far as looking better goes it’s no contest really: weightlifting for the win.

Athletics: Cardio vs Weightlifting

This is highly individualized and obviously depends on your sport. Generally speaking training with heavy weights gives you speed and power, while aerobics/jogging gives you endurance. Since most sports involve bursts of speed followed by lower intensity periods (e.g. soccer, basketball, football, frisbee, martial arts, etc) steady state cardio isn’t necessarily the best way to train for it, and thus the cardio/conditioning part of their training typically involves some form of cardio intervals instead. Oftentimes you’ll see a mix of cardio and weightlifting when it comes to athletics.

 

Running for Running

Humans are incredible endurance running machines. We’ve evolved shorter toes than our ape-like brothers, allowing us to run more easily; we’ve lost most of our body hair, giving us an extremely efficient cooling system (sweating); we’ve got two legs, which is slower but more energy efficient than four; and we’ve got a ton of slow twitch muscle fibres compared with many animals, allowing us to run for miles and miles. As ectomorphs this is even more true, as we often have tons of slow-twitch muscle fibres. With a little training we can be running rock stars.

Running is something we’re really good at as a species, and with a little bit of training we make truly incredible distance runners. Not to mention it  improves our cardiovascular health, gets endorphins flowing and can give us a runner’s high. (Jared, 2010, after some sprint intervals outside.)

It’s no surprise that there are so many popular sports for endurance runners: marathons, triathlons, decathlons, ultrathons, etc.

So, should ectomorphs do cardio?

It may sound like I have a bias in favour of lifting weights, and I have to admit that I’ve grown to love it, so perhaps I do … but I chose this type of exercise because it was the type of exercise that lined up with my goals, not because I was particularly inclined to lift weights. In fact, nothing scared me more than going to a gym. At 6’2 and 130 pounds even lifting weights in private was pretty intimidating. I would have much preferred jogging around the block or popping in a p90x DVD because, as a skinny guy, I would have felt much more comfortable doing it.

What endurance training excels at is producing adaptations that make you better at endurance activities. If you love running and your goal is to be a kick-ass marathoner then it’s a no-brainer: you should definitely be running. Just like you shouldn’t be playing the drums with the goal of building up your biceps though, you shouldn’t be jogging because of its supremacy in the muscle-building, health, fitness, aesthetics or fat-burning spheres.

What heavy weightlifting excels at is building muscle size, strength, speed and power. It’s also great for making you look better, because it fixes up your postural alignment and broadens your shoulders. And it’s key when it comes to getting lean, since it causes your body to burn fat for energy instead of muscle.

I’d recommend choosing the type of exercise you do based on your goals. Bonus points if you find time in your schedule to do a bit of both, too.

Why Skinny Guys Fail To Build Muscle

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Maybe you’ve seen the skinny guy who gets totally amped up to gain weight. They’ve tried and given up in the past, but blame their failure on not trying hard enough—on not having enough motivation. They start off strong—hitting the gym 5 times a week, eating 100% clean (whatever that means), and spending hundreds of dollars on bizarro supplements that even the supplement salesman is confused by.

A few weeks go by and after sacrificing so much in their life… the scale hasn’t really budged. Or maybe their weight even dropped because they cut out the easy calories from junk foods. Soon we stop seeing this guy in the gym.

Why does this keep happening? Honestly, this guy has incredible willpower and motivation—that’s a brutal routine that many professional fitness models can’t even keep up. That isn’t the problem. Eventually anyone will either reach capacity and burn out, or switch their energy to something else—something new and exciting (new job, holidays, new relationship)… and then there’s no room left for the crazy muscle-building routine.

I’ve been that guy too many times to count. (And not just with building muscle, either.)

Us skinny guys aren’t having a hard time because we’ve got bad genes, although that was an excuse I once used. No, us skinny guys are actually quite adept at building burly muscles. In our program the average member will gain ten pounds in the first five weeks and twenty within the first three months. While this may sound crazy, especially if, like us, you’ve tried and failed in the past… these results line up well with what’s found in the research. The largest and most thorough muscle-building genetics study found that skinny guys build muscle far faster than anyone else (study). Some guys in the study added two inches to their arms and doubled their strength in just the first three months.

So why do so many of us ectomorphs fail at building muscle over and over again?

Let’s backtrack a little bit.

Dan Ariely, one of our favourite behavioural economics researchers, believes that New Years Resolutions are such an important marker for change because it offers a fresh start. Perhaps we were skinny, unhealthy and low-energy last year. But not this year. This year we’ve got a clean slate.

But we’re going to slip, we’re going to “fail”—and that’s part of the process. A setback is just an opportunity for us to figure out what went wrong, how we can fix it, and then try again. It shouldn’t been seen as a failure, and it certainly has nothing to do with our ability to build muscle. The moment we stop thinking about change as binary—either as success or failure—but rather as a process that’ll evolve, the more likely we’ll actually reach our goals.

So when looking at our routines and our efforts, we need to look at them objectively. If our routine was failing, which part wasn’t working? What piece is missing?

If our routine is working, but is tough to maintain, what was enjoyable and sustainable? What is wearing us down? What’s the part that’s most responsible for our results? What’s useless filler that just seems to be working?

This is how we gradually develop lifestyles that work for us. This is how we get to consciously decide who we want to become. Then eventually those habits become what we do automatically—unconsciously.

Can you imagine if every single day you unconsciously made good longterm decisions for yourself? What if working out and eating well was so easy that you didn’t even think about it? What if being burly could be your natural way of being?

In the first part of this article we’ll teach you how to adjust and overcome the challenges you’ll face in your first few weeks of building muscle, and in the second part will teach you how to develop them into an enjoyable lifestyle so that you can still be rock-solid and healthy ten years from now.

The importance of habits

Let’s start by briefly discussing the importance of habits. Think of establishing good habits as free “goodness”. They don’t tax your energy levels at all because they’re decision-free. If you turn something into a habit then it becomes unconscious, automatic and no longer stresses you.

Admittedly, selling the idea that habits are your one way ticket to muscleville isn’t such an exciting revelation. Many of us would rather search for the magic pill or new supplement to make us look like Wolverine in 72 hours instead.

Even if you could do it, that would be selling yourself short. James Fell, writer for TIME Magazine, recently interviewed Hugh Jackman and it turns out that his routine is so brutal (many hours of intense training per day and a 7,000 calorie per day diet) and unsustainable that he’s only able to maintain it while filming. He lets his physique and health go to pot as soon as the filming stops. By the the time Wolverine had hit the theatres, Jackman had already lost his jackedness.

…But as a naturally skinny guy you can realistically have a lean, burly and healthy body year round, and you can do it fairly effortlessly. Maybe three hours each week in the gym. Maybe learning to cook a little better. Getting a little more clever with your nutrition and fitness routine.

When you run into a setback—and you will—you’ll need to strategically adjust what you’re doing. Cement in the more enjoyable, convenient and successful parts of your routine into lifelong habits. Over time you’ll gradually weed out the bad habits while adding new positive ones. Being jacked becomes totally natural. And all your friends start complaining to their other friends about how easy you have it—about how you’re all ripped and energetic and don’t even seem to try at it.

There are a couple necessary parts to consciously creating habits. It all starts with:

  1. Defining a Concrete Goal. (Perhaps gaining twenty pounds of muscle before summertime.)
  2. Understanding and maximizing your willpower to kickstart change.
  3. Setting your new habits.
  4. Honest and brutal accountability.
  5. Learning to strategically adjust.

Goal-Setting

Where do you want to be?

Before you take a step forward, you need to figure out which direction is forwards. You need to know which direction you’re trying to go. The clearer, more concise and concrete the goal the better.

It’s not enough to say you want to build muscle. How much muscle? Fifteen pounds? thirty pounds? Once you know, you can make a clear and detailed plan on how to get there.

Think of your goal as a mountain in the distance. If the weather is clear, you know exactly which direction to head to keep making progress. Introduce a bit of fog and you’re doomed. Even a small bit of fog can keep you walking in circles for a bit of time until it clears up and you can focus again on moving towards your mountain.

Let’s say you want to gain 25 pounds in 5 months. Great, so that’s 5 pounds every month. Just over 1 pound every week. You can measure yourself weekly and see if you are reaching that goal or not. If you gained a pound then you’re moving forward right on schedule and you can keep doing what you’re doing. If you didn’t, you know you need to find a way to eat more the following week.

(Obviously you need to make sure you’re gaining muscle and not fat, and that’s where good nutrition and lifting comes in… but you get the idea.)

But if your goal is super vague—like “get jacked”—how do you measure that? How do you know when you’re progressing and should stay the course? How do you know when you need to re-evaluate what you’re doing? How do you know when you’ve reached a huge milestone and should reward yourself for a job well done?

Making your goal super concrete

If you feel like you know everything you need to about eating and training but haven’t really started, you need to get clearer with your goals. In the incredible book Switch by Chip & Dan Heath they make a great point: what’s sometimes seen as resistance is just a lack of clarity. Clarity dissolves resistance.

In his TV show Man vs Wild, Bear Grylls always has an ultra-clear goal—find civilization after being dropped off in the middle of nowhere. Because he has a concrete goal he can make clear decisions like, “Okay, I’ll need to follow this river down stream since it’ll lead to the coast and people generally settle around coasts”.

You can apply these same principles to building muscle.

  • No weight gain this week? You aren’t in a calorie surplus. You need to consume more calories.
  • Gained some fat this week? You’re consuming too large of a calorie surplus for your lifestyle. Perhaps you need a better training program, better nutrition choices, more protein, or a smaller calorie surplus.
  • Couldn’t make it to the gym for all three workouts? Perhaps you need to build a simple home gym instead, reorganize your schedule, or make your workouts more efficient.
  • Haven’t started because you have no idea where to start? Perhaps you should buy a fantastic muscle-building program that takes care of all that for you ;)

When you’ve made your goal defined and concrete, there’s no wiggle room left but to just to do it.

Don’t let endless research or decision paralysis wear you down or kill your motivation. The hardest yet most important thing when it comes to exercising and eating well is to actually start doing it. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to start happening.

Make a clear goal that you can reach relatively soon, write it down and put it on your fridge to remind yourself every day. Some ideas to start are: train 3x a week for one month, gain twenty pounds of muscle in five months, and to literally explode your pants into pieces with a simple flex of your glutes.

Willpower

Kickstarting change with willpower

You’re going to need to make some changes to your current lifestyle to reach your goals. Doing the same thing over and over again (a habit) is easy, but making these changes is tough. It’s easy to put off ordering weights from Amazon or scouting out the neighbourhood gym. It’s easy to put off finding a good workout program. It’s easier to go to the grocery store tomorrow.

Exercising your willpower means to either override an immediate desire that is typically not in-line with your long-term goals (like passing on video games to free up time) or doing something productive long-term that you’d rather not be doing in the moment (like hitting the gym at the end of a super long day). According to Switch, every single decision you make—even ones as small as what to wear in the morning—slowly depletes your willpower. This explains why even relatively simple things, like shopping, can be draining.

If you haven’t hit the gym before, you’ll need to sign up for one even if you think you’ll feel out of place there. Or build a home gym. (Just don’t use crap equipment by the side of the road that makes even racking the weight dangerous).

home-gym-rack-be-safe

If you’re not currently gaining weight, you’ll need to scheme up a way to eat more food (article on that here).

If you don’t feel good or have much energy, you may need to eat more micronutrients (whole foods containing vitamins, minerals and fibre), eat more carbohydrates or improve your sleeping routine.

Building muscle means making a conscious decision to get yourself lifting weights and putting more food on your plate.

“Shrink The Change”, Swapping & Realizing You’re Only Human

While 46% of people making New Years Resolution are keeping up with them after 6 months (study) another study by the same researcher, John Norcross, found only 19% of people were still with them for 2 years (study). (Norcross has had his principles on change helpfully outlined here.) It’s not because their goals weren’t worthwhile or because they were unattainable. It’s because we assume that since we’re motivated now that our willpower will last forever.

It won’t, and we need to anticipate that.

We’re hyper-aware of where we need to improve. It can be easy to make a list of 15 items that need to change now. But we really only have space in our life for one major lifestyle change at a time—if that. Sometimes people even need to deprioritize another area of their life to make room for new priorities.

So what can you do when you’ve only got so much willpower?

Shrink the change. If you want to gain 50 pounds of muscle while losing a tiny bit of fat around the belly while doing cardiovascular exercise 5 times a week… that’s great, but it’s also a mountainous goal that’s doomed to fail.

Prioritize and shrink it down to just one goal, fully achieve it, progress to the next step. That way you can accomplish everything in succession rather than failing at everything all at once.

Let’s say you decide to order a pair of dumbbells from Amazon and start lifting three times per week in front of the TV. Next month, when that is easy and part of your life, then start adding in a bunch of calories. Once that’s easy, worry more about the quality of your lifting and the quality of your calories. A couple months and a couple dozen pounds of muscle later, you could start adding in some more off-day activities like sports or swimming. By the end of the year you’ll be a lean mean health machine.

Change takes time and the more you realize the limits of your body and how to stay within them, the better chance you’ll have to stick with it. Once you can learn to actually accomplish lasting lifestyle changes that aren’t taxing your willpower, that’s when you’ll see results that effortlessly last forever.

(Maintaining muscle is also 1,000% times easier than building muscle, so don’t expect being perma-full and sore and all that stuff to be a lasting part of your life—it won’t be. You wouldn’t even need to lift three times per week.)

Another example from Switch is how people hate to clean their house because they know it will take over an hour, and they don’t have an hour to spare. If you shrink the change to just committing to 5 minutes though you’ll at least do something because the huge task was shrunk to a manageable level.

A good example of this is when Shane and I did our “Lean to Mean” experiment. We set a 30 day limit on eating well and working out. The idea of losing three hours a week to lifting heavy things and chugging protein shakes didn’t sound like a fun time to the sedentary and skinny version of me, but because of the time limit it wasn’t so daunting. I wasn’t giving up my entire future life, just a few hours a week for a month. At the end of the month I’d gained over 30 pounds, felt amazing, and was eager to keep going. The next month was a breeze. Soon we started finding ways to streamline our plan—making it more fun, more efficient, more delicious. Nowadays it’s easier to be muscular than to not be muscular.

muscle-may-ectomorph-transformation-jared-polowick

Swap – don’t add or remove. Let’s say you like to snack on junk food (Doritos anyone?) before bed—a behaviour you’ve been meaning to change. Let’s also say you have trouble eating enough to build muscle. And let’s also say you have trouble eating enough protein to build muscle. A clever way to accomplish all of your goals would be to swap something muscle-buildy into that junk food habit cycle.

Since you’ll need more calories, removing Doritos (an easy source of calories) from your diet isn’t going to help you. Instead, you need more healthful calories and more protein. So an option would be to dip your Doritos into a small bowl of plain Greek yogurt for some added calories, protein, micronutrients, and deliciousness.

If you like drinking milk and need some more calories, just swap out that regular 1% or 2% for a higher fat whole milk. Need even more calories and micronutrients? Mix in some cocao.

For swaps like these ones almost no willpower is needed. This leaves willpower available to focus on the trickier stuff.

Change things around you. Some people can’t eat wholesome foods unless all the junk foods are removed from their house. Other people don’t make it to the gym because it’s too long a drive.

If you’re running low on willpower, why not change everything around you instead of yourself? If the gym is too far, too expensive or too busy and stressful… buy some adjustable dumbbells and lift at home.

The environment we live in has a huge effect on us. If you do have small plates, buy bigger ones—it’s been shown to make us eat more. Eat with bigger spoons and drink from wider/shorter glasses instead of tall/narrow ones.

If you feel too tired to cook every night, cook in bulk on the weekend. If you can’t handle large serving sizes, snack more during the day. If you forget to snack (as is common for us skinny guys), put a big bowl of delicious nuts or dried fruit on your desk, making it instinctive to snack throughout the day. Even better if it’s in a clear bowl! (study)

bulk-meals-cooking-for-a-week-lean-gain

Once you change the environment, these changes will be willpower-free, leaving your willpower available for other things.

If you feel lazy, maybe you’re exhausted. You will need to honestly judge yourself, but when you’re feeling lazy… are you actually lazy or just completely exhausted?

If you’re exhausted, something in your life needs to change. You may need to eat more wholesome foods to give your body what it needs to function properly, you may need more restful sleep (members, great post on that here), or eliminate useless stressors in your life.

Don’t beat yourself up by thinking you’re too lazy to get off your butt when it could be the complete opposite. Get smart about it instead.

If you’re already feeling low-energy, lifting may seem like another energy sapping activity… but people who work out regularly develop more energy and more willpower than people who don’t. To start it might take a bit of energy to to develop the habit, but once you’re used to it, it’ll reward you back with good health and great energy levels. This is why it makes such a great first step.

Make it easier to be healthy & strong with your favourite foods. You need to develop a lifestyle that includes solid exercise and good foods. But that doesn’t mean you need to eat bland, expensive or inconvenient superfoods all day long. The meals you cook should be quick to prepare and fit easily inside your schedule, they should be made up of foods you already enjoy, and they should be well within your budget. This could be stew cooked in bulk on Sunday, meat and potatoes on the barbecue eaten with your family, five-minute peanut butter and banana sandwiches in your dorm room, two-minute smoothies in your mini-blender, or gourmet five course meals—that’s entirely up to you and your lifestyle.

Ectomorph Muscle-Building Vice Guide: Pizza

Sleep replenishes willpower

When you wake up after a good restful sleep you have 100% willpower. The moment you make a decision like deciding between eating a bowl of muesli cereal or having a protein smoothie, you’ve already used up a small piece of your willpower for the day. This is why many successful people like Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein and Obama wear/wore the same outfit everyday to make their mornings as decision-free as possible.

Some people have very taxing jobs that require them to make a lot of decisions and they understandably feel completely drained by the time they get home. If you fall into that camp, one option is hitting the gym before work starts. That way you’ll have full willpower to draw from to ensure you get there. Not only that but there are some mental clarity benefits you’ll get throughout the day from exercising (study).

There’s an age-old saying that you should sleep on big decisions. This makes sense, as get to make the decision with full willpower, allowing you to make the best long-term decision even if it means short term difficulty. At the end of the day, when your body is exhausted you will always pick the short-term option. This affects any important decision you’ll make in your life like: eating well, working out, saving money, quitting drugs or smoking, etc.

In Willpower by Tierney/Baumeister, the authors share that research has found that sleep deprivation has been shown to impair processing of glucose, which affects your willpower (bit more on that below).

Baumeister believes that in order to get the most out of your willpower, you should use some of it to set aside time for quality sleep.

How to increase your willpower capacity

Exercising has often been called a cornerstone habit because adding exercise into your life can affect so many other areas of your life. In one study, researchers found that regular exercise increased willpower, allowing people to make better decisions throughout the day. Those who were exercising also started smoking less, drinking less, overspending less, procrastinating less and missing fewer appointments. They also had better mood regulation.

It’s possible that you can directly train your willpower too, and adding exercise into your life might help you do that. The brain is incredibly complex and we’re not sure yet if willpower can be trained as a skill or if we merely get better at specific things through practice. However, many researchers have likened willpower to a muscle because, like a muscle, stressing it makes it grow bigger. And just like with our muscles, fully annihilating our willpower won’t make it grow faster. It’s better to stress it often, fully replenish it, stress it again.

Researchers have found that doing small tasks that are out of the ordinary can be taxing at first, but once they become a habit, your willpower grows to accommodate them. Things like using your non-dominant hand to open doors and brush your teeth, promising not to cuss and watching your language, etc. They tax your willpower a little bit, but they don’t bring you to a point of failure. This allows you to slowly stress and grow your willpower.

Exercise and nutrition would be a more intense way to add in a willpower stressor, so it’s uncertain whether hitting hitting the gym is growing your willpower because it’s improving your health and energy levels, or because you’re also training your willpower muscle while doing it.

How to replenish your willpower when you’re drained

Calories! Your brain uses a lot of energy. Researchers think that upward of 20% of your daily calorie intake is used up by your brain (study, article). More specifically, your brain uses glucose. Glucose is just a simple energy unit—the type of sugar our body likes to use and store (in the form of glycogen). Some foods are also made out of glucose—dextrose, maltodextrin, potatoes, rice, etc. Glucose delivery is an essential part of willpower. Researcher Todd Heatherton famously found that consuming glucose reversed the brain changes wrought by depletion (article).

So what happens when you don’t have enough available glucose in your system? Your brain doesn’t just shut off when it’s not getting the energy it needs from food (thankfully). Rather, it switches into “energy saving mode”, which basically means you’ll resist doing any high-energy stuff. When you’re exhausted, this allows you to keep your deeper processes, like breathing, running smoothly.

This means that when you’re exhausted you can’t write your best chapter for your novel, you can’t learn a new instrument, and even insignificant decisions become hard to make (like whether to eat frozen pizza or chicken strips).

How Glucose Affects Willpower

There are many examples from Willpower about how important the steady delivery of glucose is. In one study they reference, below-average glucose levels were found in 90% of juvenile delinquents just taken into custody. There is a chapter focusing on the struggles of type-1 diabetic patients having an extremely hard time in life (skipping appointments, emotional outbursts, more arrests). These are good people with a disease that negatively affects their life because of what it does to their self-control.

This is found elsewhere too. Dogs given sugar laced drinks better obey commands, and quitting smoking is easier while eating more calories than normal. Women get short on willpower during the luteal phase, when their body requires more energy to produce hormones, and they end up making more impulsive purchases, smoking and drinking more, and having more arguments. Many women are on strict diets, and during this phase they often break down and eat high calorie foods—finally giving their bodies the extra energy they crave.

Even driving while sick is more dangerous than driving while mildly intoxicated. Taking care of your body takes precedent over your activities, so your body dedicates glucose/energy to fight off the germs… leaving less for your brain. (Evidently our immune systems don’t understand the dangers of driving.) The reason we sleep so much when we have a cold is perhaps to reserve the glucose in our system for fighting germs.

Now here’s the cruel catch-22 for most of the Western world. They want to lose weight, so they need to eat less food, and they need willpower in order to do it… but because they’re eating less food, they have less willpower. Our bodies can also grow “addicted” to junk food laced with sugar, since it knows it’s a great hit of instant energy. So we’ll actually start to crave sweet things when we’re feeling exhausted. This is why people become very emotional (grouchy) while they’re cutting—they don’t have as much self-control as they normally do.

As skinny guys though, this is amazing news. We need to eat more to fuel our muscle growth but those extra calories won’t just turn into bigger guns, they’ll give us the fuel we need to keep up with our new routines. This makes it easier to make healthy choices like cooking our own food and hitting the gym.

(Eating a lot of food can also stress our willpower, since our body will start telling us that we don’t need any extra food. The good news is that the extra food will give us more willpower, which we can then reinvest into eating more food. It’s wise to make your bulking diet as easy on the appetite as possible though.)

If you know you need some willpower in a pinch, have a Coke or a Gatorade. Generally though, the best way to ensure a dependable and predictable amount of willpower is to eat lots of nutritious foods with lots of good stuff in it (vitamins, minerals, etc.) and maintain a healthy bodyfat level (not really much concern there for us skinny guys) for a steady stream of willpower and energy throughout the day.

Celebrating Small Wins

Many people who don’t reach their resolutions blame themselves, negatively affecting their self-esteem. (For example, we may begin to see ourselves as people who can’t build muscle.)

There will be rough patches in whatever you pursue. Plan for it, brace yourself, and always remind yourself how far you’ve progressed. If you gain ten pounds, get sick and lose two pounds… you’re still up eight pounds!

It’s important to remind yourself that what you’re doing is worthwhile, and that if you don’t reach your goal, that it has nothing to do with your self-worth. If you slip or lapse, it doesn’t mean you’re a failure—it just means something in your plan needs to be strategically adjusted.

If during your first week of working out you only make it to the gym twice…that’s still twice more than you normally did! Realize that you can’t reach 100% compliance over night and instead focus on what’s working (keep doing that) and continue to tweak what you’re doing.

Most people don’t encourage themselves, but it’s so easy to be extremely critical of ourselves. Positive reinforcement that what you’re doing is important matters. There’s a reason smart businesses are trying to gamify their products—leveling up and getting rewards (even something as simple as a happy sound) helps to keep you carrying on.

When you reach a big goal that you have like to gain 20 pounds, don’t bail on the celebration part! Follow through with the reward. Otherwise you’re just manipulating your willpower into something more like a torture device—perpetual denial of pleasure in the present moment.

Willpower should be used as a tool to stop selling out your future self so you can enjoy the bigger and better parts of life like feeling and moving better, having the energy to spend with your loved ones, and having more confidence in the present and future moments.

Emotional Fuel For That Final Push

When your willpower is nearly empty and you’re feeling drained, you’ll have less self-control and become more emotional. Your emotions affect you both positively and negatively, but you can turn them into fuel for your physical pursuits.

You can lean on positive emotions like hope, enthusiasm, happiness, surprise, joy, contentment, pride and love to motivate yourself to reach your goals. Positive emotions encourage learning and curiosity—perfect for new experiences and change. You can start by believing you’re up to the challenge of creating a better, stronger, healthier future and be full of contentment about your current spot on your journey.

Understandably, people don’t like using “negative” emotions for motivation—emotions like pain, anger, fear, dismay, disgust, shame, etc. But we’re programmed to feel them. They help us navigate the world safely. They can be like putting blinders on—forcing us to become extremely focused and determined. No one is thinking about what they’re eating tonight when they’re scared because they’re lost in a dangerous neighbourhood in the middle of the night.

Using emotions like anger can help motivate us to adapt. For example, if we hit the gym consistently yet our weight stays the same on the scale at the end of the week (argh, again) you can use that anger to help you add a protein shake to your breakfast, eat a bit more past fullness than you normally would, or track your calories more diligently.

Gordon Ramsey in Kitchen Nightmares has a special knack for making apathetic owners angry and disgusted. This way they take responsibility for their mess and finally change. Martin Seligman, a famous psychologist, puts it this way: “If you have a stone in your shoe and it hurts, you’ll fix the problem.”

Habits

Automating good things in your life

Willpower will consciously get you moving in the right direction right away, but habits are the routine practices that you don’t even think about consciously—brushing your teeth at night, exercising, eating fast food, going to work. (At least I hope you don’t debate about whether or not to go to work each morning.)

For many people, most of their habits were not chosen. They just sort of “fell” into them because they were the easiest route in the short-term. One study found that we spend about 45% of our day in habits – almost half of our waking moments doing regular ol’ things that we likely didn’t decide to do and aren’t even thinking about!

One of the reasons we naturally fall into our habits is to reduce the number of daily decisions in our lives. This is good—very good. It frees up willpower and decision-making power for other things. If you go to work as a habit, you can use your willpower to motivate you to go the gym instead. If you then learn to go to the gym as a habit, you can then use your willpower for something else.

Yet we often hear people talk more about bad habits rather than good ones.

This makes sense. Bad habits are a huge deal. Five of the top health risks in the US are from repeated, habitual actions: drug abuse, obesity, smoking, risky sexual behaviours, and not exercising enough (study).

In studies following people who seemed to have enormous self-control, researchers found they weren’t even using their willpower. They already had incredible habits established, so they didn’t even need to think about anything (Tierney, Baumeister 2011). These people saved their willpower to help create good habits, and then those habits allowed them to stop using their willpower. At the end of the day, they’re not exhausted and worn down. They’re completely healthy—exercising, eating well, etc. all without even thinking about it. They weren’t using willpower to decide whether or not to go to the gym… they already went to the gym without even thinking about it.

Establishing good habits is the only way you will find success long-term. You can build muscle quickly at first, allowing you to make very rapid and encouraging progress during your first few months of (smart) lifting and nutrition… but depending on your ideal fitness goals, it could take several years of smart, focused training to reach your ultimate goals.

Eric Helms—calisthenics versus weights for naturally building muscle as a skinny guy / ectomorphTo reach the physique of a natural bodybuilder like Eric Helms, for example, it could take upwards of a decade of lifting, eating and sleeping well.

Your motivation, however strong it is right now, will surely wane before then. Instead of using your motivation poorly (doing weeks of intense research without beginning a routine, doing a super intense training program that fully depletes your willpower, etc), use your motivation, starting today, to help set up a manageable, enjoyable and sustainable lifestyle that you can carry on for a few weeks and gradually turn into an enjoyable habit-driven lifestyle.

That is how you accomplish an enormous transformation that spans months and even years.

Converting willpower into habits

In The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, he writes that researchers from MIT discovered the neurological loop for habits. The loop is: Cue, Routine, Reward. He has a great PDF for free on his website that delves deeper.

beastly-gym-training-weights-habit-loop

It’s generally very hard to break bad habits, so it’s best to program new better ones to replace them. The cue is what tells your body to do this action. According to Duhigg, a cue could fit into one of these categories: location, time, emotional state, other people, etc. It could be something like “I always hit the gym after having a coffee after work”, so once you’re done the coffee, that’s the cue. Some people work out in the morning and set up their gym bag by the door at night, that way when they wake up and see the gym bag by the door, it’s their cue to initiate the habit—to head to the gym.

The routine is the actual action—in this case, the lifting part.  (Since you’re consciously creating a habit, for now you’ll need to use your willpower to substitute this future-habit into the habit loop.)

The reward is necessary for the habit to stick. Over time, working out will become its own reward. The endorphins from working out, energy boosts, feeling better, the strength improvements, looking better—these will be the reward. But all of us know that starting to work out can be difficult. You feel physically tired from the exercise, you feel mentally tired from having to use your willpower, your muscles become sore since your muscles aren’t used to working out, and you lose some time in your day. Having a reward is important to keep you going strong until the longer term benefits start to kick in.

Here are a couple ideas for a post-workout reward, but pick something specific for yourself that you really love:

  • Having a snack that you love but don’t normally eat, like cookies or ice cream
  • If you love movies, watching a movie to relax
  • If you’re a naturally very-busy guy, give yourself some time to rest like having a bath after training. (The manly man version of a bubble bath is an epsom salt bath, but any kind of bath will do!)

Habits are like glue, they take a while to set

How long do we have to consciously will ourselves to do the routine before it becomes a habit loop? A 2009 study found the average amount of time to establish automaticity was 66 days, with 18 days being the shortest time (study). Every time you go through the habit loop, it’ll get easier and easier to to repeat.

In that sense, a habits is like glue—the longer you’ve kept it up, the harder it is to pull off. This is why it’s so hard to break bad habits… and why our good habits never seem to stick—because we lost motivation and burned out before the glue could set into a habit. For those wondering, doing something every day is not necessary to form a habit, so sticking to the three hour-long weightlifting workouts per week that we recommend is perfectly fine.

Accountability

The Ulysses Contract

Let’s say you had a particularly tough day at work. Your willpower has been momentarily exhausted. Normally you can use your willpower to hit the gym, but today you don’t have any left. If you had the choice, you’d just order in some take-out food, sit back and watch something on Netflix. Most people do have a choice, so they skip the gym.

But you don’t have a choice. You can’t sit back and skip the gym. A few days ago when you had more willpower, you gave your buddy Dave $50 in cash and told him that he was free to spend it if you don’t hit the gym 3x a week for month. If you meet that goal at the end of the month, he gives the money back.

Now you’re faced with two options. Do you go to the gym even though you’re tired, or do you go through the pain of losing 50 bucks? Most people will choose the less painful option—they’ll go to the gym. And good on them, for they’ll be sacrificing present mediocrity for longer term health, strength & happiness. After a good night’s sleep, with your willpower fully replenished, you’ll be glad that you made the right choice.

Without the accountability of the cash in place though, when we’re exhausted we’ll always default to the less painful route. Usually this means lazing around at home eating junk food that’s easy to prepare (or order). Many studies found that even people who are extremely disciplined when it comes to their future, once you wear down their willpower to the point of exhaustion, they will always favour the present tense.

This accountability system is called a “Ulysses contract”. It’s when a person freely makes a decision to bind their future self.

A good example of this is our Lean to Mean Experiment—my first 30 days of (successful) weightlifting. Shane and I were roommates, and, because we’re huge fans of Dan Ariely’s research, we set up an accountability jar. If we missed a workout it meant we had to put $10 in the jar. A missed meal was $5. We set a 30-day deadline for the contract so that we knew the pain wasn’t going to last forever, allowing us to go a little harder on ourselves. I failed to have a couple meals on super busy days (we were starting our design business at the same time) and ended up losing a bit of money. But the pain of the cost was enough to get me to hit the gym 3x a week and finish my half-eaten bowls of chili that I normally would have abandoned (by rationalizing that I’d already eaten “enough”).

The next month, fifty pounds heavier between us, both Shane and I signed up for continuing on with the jar for another 30 days. During that second month we didn’t fail once. Our big eating and gym-going had already transformed into a habit.

Make your goals public so you stay accountable in your group of friends. It’s a lot easier to rationalize another slip as “not too big a deal” if you’re the only person who knows about your muscle-building challenge. It’s awesome when our members post introductions and their goals on the forum. We even have some guys checking in with one another to see if they’re following through.

If you don’t have a buddy you can give $50 to (or however much would work for you), there’s our community forum for encouragement and help. Outside of that, there are online services that act as an impartial referee (like www.stickk.com) for any goals you may have.

Don’t make the amount too little or it won’t motivate you. You want it to be just high enough to hurt a bit. (But don’t make it so high it’ll ruin your life!)

Closing Words

If you take one thing away from this article, it’s to stop thinking about change as being an all or nothing kind of thing. Change is not like an Oreo. If you’ve missed the gym a few weeks in a row, that’s the perfect reason to get back in there, not a reason to mark yourself as a failure.

If there is any way we can help you reach your goals, let us know. Our program may help. We wish you the best of luck with your ongoing beastly journey—we’re all rooting for you! :)

What to do When You’re Tired of Being Skinny-Fat

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Skinny-fat is when you’ve got over 20% bodyfat but look skinny in a t-shirt. When instead of your shirt hanging off your pecs, it’s puffed out by your gut. This is is a frustrating situation to be in because the advice the typical skinny-guy hears is to avoid cardio, lift and eat more; whereas the typical chubby-guy is told to do plenty of cardio, lift and eat less.

…But it feels like whenever you eat more you just get chubbier, and whenever you eat less you just get skinnier. In the past I’ve “bulked” myself into having a love-handly gut, and I’ve lost all the muscle I gained from the bulk when trying to get rid of that gut. Not a good cycle to get caught in.  As far as my physique went, I don’t think I’ve ever struggled with anything quite so confusing and frustrating. To make things even more infuriating, if you’ve tried to lose fat while building muscle… then you know all too well that that’s the least effective advice of all.

At that point, feeling let down by classic advice, most of us desperately turn to novelty advice: eating like a caveman, avoiding carbs (or even going ketogenic), doing some sort of extreme sport routine (like CrossFit), or eating 100% “clean” (whatever clean means), etc. I’ve been down that road as well, because it seems like somebody finally, finally has the solution. But after a few months of having sky-high energy levels (because your body is pumping you full of energizing stress hormones), you realize that you’re exactly where you started except now you have a bunch of food phobias, your grocery bill is twice as high, and you can’t eat at a normal restaurant anymore.

We’re going to cover why you’re skinny-fat, and then how to become strong and lean. This approach isn’t novel—there’s nothing revolutionary in this article, and your doctor would likely agree with all of it. However, because it’s thorough and evidence-based it’ll actually work.

Curious?

Are you actually skinny-fat?

First we should figure out if you’re even skinny-fat. We’re a site that specializes in various types of skinny guys, and we’ve noticed that it’s fairly common for skinny guys to assume they’ve got a higher bodyfat percentage than they do. This is because even a very lean bodyfat percentage, say 10%, looks very different on a skinny guy than on a strong guy:

How lean you look depends on how muscular you are (bodyfat vs muscularity)

Us skinny guys don’t naturally have a lot of muscle rounding out our physique, so it’s just our bone structure and our fat that shapes us. As we grow more muscular our bones become less prominent, our fat is spread thinner, and we begin to be shaped by our muscles. Everyone says abs are built in the kitchen, but as skinny guys we often need to develop them in the gym to make them large enough to show through the fat on even a fairly lean stomach.

For a real life example, GK was a softer skinny, he leanly added a ton of muscle mass, and he transitioned smoothly into the lean and strong category. His bodyfat percentage is similar in both photos, but he appears far leaner with all the new muscle mass:

Bony to Beastly Ectomorph Transformation—Not Skinny-Fat, just "Soft" Skinny

It’s also common for skinny guys to mistake having bad posture for having a gut. If your abs aren’t large enough to show through, and your pelvis is tilted forward pushing your stomach out, it can create the illusion of having a little belly—what we affectionately call an ecto-belly. This could be caused by a number of things: sitting a lot, having weak abs/glutes, not having proper hip mobility, and other more complex reasons. If this sounds like it might describe you, try squeezing your glutes and flexing your abs to rotate your pelvis back into position. Does your belly still stick out?

In my case, my stomach was flat but soft, and if I got tired my posture would collapse and a little gut would pop out. If that’s what’s happening with you, it’s just due to poor posture and slender musculature. There isn’t a problem of our calories going towards fat instead of muscle. You’d just want to buff yourself into some muscles. It’s far from easy, but your path is fairly straightforward:

How to tell if you're skinny-fat or not

Of course, you might actually be skinny-fat, and that’s who this article is for. If you’ve got a higher body fat percentage and skinny muscles, let’s address how to shed the fat and burly up your muscles. But first, let’s talk about what’s going on here.

You’re skinny-fat, but that’s not your body type

You aren’t skinny-fat because of a genetic limitation. Skinny-fat is just where you are right now. A couple years ago I was the skinniest guy I’d ever met.

I’ve also been skinny-fat. I was taking weight gainers, training like a doofus, and so excited to see my weight moving up on the scale that I gained a good twenty pounds of fat before realizing I was just getting fatter. My genetics hadn’t changed, my lifestyle was just pretty atrocious.

Over the course of a couple of years I trimmed off the fat I had gained and then built around fifty pounds of muscle. I learned a lot about lifting and nutrition, and all of a sudden my body became eager to add lean mass instead of fat mass—my nutrient partitioning had done a complete 180. Now being muscular feels easy and natural.

Does this mean that I started off as a skinny ectomorph, became a skinny-fat endomorph, and then became a muscular mesomorph? I highly doubt it. Training, nutrition and lifestyle all play a far larger role than we often think.

Most of our skinny-fat members have variations of the following stories:

  1. Where’d my metabolism go? They were skinny guys growing up. For a while their metabolisms and lifestyles were able to keep the fat away, but fast forward a few years—maybe even a decade—and their lifestyles have finally caught up with them.
  2. I’m skinny-fat, so I do skinny-fat-person things. We gravitate towards things that we’re naturally good at, and activities where we feel like we belong. Jogging, yoga, martial arts, etc. Activities where strength and leanness aren’t a deciding factor and where you won’t be judged on the size of your muscles. These activities won’t stress your muscles, they’ll stress your cardiovascular system. Calories that aren’t burned off will tend to be stored as fat instead of as muscle.
  3. Dream Bulker. They were skinny guys desperate to build muscle, so they turned to the most effective way to build muscle—lifting weights. They ate hard, but weren’t quite as studious as they could have been (perhaps because they needed a nap after every meal). They bulked themselves into a bulging belly instead of bulging biceps. This was me.
  4. My body is just to carry my head around. They’ve never been that happy or confident with their body, so they’ve never been in the habit of consistently feeding it fairly well and doing muscle-buildy physical activity. Instead, they focused on more cerebral things. Eventually they realize that having a fit body will increase their energy levels, improve their mood, get rid of aches and pains that are developing, improve productivity, etc… and they realize they’re skinny-fat. (This was me as well, but my genetics were such that it made me super skinny.)

Most mesomorph “naturally athletic” guys have a story like this:

  • Young athlete. They were one of the bigger/quicker/stronger ones in the first grade, thus they excelled at sports and physical activities.  They signed up for all the sports teams, became very physically confident, and trained their way into a very athletic build. Being physically capable became part of their identity.

Malcolm Gladwell, a New York Times Best Selling author, found that even something as trivial as how early you were born in the calendar year can impact your athletic career. Most elite hockey players here in Canada are born in the first half of the year, because the age cutoff is January 1st. If you’re born on January 2nd and your buddy was born on December 31st, you’d be a year older than him and playing in the same age bracket. If you’re 7 and he’s 6, you’re going to be way bigger, way stronger, way more mature, way more practiced. As a result, you get all the coaching, you get all the encouragement, all the extra practice—your chances of becoming as someone who identifies as a very natural athlete skyrockets.

It has nothing to do with genetics, it’s just that the guys who develop that confidence (and those preferences) earlier on in life get more practice and thus have far more success.

I’m not saying that body types don’t exist. They do. In fact, once you get to an elite hockey league like the NHL, genetics actually are quite a strong predictor. These guys are the genetic outliers who could excel regardless of where they fall in the age bracket. The same is true of sports like bodybuilding and powerlifting, where being a genetic superfreak is the norm. These guys actually are naturally built like monsters. Greg Nuckols, for example, deadlifted over 400 pounds in a totally untrained state.

You can probably see genetic variance among your friends too, even if they have similar lifestyles as you. You probably have friends who are chubby, some who are skinny-fat, some who are skinny. Their bodies look a little different in an untrained state because of different stomach sizes, appetites, hormonal responses to food, habits, etc.

What I’m saying is that most naturally muscular “mesomorphs” are guys who did a ton of physical activity growing up while their parents fed them relatively healthy meals in the right portion sizes to grow leanly. Maybe they’re naturally skinnier guys who built muscle as they grew up. Maybe they’re naturally chubbier guys who burned off their baby fat as they grew up. Maybe they’re average guys who did both. Almost all of them would look fairly unfit if you took their fit lifestyles away from them though.

Furthermore, virtually every guy who looks very strong, fit or athletic leads a lifestyle that strongly supports that type of physique. Genetics can only carry you so far, after all.

Even reaching your full genetic potential of your height is influenced up to 40% by the quality of your nutrition growing up (article).

Casey Butts, author of Your Muscular Potential, the most thorough book on natural muscular potential, found that genetically gifted guys can build about 5% more muscle than the average guy. Guys with poor genetics, on the other hand, can build about 5% less muscle than the average guy. For example, he found that the average 5’10 guy could get to a lean 200 pounds, the genetically gifted guy could get to about 210, and the guy with poor muscle-building genetics could get to 190 pounds. If you’ve seen 5’10 guys at a lean 190 and 210 pounds, you know that they both look like they could be in the Olympics.

Here’s me at 6’2 and 180 pounds. Even if I had the poorest muscle-building genetics, I’m still a good couple dozen pounds away from my genetic muscular potential (although Casey Butts informed me that my too-tiny wrist sizes broke his formula).

Ectomorph or Mesomorph? (What to Do When You're Skinny-Fat)

Genetics also play a role when it comes to fat gain. People have varying levels of insulin sensitivity, differing quantities of fat cells, and even our metabolisms respond differently to overfeeding. A lean skinny guy might be able to bulk with quite a large calorie surplus, as his body naturally burns off the excess calories via fidgeting, extra body heat production, and even holding peculiar postures. (Our full article on that here.) Some guys need to be more mindful of their calorie intake when bulking, meaning it’ll take them a little bit longer to become incredibly muscular.

So you might not be able to become a hulking mammoth of a man who looks like he must be on steroids (perhaps a blessing), and you might not be able to diet down to 7% bodyfat. Or maybe you can. Unless you’ve been lifting well and eating right for a few years, your current condition is probably not the best predictor of how far your genetics can take you.

Let’s assume you’ve got atrocious genetics though. You won’t win a national bodybuilding competition, no matter how hard and how smart you work for it… but you could probably still get buffer than Bradley Cooper, Michael Jordan, Bruce Willis, Usain Bolt, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, etc. They all work out but none of them have a body outside the natural muscular potential of guys with awful genetics.

If you think your genetics are holding you back much more than that, it’s probably because you aren’t lifting right (or you aren’t lifting), you aren’t eating right, you haven’t been doing it consistently for long enough, or there’s another aspect of your lifestyle holding you back.

Becoming “Naturally” Lean & Muscular

How to become naturally muscular. The strongest predictor of “natural muscularity” is the number of nuclei in our muscle cells.  When you have a lot of them and stimulate them properly, they use the food you’re eating to build muscle mass incredibly quickly.

These nuclei are sort of like little muscle-building construction workers. Imagine getting a giant calorie paycheque. If you don’t have any expenses, you can put your calories in the energy bank, i.e., you’ll store fat. If you have a lot of construction workers permanently on staff, you need to give them each their calorie salaries. In return they’ll get to work building muscle. This means more muscle and less fat. (In the fitness industry this is called favourable nutrient partitioning.)

Naturally muscular guys have a tremendous amount of these nuclei in their muscle cells by default, but as we skinny-muscled guys grow bigger and stronger (best done by weightlifting) we add more nuclei in our muscle cells. We take on the muscle-building advantages of guys who are naturally muscular. And these nuclei stick around forever. Your muscles may shrink and grow, but each time you build muscle, you pull nuclei into your cells, and it becomes a little easier to get and stay more muscular.

The advantages of building muscle when skinny-fat

How to become naturally lean. Fat cells can inflate and deflate with stored energy, but the number of fat cells we have tends to stay fairly constant. We can increase the number of fat cells we have (hyperplasia) by gaining a tremendous amount of fat. This is one of the bigger problems of morbid obesity. If we gained a bunch of new fat cells, getting lean again could become incredibly difficult. But unless we become morbidly obese we don’t need to stress too much about this.

Some guys naturally have a lot of fat cells, some guys eat their way into having a lot of fat cells. This makes being lean much more challenging for them. Luckily, skinny-fat or not, we don’t tend to be those people—at least not in an extreme way.

Being morbidly obese would change the game, but being skinny-fat won’t really reduce your long-term ability to get leaner. However, it will reduce your short-term ability to gain muscle leanly. When your bodyfat percentage is higher you will gain more fat when you bulk. This is probably due to the higher levels of estrogen and lower levels of testosterone that often goes along with having a higher body fat percentage.

On the other hand, when you get leaner your hormone profile becomes more masculine and muscle-buildy, and your nutrient partitioning improves. Your body will be more inclined to store surplus calories as muscle rather than fat.

The advantages of losing fat when skinny-fat

Changing your body type. You can see that once you build an appreciable amount of muscle mass and get to a fairly low body fat percentage (10-15%), things start getting pretty easy. Combine that with a healthy lifestyle that involves some exercise and some quality food, and you’ll be maintaining a lean and muscular body fairly easily. (Becoming more muscular will still be challenging, and becoming even leaner will also still be challenging, but maintaining a lean and muscular physique will be fairly easy.)

You’ll discover what it feels like to be a naturally muscular mesomorph, since you will have become one.

So that means you now have two straightforward goals: 1) build muscle, and 2) get lean. The problem is that building appreciable amounts of muscle requires a calorie surplus, and losing fat at a halfway decent pace requires a calorie deficit. You also need to make sure that you aren’t getting fat when in a calorie surplus, and that you aren’t losing muscle while in a calorie deficit.

Too many skinny-fat guys get stuck in the dreaded skinny-fat cycle—where cutting makes you skinnier and bulking makes you fatter.

Skinny-fat Hell—where bulking makes you fatter and cutting makes you skinnier

This leaves you with a big decision to make—whether to bulk leanly or cut while maintaining muscle mass.

… or does it?

What happens if you stay the same weight?

We get a ton of questions about this. Yes, you can build muscle and lose fat without bulking or cutting. You can keep your weight about the same and make progress, but it takes forever.

Your body will only burn fat when it needs the energy—when it needs the calories. If you aren’t losing weight (i.e. in calorie deficit) you won’t be losing fat. Similarly, beyond the very very early stages of training, your body will only build muscle when you’re gaining weight (i.e. in a calorie surplus).

What happens though is that you inevitably go in and out of surpluses and deficits even if your weight is staying the same overall. Maybe you have a big dinner, driving you into a calorie surplus, and you gain a bit of muscle and fat. Then you go to bed for eight hours, falling into a calorie deficit, and you lose a bit of fat and muscle.

The idea of body recomposition is that when in those brief surpluses you build more muscle than fat, and when in those brief deficits you lose more fat than muscle. So over time you build muscle and you lose fat. Relying on these tiny little surpluses and deficits is a very slow way to make progress though. It also hinges entirely on the fact that you’re able to get damn-near-perfect nutrient partitioning… which is currently your biggest weakness.

We see a lot of guys doing this, thinking that intermittent fasting or whatnot will fix their nutrient partitioning issues and lead to simultaneous fat loss and muscle gain. It might help a little, but you probably want to be fit and lean for the beach this summer. You probably won’t even be ready for the swimming pool at your retirement home… so I vote that we stick to more rapid and effective body recomposition methods.

What happens if you try to build muscle and lose fat at the same time (when skinny-fat)

Very, very slowly progressing your weight is an effective strategy for lifters who are already very lean and muscular. After a decade of lifting, you’re only going to be able to gain a fraction of a pound of muscle each month, making your gains on the scale nearly imperceptible. However this is not an appropriate strategy for you at this point.

What happens if you bulk first?

If you bulk properly you can build muscle fairly quickly, but it’s going to be challenging to keep your gains lean, and to come out looking not fat. If you have a belly and build up bigger abs under that belly, your belly is going to look bigger. Still, having a bunch of fat and muscle on you will make you look bigger, and what skinny-muscled guy doesn’t dream of being bigger? While you might not be quite as lean as you’d like, your friends will finally start trying to lure you into helping them move heavy furniture with pizza and beer.

Building muscle first is a great option for guys who are more on the skinny side of skinny-fat. For example, DoctorB came in without abs but still fairly lean. His goal was building muscle as quickly as possible. This made bulking the perfect choice and he did a perfect job of it. In 5 months he went from being thin to being a true beast of a dude :)

What happens if you bulk when you're skinny-fat?

Advantages of bulking first:

  • You don’t need to stress about getting even littler—every skinny-fat guy’s worst fear.
  • Having more muscle mass will make cutting a little quicker, since muscle mass increases your metabolism.

Disadvantages of bulking first:

  • Depending on how high your body fat percentage is, you might have more estrogen and less testosterone. This isn’t ideal for bulking, as it can make it harder to keep your gains lean. (This was probably not the case for DoctorB, since he’s fairly lean.)
  • Building muscle takes time. You’re going to be bulking for at least a couple months in order to see great progress. During that time you’re going to need to be okay with your current body fat percentage.

What happens if you cut first?

If you’re fairly new to either weightlifting or proper muscle-building nutrition, you can expect some pretty good results. Most studies show that relatively untrained guys who lift weights while cutting will not only lose fat very rapidly, they’ll also build muscle as they lose weight overall. This is the skinny-fat holy grail.

For example, a study published last February found that guys who did cardio while eating in a calorie deficit lost 7 pounds of fat and 6 pounds of muscle—they got smaller. However the group of guys who lifted weights while eating in a calorie deficit lost 22 pounds of fat and gained 4 pounds of muscle—they got leaner and more muscular. Similar results have been found in many studies.

This is a great option for guys who are more on the fat side of skinny-fat. For example, Eric, who already had a decent amount of muscle mass, lost 4 pounds while gaining 2″ on his biceps and 1.75″ on his chest in 5 weeks. Quite the jaw-dropping transformation (literally), as you can see ;)Skinny-fat Cutting Transformation

Advantages of cutting first:

  • If you’re new to lifting well and eating for muscle, you can expect to build a few pounds of muscle even as you cut. You won’t come out smaller, you’ll come out leaner, stronger and more muscular.
  • Losing fat is quick. You can realistically lose two pounds of fat per week. If you don’t have that much to lose, you can be done with your cut fairly quickly. (You might lose something like 1.5 pounds per week—2 pounds of fat down, 0.5 pounds of muscle up.)
  • Reducing your body fat percentage will allow you to bulk more leanly afterwards.

Disadvantages of cutting first:

  • If you’re already self-conscious about how skinny you are, this can be stressful. It’s scary to get lighter when you want to command more space, not less.
  • If you aren’t currently eating a lot of calories, you might need to drop your calories quite low. This makes cutting very unpleasant, and if you spend a long time cutting, it isn’t very healthy either. It seems to be more common with the skinny-fat guys who have been yo-yo dieting and doing tons of not-particularly-muscle-buildy exercise for years in an attempt to get rid of their gut: Runners, P90Xers and CrossFitters who are very familiar with calorie restriction. Their metabolisms adapt to lots of cardio and lots of dieting by growing ever smaller. Dr. Layne Norton coined the term metabolic damage to describe this, and it’s rare that we run into this issue, but it happens.

Conclusion. You can cut first or bulk first, but you do need to pick one or the other. If you’re like most skinny-fat guys and you aren’t as lean as DoctorB or as muscular as Eric (we’ve got a more typical example still to come), the decision can be tricky. You need to start seeing what approach fits your situation best. Keep in mind that both paths will get you out of skinny-fat in a relatively short timeframe: a few months of bulking + a couple months of cutting. Hell, you’ll probably look markedly better within just weeks of starting.

Now onto the how-to.

What to do when you’re skinny-fat

1. Forget about being hardcore. You may be really unhappy with where your body is, but that doesn’t mean that you need to punish it. You don’t need to do the most brutal CrossFit or Insanity routine every day in order to fix your body. You just need some good training, some good food and some good rest. You can have 2-5 meals per day depending on your schedule and preference, those meals can contain carbs, and you can fit all the lifting you need into about three hour-long workouts per week. You can do cardio or play sports if you like that kind of thing, but you don’t have to.

The more stressful your routine, the harder it will be to get yourself to the gym. The harder it will be to tell what’s working for you and what’s just useless filler. The harder it will be to stick with this long enough to solidify a healthy lifestyle that will last.

You can make rapid progress at first, sure, but if you want to go from being skinny-fat to feeling like “a naturally muscular mesomorph”, you need to build a lifestyle that you can actually live.

2. Focus on what matters—lifting and nutrition. I know this one is hard. There’s a ton of pseudoscience and bro-science out there telling you that carbs are bad, or meat is bad, or dairy is bad, or maybe gluten is bad, or maybe you’re consuming too many meals per day, or too few meals per day… which they say is also bad. This just makes things really confusing.

What matters nutritionally is the quantity of the calories you eat, the quality of the calories you eat, and what your macro breakdown is—especially how much protein you consume.

What matters as far as exercise goes is that you lift, and that you lift well. Lifting well means choosing the right lifts for your skill level, using good technique, lifting with the right intensity, and doing enough volume (sets/reps) per muscle group without fatiguing yourself. (Here’s our article comparing different types of lifting and how effective they are for building muscle.)

Lifting well is what will tell your body to use surplus calories to build muscle instead of storing fat. Lifting well is what will tell your body to keep your muscle around when in a calorie deficit, instead of keeping your fat around. Lifting well will make you leaner and more muscular.

There are many benefits to cardio, but the main body composition benefit is that it burns calories. It won’t tell your body to build muscle or get rid of fat, it mostly just burns calories. You can do it if you want, but don’t use up all your willpower on it. It’s not one of the more important factors.

In fact, sleep is probably far more important. You need to learn to turn yourself on so that you can lift well. And you need to learn to turn yourself off so that you can rest well. When you rest is when you build muscle, and sleeping is the pinnacle of resting—you’ll build muscle far more quickly, you’ll build muscle more leanly, you’ll lose more fat, and you’ll have more willpower. (Members, optimal sleep guide here.)

3. Adjust your calorie intake as you zig-zag towards your goal. 15+% is the cutting zone, where you focus on getting stronger and losing fat. You’ll need to be in a calorie deficit to do this, i.e., consistently losing weight (maybe 1-2 pounds per week). Keep going until you’re fairly lean—preferably under 15%—but you can switch goals if the diet is becoming very unmanageable. As we discussed above, if you’re new to lifting well and eating for muscle, you’ll probably gain a few pounds of muscle while cutting.

10-15% body fat is the bulking zone, where you focus on building muscle and strength as leanly as possible. You’ll need to be in a calorie surplus to do this, i.e., consistently gaining weight (maybe 0.5-1 pound per week). The goal is to gain weight leanly so that you can just slowly bulk without ever having to cut again. But when does life ever go perfectly according to plan? Keep going until you get to around 16% body fat—until you entirely lose sight of your abs (or the vein running down your bicep), and then trim off a little fat.

Your progress should look like this:

Should you bulk or cut when skinny-fat? Lose fat first

If you want to bulk first, that’s cool too. I was a skinny guy, and personally I didn’t care if I got a little chubby on my way to getting bigger and stronger—I just didn’t want to be the skinny guy anymore! If you bulk first, your path will look more like this:

Should you bulk or cut when skinny-fat? Build muscle first.

At all times make sure that you’re progressing in your lifts. You want to be building a lot of strength when bulking, and at the very least maintaining your strength when cutting. If you’re consistently getting stronger, even as your body weight fluctuates, you can be confident that you’re on the path to becoming lean and strong.

Keep going until you’re a beast. Good luck!

Skinny-Fat Transformation (Before & After) with Bony to Beastly

The Best Lifts for Building Muscle

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One of the most common questions we get asked is, “What exercise is best to grow my small chest (or arms, shoulders, abs, etc)?” It’s a surprisingly large question, since there are so many things to consider. There are a ton of studies looking into the best exercises for activating certain muscle groups, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

So we’ve put together a guide showing you the best exercises for each muscle group. These exercises represent your best chance of safely building muscle as rapidly as possible for your experience level. We’ve selected these exercises based on a few factors: muscle activation, efficiency, learning curve, risk:reward ratio, etc.

Before we get to the infographic, we’ll break down how we went about selecting these exercises by explaining a few of the things we considered:

Experience level is a really important factor. Let’s say you’re trying to build up the beastliest shoulders possible. Just like an advanced lifter, you’d want to optimize the “three M’s of muscle” (mechanical tension, metabolic stress, muscle damage) in all of the muscle fibres in your shoulders (study). This makes a case for building a workout program around heavy compound lifts done through a large range of motion. The best study to date found that the dumbbell overhead press better stimulates your shoulder muscles than barbell overhead presses, military presses, seated dumbbell presses, etc (study). Bret Contreras even found that overhead pressing also better activated core and oblique muscles than squats and deadlifts. So it would make sense that this would be the best lift for you to choose, right?

Maybe not.

To reap the rewards of that advanced lift you need solid shoulder strength, stability and mobility. If you’re a lanky limbed and lanky torsoed beginner with iffy posture and shoulder mobility, you should use an easier, lighter and safer exercise to stimulate growth in your shoulders. Something like a lateral raise. Otherwise you’ll risk injuring your shoulders and lower back without even properly stimulating the muscles you’re trying to grow.

Equipment. As a beginner you don’t need much equipment to build muscle. If you have access to a fancy equipment, great, but as a skinny dude you can build 30+ pounds of muscle with just a couple dumbbells and a bench. Dumbbell exercises are often the best exercises for building muscle. A simple setup will allow you to build muscle optimally well. This makes it easy to train in a wide variety of gyms, and also easy to train at home. (Here’s our guide for building a simple home gym.)

As you become more advanced your training options expand, it becomes harder and harder to build muscle, and due to your ever-growing strength you need to lift heavier and heavier weights. As an advanced lifter it helps to have a barbell, weight plates, a power cage, etc.

Compound vs Isolation lifts. Compound lifts are shown in regular text. We’ve also included exercises that specifically target that particular muscle group (typed in bold italics) for muscles that you really really want to grow quickly (perhaps your biceps) and muscle groups that don’t activate easily (perhaps your chest).

For example, if you’re torso dominant like me, the bench press will be the best exercise to build up your chest because it will allow you to press a ton of weight with your chest. I grew my chest pretty much exclusively with dumbbell and barbell bench presses. If you’re limb dominant though, like Jared, a bench press will mostly grow your shoulders and triceps, making it a poor lift to plumpen up your lagging pecs. He’s grown his chest by adding in a ton of pullovers and flys.

Assuming you want to grow every muscle quickly, I’d recommend doing a mix of both compound and isolation lifts for your entire body. This has been shown to build more evenly developed muscle mass, more muscle mass overall, and more strength (study, study).

You’d begin your workout with the heavy compound lifts, and then finish with the lighter accessory/isolation lifts. For example, you may find that doing chin-ups will grow your biceps just fine, but if you want to build truly burly biceps I’d recommend doing bicep curls too:

The best exercises for building muscle in your biceps (curls or chin-ups?

Muscle Group illustrations. Each muscle is shown as a few mock muscle fibres. These are simplified, but show you which directions these muscles can pull. We thought this would be helpful, since it also shows which parts of muscles you can target.

As you can see, the muscles in your chest run horizontally. You can target the lower fibres with a decline bench press, the upper fibres with an incline bench press. (A regular bench press will target both.) However you probably won’t have as much luck targeting your “inner” or “outer” chest, since the same muscle fibres span all the way across.

Conversely, your bicep muscles run vertically. You can target your inner biceps (short head) with in-front-of-the-body lifts like the preacher curl and concentration curl, or your outer biceps (long head) with behind-your-body lifts like the incline curl and drag curl. (A regular curl will work both.) However you can’t really target your upper or lower biceps.

We kept this in mind when putting this diagram together. Your best bet for stimulating every part of every muscle group is to use a wide variety of exercises that work your muscles in slightly different ways. Comparable (somewhat interchangeable) exercises are on the same line, and complementary exercises are shown on different lines.

So if you’re a beginner who wants to build up a big chest, you might want to do dumbbell bench presses and push-ups and dumbbell pullovers, and then either the dumbbell pec fly or the pec deck.

Example. To give you an idea of how all these factors come together, a goblet squat activates virtually every major and minor muscle group, it optimally stimulates several of them, it’s relatively easy to learn, and it requires just one dumbbell. When the heaviest dumbbell is no longer heavy enough, or muscle gains begin to slow, it’s then easy to transfer your newly acquired skills, coordination and strength towards a front squat (and eventually a back squat). This makes the goblet squat the best skinny-boy exercise for a few different muscle groups, and a great exercise for many others.

Conversely, a Smith Machine back squat does a poorer job of activating many muscles, proper technique is more difficult to learn, it’s more likely to result in injury, it requires a fancy piece of equipment that isn’t very versatile, and it doesn’t allow you to easily progress to a more advanced variation later on. (You wouldn’t have built up your stabilizer muscles or practiced the movement pattern that would allow you to smoothly progress to a barbell front or back squat.) Smith machine squats aren’t necessarily a “bad” exercise, but they certainly aren’t good enough to make the cut.

This is not an exhaustive list. Just good solid examples that will get the job done incredibly well.

Okay. Here we go:

The best exercises for building muscle organized by muscle group

We hope that helps!

Note: We made the image for our new Pinterest page. If you have Pinterest, it’d be great if you followed us. We’ll be posting a ton of cool new ectomorph muscle-building graphics there over the next few months :)

Ectomorph Travel: Maintain or Even Gain Muscle on Vacation

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The Skinny Guy's Guide to Muscle Traveling

You’re eager to build up a more muscular physique, and things are going super well. But lo and behold, disaster strikes—and not just a run of the mill muscle disaster, like running out of milk, but the worst kind of disaster imaginable: a vacation.

I bet just the mention of a vacation has your heart racing and your mind spiralling down into panic mode. Unfortunately, I’ve been there. I know what you’re thinking. Will all of your hard-earned muscle wither away if you don’t go to the gym for a week or two? Can you build muscle with bodyweight workouts? How many mojitos does it take to spike muscle protein synthesis? Why don’t they make luggage big enough to fit a barbell? Is there real coconut in a piña colada, or does it count as junk food? Will the customs agent mistake your whey protein for cocaine? (Can you really get jacked in prison?) How much of a tan will be enough to disguise your now skinny-fat physique?

In desperation, you might start googling around to learn more, but since only 3% of the population is trying to gain weight, good luck trying to find an article about how to maintain/gain muscle while travelling.

So what do you do?

How do you travel as a skinny guy / ectomorph without losing muscle / losing weight?

I got back from Mexico a few weeks ago. Above you can see my girlfriend and me in a cenote having a balancing competition. (It was a tie.) After a couple weeks of eating tons of delicious seafood and tacos, walking 5-6 hours most days, and having at least a couple drinks most nights, I came back just as muscular and finally looking like the 1/4 Cuban that I am (aka still 3/4 pale).

Even though we base our articles on research rather than anecdotes, we still like to walk the walk before writing about something. Luckily, the three of us get the opportunity to travel fairly often. Jared just got back from a small little island in Northern Canada, and Marco recently went hiking through Peru.

It’s about time we write about one of the most commonly asked question we get: “How do I keep up with this muscle-building stuff while I’m on vacation? Am I totally screwed?”

First of all, there’s this misconception that being a strong healthy dude makes it harder to travel. That couldn’t be more wrong. Being a strong healthy dude makes travelling so much better. You’ve got muscles that can carry around a whole family’s worth of luggage without breaking a sweat, you have the cardiovascular fitness to race your girlfriend up pyramids (and win), you have the rugged immune system that resists catching a cold on the airplane, the energy levels for every adventure, and the brainpower to think clearly even when jet-lagged.

Lifting and eating well in your day-to-day life makes travelling radder. So if you’re at a point where you’re healthy and happy with your body, great—you don’t really need to worry about much while on vacation. Just have fun, be active, eat delicious food, go back to your healthy strongman routine when you get back.

This article isn’t about that though. You’re probably a guy who’s still trying to get bigger and stronger. This article is about building muscle while you’re travelling, not just being a strong and fit dude while travelling.

First, let’s get the bare basics out of the way:

  • Your customs agent probably won’t mistake your whey for cocaine. I got pulled aside for further questioning the (one and only) time I tried to travel with individual serving size ziplock bags of whey. But the guy interrogating me in the scary little room was pretty buff, and after one little whiff of my little baggies he was giving me lifting advice, not handcuffs. Nowadays I bring a few prepackaged chocolate chip cookie dough Quest Bars instead. Less drama, far easier to eat on the go, more calories, more fibre, and more delicious. (And we aren’t even being paid to say that!)
  • A mojito or three will neither create nor prevent muscle protein synthesis, but it will temporarily increase your testosterone levels by about 17% if you’re a young guy (study). Seven mojitos, on the other hand, will reduce muscle protein synthesis and suppress testosterone production (study, study). That doesn’t matter if it’s fairly irregular, but an alcoholic will really struggle to maintain a muscular physique, let alone build one. Anyway, so as long as you aren’t a frequent binge drinker, there’s no reason to stress about drinking.
  • Moctezuma’s revenge is definitely the ultimate weight loss cleanse, and you definitely don’t need a weight loss cleanse. Beware the street vendor with the reckless look in his eyes.

With that covered, we can get to the interesting stuff. To cover the elusive science of what happens to muscle when travelling, we brought in the big guns—Armi Legge.

Armi has long been known in the fitness industry for being one of the best researchers out there. He’s a bit of a controversial figure in the best way, because he’s a young guy who’s not afraid to stand up to some of the most influential guys in the industry when they get their facts wrong.

Recently, he wrote up a piece in Alan Aragon’s research review (which is perhaps the most respected research review in the fitness industry). As luck would have it, that piece was on building muscle on the road. Armi’s latest area of research has been everything related to muscle, fitness and travel.

Armi Legge’s Tips for the Skinny Traveller

Armi Legge & Bony to Beastly—How to travel without losing muscle/weight as a skinny guy

Armi’s a naturally skinny guy himself, he’s recently built a ton of muscle, and he travels pretty much constantly for business and adventure. Not only does he maintain his muscle while travelling, he’s building tons of muscle while travelling (as you can see above).

We used this as an opportunity to help you out (since he’s done a ton of research into this), and it’s also a chance for him to talk about his rad new eBook about staying fit, strong and lean while travelling.

Without further ado, here are my questions, with his answers in blue.

The Skinny Guys Guide to Travelling while building muscle

What will happen if we lose weight while not lifting? We’re naturally skinny guys. Airports, carrying luggage around, strolling around exciting new cities, being way too far away from a refrigerator, needing to get most of your meals from restaurants, etc. This all means calories burned + fewer calories eaten. The perfect storm for tons of weight loss.

Armi: If you lose weight without lifting, then you’ll mostly lose fat, along with some muscle. The larger your calorie deficit, generally the greater your risk of muscle loss. The amount of muscle you lose is largely dependent on your genetics, although the absolute differences between people tend to be pretty small.

Most research also shows that eating a higher percentage of your diet from protein can generally help you retain more muscle while under-eating. So if you don’t lift weights and you under-eat, make an effort to get in slightly more protein.

If you gain weight, you’ll gain some muscle and fat. That’s something most people don’t realize—any calorie surplus, even if you aren’t lifting weights, generally causes some muscle growth. The problem is that a lot more of the weight tends to come from fat. But since you’re reading this, under-eating is probably more of an issue for you than over-eating.

Guys Guide to Travelling while building muscle

Okay, so let’s say I decide to go traveling and don’t plan on lifting at all. I do a pretty hearty full body workout the day before leaving. How long before my muscles begin to atrophy if I were to eat enough to maintain my bodyweight? And does it matter? I mean, how much muscle loss are we talking about, and how hard will it be to regain?

Armi: I’d say you’d have at least two weeks or so before you started to lose muscle, assuming you were eating enough to maintain your weight. You’d probably lose a little strength after a week, but that would mostly be neurological—feeling rusty. After a few workouts you’d be back to your normal self.

The second part of your question is really interesting. I’d say that a week or two without training isn’t that big of a deal, assuming you don’t do that every month. You might lose some muscle and strength, but you’ll gain it back much faster. It’s easier to regain or maintain muscle mass than it is to build it in the first place. This is partly due to satellite cell activation.

In a nutshell, when you lift weights, special stem cells called “satellite cells” donate their myonuclei to your muscle cells. That extra nucleus helps the muscle support a slightly larger area, and your muscles get bigger. The interesting thing is that those myonuclei stick around even if your overall muscle size shrinks. When you start lifting again, it’s generally easier to shoot back up to your previous size, partly thanks to those new myconuclei.

There have been a few studies on this, too. In general, 3-6 weeks off from training will cause around a 6-12 percent drop in strength. That’s really not much when you consider how long these people weren’t training. In these studies, muscle mass didn’t change much after 4 weeks. There probably was a drop in muscle mass, but it was small enough that it wasn’t measurable.

I’d say that if you’re traveling for two weeks or less, it’s okay to stop training completely. If you’re traveling for more than two to four weeks, you can probably expect to lose a moderate amount of muscle mass and strength. It’s hard to say exactly how much, but probably not enough to have a significant impact on your appearance.

When you get back into training, you’ll regain your lost strength and size much faster than when you had to build it in the first place.

But, I think it’s still a good idea to do at least a little strength training while traveling for another reason—habit formation. Even if you just do a 10-minute bodyweight workout twice a week, that helps you maintain the habit of working out. When you come home, it will be much easier to get back into your normal training schedule.

In short, you can maintain your muscle mass and strength without training for longer than most people think.

Guys Guide to Travelling while building muscle

What’s the bare minimum amount of lifting needed to maintain muscle?

Armi: I’d say once per week of heavy, full-body strength training would help you maintain most of your muscle mass for one to two months. That’s assuming you’re eating enough to maintain your weight. (You’d probably lose some muscle if you were in a deficit.) You’d lose muscle mass eventually on this routine, but one full-body session per week is probably enough to maintain your muscle mass for several months.

Guys Guide to Travelling while building muscle

Is there anything in particular you’d recommend for a naturally skinny guy who wants to not just maintain, but build muscle while travelling? (Keeping in mind that our tendency is to accidentally lose weight while travelling.)

Armi: Great question. I tend to default toward under-eating too, so this is something I’ve thought about. Here are a few strategies that work well for me:

  • Pick more calorie-dense foods. Nuts, protein bars, whey protein, chocolate and dried fruit are all good choices. If you can’t get a large meal at a restaurant, you can supplement your calorie intake with one of those options or something else. When I was traveling in England, the portion sizes were much smaller than normal, so I’d often have a protein bar or something else to supplement my calorie intake.
  • Pack some snacks. Beef jerky, whey protein, apples, bananas, yogurt, or anything else that has some protein and fiber can work well. If I don’t bring something, I’ll just forget to eat.
  • Eat more often. I get full easily, so spreading my calories throughout the day makes it easier to eat enough.
  • Make time to eat. When you’re traveling, it’s easy to get distracted by exploring a new places and meeting new people. In the end, it really just comes down to reminding yourself to get in a meal.

Guys Guide to Travelling while building muscle

Bonus Tips From the Beastly Team

Jared’s travelling tips:

  • It’s normal to feel a little worn down when travelling. Everything is a new experience, meaning there’s no chance to fall into your energy saving auto-pilot routine. Making decisions all day long, however small, is tiring. Bringing some super easy snacks along, like a Quest bar and some water, will remove the stress of figuring out where your next meal will come from. This will help keep your willpower, mood and energy high while sneaking in calories/protein throughout the day. (Sharing your snacks will also keep your travelling mates from getting hangry on you.)
  • A light bodyweight exercise circuit in the morning, while your willpower is still high, will improve your energy levels throughout the day, and also give your muscles a reminder that they’re still needed.

Shane’s travelling tips:

  • Armi’s travelling guide has some really great recipes that are really easy to make, even when travelling. But let’s be real here—when you’re travelling you’ll probably be getting a lot of your calories from restaurants and corner stores. Corner stores tend to sell milk, fruit and nuts, which are perfect muscle-building foods. At restaurants you can order a meal that centres around a protein (rather than a vegetarian style dish). Chefs often cook with a lot of fat and salt, so the main problem with eating out all the time is that the food is high in calories. That’s not much of a problem for us, so don’t worry about it.

Marco’s Travelling tips:

  • Oh man the Moctezuma thing. I had some real bad street meat in Peru…
  • I do makeshift workouts, often just for fun. Squats with my brothers on my shoulders, workouts in the park—that kind of thing. In Peru it was a run through Cuzco culminating hill sprints (although I forgot to consider the low oxygen levels at such a high altitude and passed out afterwards), in Hong Kong they had a bunch of bars to play on, and in Japan they had a really cool park to run through.
  • I guess if you put a tip from me, it would be to explore and enjoy your surroundings. There’s exercise related stuff everywhere if you open your mind to it. However, this would only take up a short portion of the day. Just 15-30 min in the morning before setting out for more adventures.

Conclusion

I hope these tips not only help, but also make you a little bit less stressed about venturing outside of your regular routine. The worst thing is getting into a good healthy lifestyle and then thinking that you can’t take your body anywhere anymore. You can. A strong healthy body is less fragile and more versatile than a weak one.

If you have any questions, tips, success stories, horror stories—who doesn’t love travelling horror stories?—just drop them bellow.

And if you found any of Armi’s advice interesting or helpful, I think you’d really love his program. It works perfectly in conjunction with a good lifting and nutrition plan, since it covers absolutely everything you need to keep in mind while travelling, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it made your trip way cheaper too—more than paying for itself with just one trip. You can find his program here: The Fit Traveller. (That’s an affiliate link.) If you’re not interested in the program, clicking on the back arrow at the top of his page will take you to all of his free articles, which are pretty sweet. He writes about his research into performance, building muscle, losing fat, and flexible dieting.

Happy travelling, and don’t forget your muscle in Mexico!


The Skinny Struggle is Real

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This article is for the skinny guys who haven’t been able to gain weight yet. For the the skinny guys who are still worried that it’s impossible for them. This one’s for you.

I wouldn’t blame you for your doubt. It’s common for us to see other people who were born muscular, or who were able to build muscle with just some casual effort. We try following in their footsteps and fall flat on our faces. This gives us good reason to assume that our genetics suck.

This is made worse by the fact that nobody understands our situation at all. All the mainstream magazines and websites feature bulking up routines for skinny guys seemingly designed by people who have never even met a skinny guy. Nowhere is there any mention of the actual reasons why gaining weight is so hard for us, nor are any solutions provided for overcoming them. Just people offering advice that worked for them without having any idea what we’re even struggling with. When that advice inevitably fails, we worry that building muscle is impossible for us.

Because their advice seems to work for everyone except us, what else are we supposed to think?

Then we get told to “just lift heavy and eat more, bro” from the gym rats. They blame our lack of effort, not knowing that we may have tried far harder than they did and still not gotten anywhere.

And we get the dismissive “oh, I wish I had that problem” from all the people who aren’t interested in building muscle because they were born with enough of it, who instead struggle with extra fat.

The advice we get doesn’t suit us, but our genetics are good. Uncommon, but good. I’m not just talking about the ease with which we can avoid obesity either. Even our muscle-building genetics are good.

In this article we’re going to go over the things that make it difficult to build muscle as an ectomorph, and then discuss ways that we can overcome them to finally build a ton of muscle.

We Don’t Just Gain Weight By Accident

There’s a monthly research review that all the experts in the muscle-building industry read religiously: Alan Aragon’s Research Review. Alan Aragon is the nutritionist for many of the world’s top athletes (e.g. the Lakers), natural bodybuilders, and fitness models. Every month he publishes a report on each of the significant new fitness and nutrition studies.

I found one part of the latest issue especially fascinating. It was a review of the studies about obesity and appetite regulation, but the whole time I was reading it I was thinking about how this could apply to us ectomorphs.

Here’s a quote: “The human body wasn’t designed to overeat. Just a quick glance at the consequences of long-term overeating can tell us that the body doesn’t cope with it too well. [He’s saying that being obese is incredibly unhealthy.] That’s probably why there are several mechanisms in place to signal hunger and satiety so that energy balance can be met most of the time.”

Said more normally: if you’re a regular healthy person your body will make it very hard for you to eat enough gain weight.

At this point you might be thinking, well, then why do so many people gain weight so easily?

Later on he quotes a 1992 study where people were given an unlimited amount of vending machine foods to eat. The study participants accidentally gained a couple pounds in a single week. The writer then goes on to say that it’s junk food that’s messing with our appetite regulation.

This is why most people gain weight. Because they eat tons of junk food.

This makes sense. Most research confirms that hypothesis. That’s actually the leading hypothesis for the current obesity epidemic. Not carbs or fat on their own, but the delicious combination of carbs and fats that is junk food. These foods are low protein, low fibre, high carb, high fat, salty and sweet.

Overeating is hard, but these things make it far easier. So much easier that many people are becoming overweight.

However this doesn’t help us skinny guys. Bulking and carbs go well together, but if we bulk on a higher fat diet we’re going to get fat. Since junk food has a huge amount of heavily processed and unhealthy fat in it, this makes it a bulking disaster. This is why a lot of skinny guys who are finally able to eat enough to gain weight become skinny-fat. (If you’re already skinny-fat, here’s our skinny-fat article.)

This is a common mistake we see skinny guys make, and I’ve made it myself a couple times, so let’s go into slightly more detail here. When you read mainstream fitness information, keep in mind that this is weight loss information. Even if it’s “muscle-building” information, it’s usually written for guys who are naturally beefy. More often than not it’s still weight loss information.

Even guys who are trying to write to us skinny guys often get their information from this mainstream weight loss stuff, so they accidentally spread this false information around.

You can use a low fat or a low carb diet to lose weight. So long as your diet is low in something you’ll lose weight, since that means you’ve removed calories from your diet. This is why going vegetarian and going Paleo will often result in similar amounts of weight loss, even though they’re exact opposites of one another. Both involve restricting certain foods, and that often means accidentally restricting calories.

Just because you can lose weight on a higher fat diet does not mean that you should build muscle on a higher fat diet.

When your body doesn’t have enough calories it will burn fat (and burn muscle) to get the calories that it needs. It doesn’t matter if you’ve eaten more carbs or fat that day, either way your body is short on energy and will be forced to burn fat.

When you’re gaining weight things change. When your body has too many calories your body will try to store the extra calories you’re eating as fat. This is where things get interesting. The fat that you eat is already fat. If your body wants to store it as fat, it simply stores it.

Protein and carbs are not fat. The protein will first be used to repair and build muscle, and the carbs will first be used to fill your muscles up with fuel (glycogen). This is good. If there are still protein and carb calories left over, your body needs to convert them into fat. Fortunately, when your body converts those carb and protein calories into fat, most of the energy is lost as heat.

They mentioned this in the obesity/appetite research review too: “Both studies have also found that excess fat was stored more efficiently than excess carbohydrates. In Rising et al., 76% of the carbohydrates were oxidized whereas none of the fat consumed was.” (study, study.)

In simple English: bulking on carbs will make you hot, whereas bulking on fat will make you fat.

(And protein is even less likely to be stored as fat.)

That’s why “see food” diets (where you eat everything you see) don’t work very well if you’re trying to build muscle leanly. It’s also why GOMAD (where you’d drink a gallon of whole milk per day) will often result in a bunch of fat gain.

It’s that nasty combo of sugar and fat that causes most people to overeat. That’s what leads to weight gain. That’s what makes people fat.

Since we aren’t trying to get fat, that doesn’t help us. Bread, rice and whatnot when bulking are perfectly fine. However bread, rice and whatnot do no lead to accidental weight gain because they are not junk food.

Without the magical appetite increasing powers of junk food, people in general are quite good at regulating their bodyweight. Us skinny guys are exceptionally good at regulating our bodyweight. This is why we’re able to live in this junk-food-filled world without struggling with obesity. We often have smaller stomachs, we don’t have an exaggerated hormonal pleasure response from food, our metabolisms are often high and adaptive.

This all makes it brutally difficult to bulk.

Not many people understand us when we gripe about it. They eat junk food and they gain weight. They’re unhappy about it because they get fat. Since this is what they do intuitively, they don’t understand why we have so much trouble gaining weight.

The thing is, gaining weight without having an unhealthy relationship with junk food is very hard. We need to override one of our most powerful natural instincts—appetite regulation.

Fortunately, there are ways to deal with that. You won’t see this information in mainstream fitness info, but there are strategies out there for us ectomorphs too. For example, eating junk food isn’t the only way to trick our appetite. liquid calories don’t fill us up as much as eating solid calories, so sneaking in smoothies, milk or protein shakes can help a lot. Snacks help too. So are condensed whole foods, like dried fruits. We wrote about a ton of other options for increasing appetite in our article, The Skinny on “Just Eat More.” We have even more in our muscle-building program.

This article is about why building muscle is hard for us skinny guys though, so let’s move on to the next issue: stimulating muscle growth.

Exercising to Build Muscle

Weightlifting is by far the most effective way to build muscle. If you’re a college rower who eats a lot, yeah, over the course of years of training each and every each day you can build up a moderately bigger back. And yeah, if you do hours of bodyweight workouts each day and you eat a ton, perhaps over the course of several years you can build up a more muscular physique that way too. Weightlifting isn’t the only way to build muscle, so you’ll see success stories from guys who have used a different approach, but it’s 10,000% times as effective as any other method.

Bony to Beastly Ectomorph Transformation—Not Skinny-Fat, just "Soft" Skinny

Trying to build a muscular physique with any other type of exercise is like using a unicycle to do your grocery shopping instead of a car. It’s possible yes, and if you go on YouTube I’m sure you’ll see some people bragging about how they had success with it, but it’s still needlessly difficult.

There used to be two main types of weightlifting: strength training and bodybuilding. Powerlifters, Olympic lifters, and athletes would do strength training. Actors, fitness models, bodybuilders and people trying to look better would do bodybuilding. Both approaches work well, but recent research has shown that combining both approaches together works even better.

There’s a third type of lifting too. Some people call it high intensity power training (HIPT), others call it high intensity functional training (HIFT). Most people just call it CrossFit. That can be okay for some people in some situations too, but that’s more of a sport that weightlifters do, not something that’d be any good for a skinny guy trying to build muscle.

If you’re tall and fit you may enjoy learning to play basketball, but you wouldn’t play basketball to become tall and fit. You can think of CrossFit that way. It’s a great sport for people who are already strong and fit, but you wouldn’t want to use it to become strong and fit.

(For more details on the different styles of exercise and the adaptations they encourage, check out our article, The Skinny on “Just Lift Heavy.)

Anyway, nowadays most high level athletes, actors, powerlifters and bodybuilders who know what they’re doing will do a combination of bodybuilding and powerlifting. Strong athletic people looking for a fun fitness challenge will do CrossFit. Like using a unicycle to do your grocery shopping, CrossFit adds a level of complexity that can make things more interesting for people who already find building muscle easy.

Even when explaining the basic types of weightlifting, we’ve already run into a problem. CrossFit is massively popular and many skinny guys think it’s a good way to build muscle. This is another example of mainstream fitness stuff misleading us because we’re not the majority.

Unfortunately, CrossFit is just one example. The same is true for a lot of sporty fitness things: martial arts, callisthenics, p90x, Insanity, etc. They help us burn calories (not a good thing for us) and they help us develop better coordination, fitness and stabilizer muscles, but they’re ineffective ways to gain weight and build muscle. So ineffective that us skinny guys trying to build muscle become discouraged. This can cause us to blame our genetics.

So to build muscle efficiently there’s really no getting around it—we have to lift weights.

This brings us to problem number three:

Going to the gym can be rough for us skinny guys

Us skinny guys are built well for many sports. We have light bodies and long legs, making us great at running. We have long arms and aerodynamic torsos, making us great at swimming. We have a light bodyweight and a long reach, making us great at boxing. We excel at sports where being proportionally long and light are an asset, not a disadvantage.

Unfortunately, weightlifting is not one of those sports.

Weightlifting is a sport that stubby people excel at. They have good leverages because their limb lengths (lever lengths) are short. Their muscles are proportionally large compared to the length of their limbs. This means that their muscles not only start off proportionally larger, but also that even a small increase in muscle mass can go a long way, both visually and in terms of weightlifting performance. Because they’re short, they also don’t need to move the weight very far to complete a rep.

For example, it’s no coincidence that dwarfs dominate powerlifting. Andrzej Stanaszek can squat 639 pounds at a bodyweight of 113. He can squat 5.6 times his bodyweight. That record will likely never be broken by a taller person.

Moreover, since our spines are long, thin and not held in place by thick strong musculature yet, the deadlift can be difficult to learn. Even though we don’t excel at it right away though, this makes the deadlift an extremely important lift for us. It builds up the musculature surrounding our spine that will fix and strengthen our posture. The people who are naturally the best at deadlifts don’t need to deadlift. We do.

(We talk about some solutions for these weightlifting issues in our article, Why Ectomorphs Need to Lift a Little Differently.)

Those are some good logical reasons. There are also some psychological reasons that make going to the gym tough. If on the basketball court you’re judged by how good of a basketball player you are, then in the gym you’re judged by how large your muscles are.

Going into any new social setting is intimidating, but going into a gym can be an especially intimidating place for a skinny guy, or a guy who can’t lift a lot, or a guy who isn’t familiar with the basic lifts. We are often all three of these things—I know I was.

Unless you’ve got truly incredible self-confidence going to the gym is going to be a true test of your character.

For someone who just wants to build muscle, not test their self-esteem, that sucks.

If we spend our time jogging around trying to get fitter though, we’re running with our strengths (pun intended) instead of strengthening our weaknesses (is that a pun?). If we want to become well-rounded athletic guys that exude strength and fitness—aka look sexy and strong—we need to strengthen our weaknesses.

We’re already good at avoiding obesity and improving our cardiovascular health. That’s half the battle won. But we don’t have dense bones, big strong muscles and superb power output—yet.

So just like a naturally strongish chubby guy will probably suck at cardio and feel embarrassed on a treadmill but need to do it anyway to improve his cardiovascular health—most overweight guys struggle massively with heart health issues—us skinny guys need to lift weights in order to make the most of ourselves.

Here are three possible solutions:

  • You need to lift weights, but you don’t have to go to the gym. All you need is an adjustable bench and some adjustable dumbbells. That will allow you to work every muscle group optimally, and many of our members go that route. They do just as well as our members who go to the gym. We have a full guide for building a cheap, simple home gym here.
  • You can avoid peak hours. The busy hours will vary depending on the gym, so I’d just ask the receptionist. Scheme up a time when neither you nor the gym is busy. In the gym I go to, most guys train after work, and most guys work until 5pm. This means that at 6pm on Monday, Wednesday and Friday I’m training at the same time as all the other guys who lift 3x per week, as well as all the guys who lift 6x per week. Nowadays that’s nice, since most of them will smile at me and say hi, ask how my day went. However, if I want some peace and quiet I can go at 8pm on a Tuesday, when it’s a ghost town.
  • You can practice at home. One of the scary parts of going to a gym is not knowing what lifts to do, or not knowing how to do those lifts properly. First of all, stay away from back squats, barbell bench presses and conventional deadlifts. Those are expert lifts that require a ton of practice and expertise. Start with simple variations: the goblet squat, the dumbbell bench press, the dumbbell sumo deadlift. They build muscle just as well and they’re far easier to learn. Most guys won’t know what those lifts are either, so they won’t be able to tell if you’re doing them wrong. And you can practice them at home beforehand in front of the mirror while holding a book or something. That way you show up with a plan, you don’t need to use the coveted bench press station, and you’re doing lifts that match your experience level.

Conclusion

Because of all of this, following mainstream fitness advice often doesn’t work very well. You tend to get naturally muscular guys becoming coaches and personal trainers, and they tend to spend most of their time coaching overweight people. They’re often very poorly equipped to deal with the lifting and nutrition issues that a skinny guy will run into.

This is why the struggle is real.

This can leave us feeling desperate, and I know that the more desperate I felt the more I wanted to ignore my body and play video games. I really only became inspired to build muscle and improve my health when I learned to like how I already was. Who wants to spend time feeding and exercising a body that they hate, right?

Fortunately, there’s nothing wrong with being naturally skinny. It can be frustrating sometimes, and we can feel misunderstood sometimes. Sometimes people even treat us oddly because of it. But being naturally skinny is pretty great. We’re a minority, which presents a challenge, but it’s actually quite easy for us to look optimally attractive. It’s also quite easy for us to be wickedly healthy.

Once we understand our appetite and how to overcome it, we can gain weight.

Once we understand weightlifting, we can practice it, become good at it, and gain strength.

Combine both of those things together and we can build muscle. Not in a slow and patient way either, but extremely quickly. It’s only once we’re already muscular that progress becomes slower, and at that point progress also becomes more enjoyable, since we’re comfortable lifting, we’re comfortable eating, and we’re comfortable in our fit, healthy, muscular bodies.

Ectomorph-transformation-how-to-build-muscle-as-a-skinny-guy-nick

If I got to choose my body type all over again, I’d still choose to be an ectomorph. I wouldn’t have guessed that back when I was graduating university at 6’2 and 130 pounds, but I genuinely believe that now.

The only thing I wish is that I’d started sooner—succeeded sooner. That I’d  started exercising and eating a little better from a younger age so that I could really take advantage of my genetics.

Sometimes I daydream about what it would have been like to know all this stuff at 15. To have started building muscle as I was going through puberty. I could have been one of the strongest and fittest guys in my school, but I gravitated towards my natural strengths and took up swimming, callisthenics, and then finally martial arts. Each time I would get discouraged by my lack of muscular progress, never realizing that of course these sports wouldn’t make me more muscular—that isn’t even what they’re for.

I quit martial arts once and for all when I started being paired with the girls (because they were the only ones who were as light as me). I took up video games as a hobby instead.

For a long while my body became something to carry my head around, and I started taking great pride in my ability to think well. I even started looking down on people who could also use their bodies well. That was foolish of me, because mental and physical health are so closely intertwined. It’s possible to succeed at one but not the other, but the best results come when you focus on both. A healthy mind is part of a healthy body.

I wish I’d had access to a different kind of information. That I had known more about this stuff. I could have bought some dumbbells and a weight bench instead of snow skis. I didn’t even love skiing that much. Now that I’m good at weightlifting I love it more than any of the sports I used to play, because this “sport” actually helps me accomplish my goals.

Had I known more about lifting weights I could have happily built a ton of muscle in my basement a couple times a week after school. I still would have had plenty of time to play Halo, too!

The same thing is true with how I was eating. I could have easily started to eat more rice and dried fruits, drinking more milk and smoothies. Instead, whenever I became focused on my health, I would try to follow all these mainstream fat loss fads because I didn’t know they were fat loss fads. I’d be focused on choosing leaner meats, eating more veggies, eating “cleaner”. Eating cleaner just made me lose weight, and being as tall as 6’2 and as light as 125-130 pounds… well, you get the picture.

As some experts say, “Genetics may load the gun, but lifestyle decisions pull the trigger.” Taking my skinny genetics and combining it with skinny nutrition and exercise habits wasn’t doing me any favours. Sort of like the naturally chubby guy doing things that chubby people are good at—powerlifting and eating tons of extra (junk) food to bulk up. He’s already strong and already a little too chubby. That’s not doing him any favours either.

This is all to say that being naturally skinny isn’t really any kind of disadvantage. We just have different strengths and weaknesses than the majority of people who are giving fitness advice. With a good ectomorph-oriented lifestyle we can often go from being naturally skinny to being naturally muscular.

That worked for me.

famous-ectomorph-transformation-shane-duquette-bony-to-beastly-home-gym

It will work for you too.

I’ve posted a link to an article we wrote about how to eat more as an ectomorph. I posted another link about how to lift as an ectomorph. I think those articles are a good place to start if you’re interested in learning a little more about this stuff.

Just make sure that paralysis from analysis doesn’t set in. You need to actually start lifting, not sitting in front of a screen learning everything about lifting. So if you want a full program that covers everything, that’s what our Bony to Beastly Program is for.

We cover all the fundamentals of nutrition, lifting, and appetite manipulation. We have recipes for some delicious, cheap and convenient bulking meals. We have videos that will teach you all the lifts and gradually take you from a beginner level to a very advanced level over the course of a few months. You also get a membership in our ectomorph-exclusive muscle-building community, and you get coaching from us throughout the entire process.

If you had started a couple months ago, you could have already gained twenty pounds. So don’t delay this time, or a couple months from now you’ll just be wishing you had started today.

Ectomorph Aesthetics #2: How to Become More Attractive

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Four years ago we published an article called Ectomorph Aesthetics that covered everything you could possibly want to know about the most attractive male physique. Fortunately, it’s fairly easy for us naturally thin dudes to build up a perfectly attractive physique.

In that article we talked a lot about what was attractive, and not so much about how to become attractive. So in this short follow-up article we’re going to help you actually build up an optimally attractive physique.

Also, a few new really interesting bits of research have come out in the past few years. We’ll cover that too.

Interested?

How to Build the Optimally Attractive Physique

Having a perfectly attractive physique isn’t as difficult as you might think. You see guys on the cover of fitness magazines and whatnot and yeah, in order to get their physiques you’d need exceptional genetics and the help of your neighbourhood drug dealer.

Unfortunately, as naturally skinny dudes we don’t have best muscle-building genetics. Also, most of us don’t want to break the law, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, and suffer some unsightly side-effects in order to take steroids. I certainly don’t.

Does that mean we can’t have an optimally attractive physique? Hell no!

What women are drawn to is exceptional masculine health. Guys on steroids look very strong and very masculine, but they hardly look like pillars of health—at least not to women. It’s very impressive… but mostly just to other dudes.

In terms of attracting women, you could say  that sexy is a visual representation of remarkable health.

In order to look remarkably healthy you can’t have the average dude’s fairly healthy 20% body fat and look like you work a desk job. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you want to look exceptionally sexy you need to look exceptionally strong and healthy… not average. Surprisingly, that’s actually not that hard! That’s incredibly realistic for almost everyone. It’s certainly realistic for you.

That’s what made our first aesthetics article a little bit controversial. A lot of bros think that you need to be enormously muscular and totally chiselled in order to look “aesthetic.” This is not so! The research unanimously shows that guys with twenty fewer pounds of muscle and ten more pounds of fat look better.

You could think of that as being the difference between Brad Pitt and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Both action heroes, but just one is a famous sex icon—the smaller one. It’s primarily dudes who dig the bigger one.

So for us skinny guys, who generally tend to have a healthy body fat percentage already, it’s simply a matter of building up a bunch of muscle in a balanced way without getting fat, and then while doing that fixing up your desk-junkie posture and doing some fun accessory lifts to bring up lagging body parts.

Patrick's Bony to Beastly Ectomorph Transformation

That’s where this visual guide comes. It will show you how much weight you need to gain, what optimal posture looks like, how lean you should be, and some proportions to aim for.

Keep in mind that just moving closer to these ideals will make you far more attractive. If you get 80% of the way there that’ll probably be all you need. If you can get 100% of the way here, God help the women you don’t choose to spend the rest of your life with—they’ll never find another man as handsome as you.

Onwards to the guide! (We made it Pinterest Size.)

How to Build the Most Attractive Male Physique (Ectomorph Aesthetics)

The Full Guide to Optimizing Your Attractiveness (Members)

For members, we’ve got a full step-by-step guide in the community (which integrates with the workouts and nutrition plans).

Beastly Resources for Becoming More Attractive (Free)

We’ve got a ton of free articles right here on the blog that explain how to accomplish all of these things. I’ve sorted them and linked them here for your convenience.

#1: How to Gain Weight

#2: How to Fix Your Posture

#3: How to Lose Fat

#4: How to Fiddle with Your Proportions

 

Wrap-Up

So we’ve just outlined the four key steps to becoming more physically attractive. First start off by getting your BMI into the ideal 23–26.5 range. Then you’ll want to take care of that ecto-belly to get that actor-perfect posture. Next up you’ll likely want to burn a few pounds of fat while holding on tight to your muscle (lifting + plenty of protein is essential when cutting). And lastly, you’ll want to strategically muscle-up certain body parts to get the proportions of a Greek God.
If you’d like to learn how to:
  • Gain weight to increase your BMI
  • Correct your slumpy posture and “lazy stomach” so you don’t even need to think about it
  • Learn how to cut while maintaining (and sometimes even building) muscle
  • And how to properly emphasize different body parts to idealize your proportions
…then we’d really recommend joining the Bony to Beastly Program. It’s a complete muscle-building system that was designed with these principles in mind (and much more). It’s suitable for all experience types—whether you’re a total beginner with a BMI of 17 (that’s where I started) or you’ve been lifting for a few years and you just need to gain a few pounds and bring up some lagging body parts. You don’t even need to take our word for it, you can give the program a try for 60 days with a full money-back guarantee… but if you fail to see measurable results after even just a single week we’ll be right there to get you back on track :)
Josua's Bony to Beastly Ectomorph Transformation

The Skinny on Abs

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Having abs shows that you’re even leaner than you need to be, that your posture is confident and athletic, that your muscles are strong, and even that your hormones are very masculine (study). Abs look so good because having all of these things at once shows that you’re not just healthy, but obnoxiously healthy.

Fortunately, we just so happen to be the body type that can rock a washboard stomach year round without suffering the negative side effects that other guys risk (perpetual hunger, reduced sex drive, etc). This gives us a real physique edge over the other body types.

However, as naturally skinny dudes with naturally smaller muscles, our walk across Abbey Road is a little atypical. There are usually two types of ab advice you’ll come across, and neither works very well for us:

  1. Science says that abs are built in the kitchen. Usually yes, since most guys are overweight, and most overweight guys already have large ab muscles. In the Beastly community we see guys all the time who are more than lean enough to have great abs—but their posture is a little loose and their ab muscles are a little small.
  2. No pain, no gain. The most popular ab routines are high rep circuits that make your abs burn with hellish fire. Abs are muscles though, and doing high rep crunches to build bigger abs is like running a marathon to build bigger legs. Endurance work improves blood flow but it’s awful at making muscles bigger. You’ll see some guys with crazy abs doing these high rep routines, but this is like thinking that taking topless Instagram selfies gives you abs because guys with abs do it. It’s not why they have great abs, it’s just something they do because they like their abs.

So what’s the best way for us naturally thin dudes to build Abercrombie abs?

Let’s start with an example. Here’s GK showing that abs aren’t built in the kitchen. He’s more than lean enough to have rad abs, he just don’t have the muscle size for them yet. Although I suppose you could say that these abs were built by eating everything in the kitchen, it’s probably more accurate to say that they were built in the gym (or home gym or wherever you want to lift).

GK's Bony to Beastly Ectomorph Transformation

So in this article we’re going to show you how to build a rock hard, chiseled 6-pack from the perspective of a skinny guy. These bigger abs will not only look badass, they’ll also make you far stronger, protect your spine and improve your posture.

Ab Anatomy

Before we can woo ourselves some washboard abs we must first understand them.

To begin, let’s cover the muscles that are underneath your visible abs—the transverse abdominis muscles. These work sort of like a lifting belt or a corset, keeping your core on lockdown. You don’t see these though, and so long as your lifting program is well balanced and you lift with good form you won’t need to give these guys special attention. They’ll grow plenty strong by doing squat and deadlift variations.

Ectomorph Ab Anatomy (How to Build Bigger Abs as a Skinny Guy)

When we say “abs” what we’re generally talking about are our rectus abdominis muscles. These muscles are made up of a series of bellies and tendons. The bits that bulge out are the bellies, the canyons between the bulges are the tendons. This gives them their unique washboard shape.

Ectomorph Ab Anatomy (How to Build Bigger Abs as a Skinny Guy)

These ab muscle bellies can flex, just like any muscle belly can, allowing us to move our core like an accordion. Our abs allow us to crunch forwards, our obliques allow us to twist around and crunch sideways. More importantly, these muscles help us resist movement, keeping our ribs and hips on lockdown when doing compound movements. This let’s us squat down and pick something up without looking like a jelly fish, keeping our spine safe and allowing us to transfer power from our lower body to our upper body. The transverse abdominis helps with this as well.

You could say that our abs are our most important muscles, as you can’t even do a bicep curl if your core has the consistency of an overcooked noodle.

This means that if you follow a good program made up of mostly compound lifts, your abs will become big and strong without you ever needing to directly train them… right? That works well sometimes, but more so for naturally stocky dudes. As someone with a longer slenderer torso you’ll probably want to directly target your abs to make your compound lifts even stronger, even safer, and, of course, to make your abs look way better.

As you build up bigger abs, you’ll soon notice that they have their own distinct shape. You can make your muscle bellies bigger with good training, but you can’t do anything to affect their symmetry or to alter the number of tendons that you have. So some guys have an 8-pack, other guys have a 6-pack. Some guys have a wide-pack, others guys have a thin-pack.

Bony to Beastly Genetics 6-pack or 8-pack abs

In a controversial new study, science has just recently proven what belly-dancers have known for thousands of years—with enough coordination these muscle bellies can be individually targeted (study). After learning this, most guys will think that they have smaller lower abs.

While it’s possible that your lower ab muscles are disproportionately small, keep in mind that men store more body fat on their lower stomach than their upper stomach. Lower abs tend to be murky unless you are very lean—under 10%.

Bony to Beastly small lower abs

Also keep in mind that if your ribs aren’t in their proper position, they might be shoving your upper abs out further than they should be, making your lower abs look smaller by comparison.

And there’s another thing that might prevent you from getting defined lower abs: you may not have lower abs. If you take a look at Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example, you can see that he has just four ab bellies, and all of them are above his belly button. Even if Arnold were to train his lower abs he’d still never have any definition on his lower stomach. There are no muscle bellies there.

arnold schwarzenegger lower abs

We’ve included the best lower ab exercise at the end of this article, but don’t worry too much about targeting different ab muscles just yet. We’ll want to make sure that we train both your obliques and your abs, but we don’t need to worry about training upper abs or lower abs or anything like that. For now we want to fully work the entire accordion.

The cool thing about abs though is that they all look amazing so long as they are big enough and lean enough. Every set of abs will be different—and all will be badass.

How Lean?

Flex your abs as hard as you can and touch your stomach. If your stomach is firm and rubbery, skip this section. If there’s a shallow layer of dough there or if you’re unsure, read on.

Not all skinny guys have a low body fat percentage. Many do, but a lot of the guys who are the most interested in getting abs are the ones who have a naturally softer stomach. Building up bigger ab muscles when there’s a substantial amount of fat on top of them will just push the fat out further. Not the desired effect.

Ab Bulking at 15

So first things first, let’s make sure that you’re lean enough. For a flat stomach you’ll want to be around 15% body fat, but to have abs you’ll usually need to be under 12%.

There are lots of ways to calculate your body fat percentage, but when it comes to being healthy and getting abs, all you need is a mirror. It doesn’t matter if your skin callipers are telling you that you’re 10% if you can’t see your abs, and it doesn’t matter if your bathroom scale thinks that you’re 17% if you can see your abs. Moreover, anywhere in that 10–20% range is perfectly healthy.

So, because we’re trying to get a visual result here, the most logical approach is estimate your body fat percentage visually. Fortunately, the mirror method is often more accurate than the other at-home methods provided that you’re fairly lean (10–18%).

The tricky thing is that being lean enough for abs looks very different depending on how much muscle you have. At 12% a skinny guy can look soft and a strong guy can look ripped. Even so most of the body fat percentage charts use a bodybuilder on steroids to show you what 6% looks like and then an obese guy who’s never seen a weight to show you what 30% looks like. That’s not all that helpful. So we’ve got two charts—a skinny and a strong one—and we’ve used illustrations so that we can keep all the variables constant except for body fat.

Here’s how you use them:

1) Find a mirror

2) Turn on some flattering overhead lighting (bathrooms work well)

3) Flex your abs and your butt (to rotate your hips into a decent position)

4) Compare your abs to these charts, depending on how much muscle you have

Here’s what 9–20% looks like on a strong guy: 

How to Estimate Body Fat Percentage In the Mirror (Strong Guy)

Here’s what 9–20% looks like on a skinny guy:

How to Estimate Body Fat Percentage In the Mirror (Skinny Guy)

If you want to see how this might look in real life, here’s me at 11% as measured by DEXA scan (the gold standard in body fat percentage testing). As you can see, I have a fair bit less definition than the 9% image, but maybe slightly more definition than the 12% image.

Bony to Beastly Shane Duquette Body Fat Percentage DEXA Scan

If you’re under 15%, congratulations—you’re not only very healthy, but you also have a very attractive body fat percentage. To get abs you’ll need to lose just a few pounds of fat. If you’re under 12%, even more congratulations—you’re eligible for amazing abs without needing to lose any fat.

But let’s say you’re closer to 20%. That’s not the end of the world. Your body fat is still fairly healthy, and if you decide you want to be lean enough for abs, you’re not that far away. Here’s what you can realistically expect after three months of scientifically cutting—all muscle maintained, 20 pounds of fat lost:

Bony to Beastly Cutting Body Fat Percentage

To do this you’ll need to eat 1 gram of protein per pound bodyweight while consuming few enough calories that you’re losing weight on the scale each week—probably around 500 fewer calories than you’re eating right now. (We’ve got an article on what to do if you’re skinny-fat here.)

While doing this you’ll want to be following a good lifting program. If you’re new to lifting and eating scientifically you should be able to build some muscle while you do it, and if you’re already somewhat muscular (as I was) you can expect to maintain your muscle mass and strength.

This means that whether you’re lean enough or not, you need to be lifting in order to get closer to your goal. So whether you’re under 15% or not, let’s move on to building badass abs in the gym.

How to Build Badass Abs

We’re going to teach you the best exercises for building up badass abs, but keep in mind that we need to get your hips positioned properly in order to get your ab muscles firing properly. With proper posture, literally everything you do in and out of the gym will be training your abs. Your abs won’t be hanging loose as you stroll around town, your gut won’t be jutting out even though you’re at 9% body fat, and eating a big meal won’t make you look quite as pregnant.

ecto-belly vs good posture with strong abs

If you want to see what this looks like in real life, check this out:

Europa's Bony to Beastly Ectomorph Transformation

This should also help fix the “lazy stomach” that some guys get when they aren’t intentionally flexing their ab muscles. Some degree of this is okay, but it’s best if your abs have the strength, positioning and endurance to always have a little bit of tension in them.

Here are two pictures that b2B member Jeremy took just seconds apart. On the left side, even with a very low body fat percentage, his ab positioning is preventing him from having abs. When your stomach is stretched like that it prevents the abdominal muscles from contracting properly, preventing them from naturally holding a little tension.

lazy stomach vs good posture with strong abs

Fortunately, stronger ab muscles are better at holding your hips and ribs together. This means that building up bigger abs will improve your posture, and improving your posture will help you build up bigger abs. These goals work additively with one another. By focusing on both simultaneously you’ll get the quickest (and best) results.

There are a few exercises that are particularly effective at getting your hips into a proper position and building up bigger, stronger abs. Here are six different lifts that will bulk up your abs in different ways, improve your posture, and build bonus muscles everywhere else on your body.

Here’s Marco with the how-to.

The plank. This will show you what proper pelvic positioning looks like and teach your core how to become comfortable maintaining that position under a light load.

 

The farmer carry. In this exercise we’re teaching you how to maintain that plank position while walking around with heavy things. Great for the obliques, great for developing a core that will look good even when you aren’t thinking about it.

 

Sit-Ups. Crunches involve repeatedly bending your spine under load. While there is little direct evidence that they are bad for you, the most respected spinal health expert in the world, Dr. Stuart McGill, advises against them. Instead, he recommends variations where the spine remains in a more neutral position. These spine-conscious variations will also ingrain better lifting habits, as you’ll learn how to keep your abs on lockdown during compound lifts. Here’s an ab isolation exercise that’s safe, healthy and effective:

 

Dumbbell Pullovers. In this exercise you’re moving in the shoulder joint while your abs fight to keep your ribs down. The bigger and stronger your back and chest get, the bigger and stronger your abs will become.

 

Goblet Squat. In this exercise you’re moving in the hips while your entire core is lit up. The bigger and stronger your entire body becomes, the bigger and stronger your core will become.

 

Reverse Crunches. This is the ultimate lower ab exercise, and it’s actually pretty great at teaching your abs to pull your hips up into a nice, strong position. Great all-around ab exercise.

Once you become good at these exercises pretty much everything you do will help you build incredible abs. At this point your abs will probably be looking good enough that you get bored of training your abs and switch your priorities to something else—getting a stronger bench press or deadlift, or maybe building yourself some beastlier biceps and pecs.

…But if you still feel like your abs are too tiny, this is a great time to introduce more difficult variations. There are many, many great compound and isolation lifts for your abs: dead bugs, front squats, weighted chin-ups, weighted push-ups, ab-wheel rollouts, hanging leg raises, Pallof presses, and many more.

Conclusion

When it comes to your abs, always remember the three things you need:

  1. Big enough abs, so that your belly is shaped by many little bellies
  2. A lean enough stomach, so that you can see your abs through the flabs
  3. Proper posture, so that your abs will activate and flex naturally

Also remember that you don’t need abs. You’re perfectly healthy at 18% body fat and perfectly attractive to women at 15% body fat. Abs are a bonus. No need to stress out if you lose sight of your lower abs when bulking, or if you’re a skinny-fat guy and want to focus on building up muscle before you worry about your stomach. Hell, once you’re muscular enough you may realize that you don’t even care about abs at all.

And as always, if you want more help building muscle, more help cutting fat, and more help getting rad abs… that’s what the Bony to Beastly Program is for. The main eBook covers absolutely everything you need to know about muscle-building training and nutrition, it comes with over 5 months of workout programming, tons of recipes to make eating enough easier, videos teaching all of the lifts (like the ones in this article), a yearlong membership in the community, and coaching from us along the way. We’ve love to have you, too.

Omar's Bony to Beastly Ectomorph Transformation

Are You Really a Hardgainer? Find Out With These 3 Tests

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Have you ever wondered whether you’re a “hardgainer” or not? What your muscle-building potential might be? How much of an ectomorph you are? How your physique might look after gaining 10, 20 or even 40 pounds of muscle?

These three quizzes should help you figure all of that out, and you can do it right now from the comfort of your own home. The first two tests require just measuring tape, and the third you can do with no equipment whatsoever. We have a video where I explain each test, then written instructions and illustrations underneath.

Let’s get started.

Before we get started we also have a quick announcement to make. We’ve had a lot of guys asking for video content, so we’ve decided to start making YouTube videos. We’ve just put up these three new videos, and if you want more, just let us know by liking, commenting and subscribing via YouTube. If you guys dig ’em, let us know as we’re happy to keep making more.

Hardgainer Genetics Quiz #1. Bone Breadth

In our Ectomorph Aesthetics article we talk about the most attractive shoulder to waist ratio. That has to do with how broad your shoulders are compared to how narrow your waist is. Genetics can help with that for sure, but that has more to do with leaning down your waist and muscling up your shoulders. This ratio is very different, as it concerns itself strictly with your bone structure.

I initially read about this a decade ago in the old Scrawny to Brawny book by Dr. John Berardi and Michael Mejia. They suggest that if your bi-acromial to bi-iliac breadth ratio is 1.46 or higher then you have an ideal frame for building muscle. Berardi is well known for doing good research, so I suspected there was more to this. I searched PubMed for studies looking into this bi-acromial to bi-iliac ratio and found a couple studies that use it as a way of predicting body mass.

Excellent.

One of them was a study out of Johns Hopkins University in 2000 (study). The researchers took elite athletes in various sports, measured their bi-acromial to bi-iliac ratio, weighed them, and established a way to predict body mass based on bone structure. Olympic weightlifters, the burliest of the bunch, had a ratio of 1.491. Decathletes, the narrowest of the bunch, had a ratio of 1.311.

A follow-up study in 2004 supports this theory as well, finding that Inupiats (aboriginals of Alaska) have a 1.38 biac/bi-iliac ratio and are slenderer than Finns, who have a 1.41 ratio (study).

Now the rub—this ratio is very hard to measure! I highly recommend watching the video above, where I show you how to measure it.

Bony to Beastly Bone Structure V-Taper Ratio

For the bi-acromial breadth, use measuring tape to measure the distance between the outermost parts of your shoulder bonesThis doesn’t include your upper arm bone or your shoulder muscles, but just where your shoulder joint begins. Also keep in mind that we’re measuring the distance between the joints, so hold the measuring tape out a little bit in front of your body so that it doesn’t curve around your chest.

Same deal with your hips. The outermost part of your upper hip bones, and no bending of the measuring tape.

Once you have these measurements, just divide the shoulder measurement by your hip measurement to get your ratio. You can use either inches or centimetres for this. We’re calculating a ratio here, so as long as you’re consistent it won’t matter.

Your Bone Breadth Ratio = Shoulder breadth / Hip breadth

  • If you have a ratio under 1.4 you have an elite endurance build
  • If you have a ratio of 1.4–1.45 you have an average build
  • If you have a ratio of 1.46–1.5 you have an elite strength build

For an example of someone with amazing natural muscle-building potential, we can look at the old school bodybuilder Steve Reeves. Even as a young teenager you can see that his genetics are pretty undeniable.

Muscle-Building Genetics, Bone Structure V-Taper, Steve Reeves

For realistic examples of what you can achieve, some good examples are Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt. Both are ectomorphs with similar muscle-building genetics in most ways, but Ryan Gosling has a slightly lower ratio than Brad Pitt. Chances are that you’re somewhere in the middle.

Ectomorph Actor / Celebrity Genetics Ryan Gosling & Brad Pitt

What should you do if you have an endurance build? This is another one of those things that makes us “hardgainers”—guys who need to be smart with our lifting and nutrition in order to wind up with a strong, optimally attractive physique. Some guys look plenty strong just by playing sports and whatnot, but we aren’t those guys.

Hardgainer Genetics Quiz #2. Bone Thickness

This test is a special one, since you could say that it’s the original hardgainer test. In the 1950’s, the famous bodybuilder Reg Park began noticing that “the small boned type” didn’t build muscle as easily as other body types. The term hardgainer was coined shortly thereafter, and since then the research of Dr. Casey Butts has proven that there’s indeed a relationship between bone thickness and muscle-building potential.

How do you figure out if you’re the small boned type? By measuring how thick your bones are in relation to your height. Unless you’re quite overweight, your wrist and ankle size are determined almost exclusively by your bone size, so these are the best places to test. Our wrist size directly relates to arm muscularity, whereas ankle size directly relates to leg muscularity. For the purposes of this test, we’ll use our wrists.

Your Bone Thickness Ratio = Wrist Circumference / Height

So take your wrist circumference and divide it by your height (in cm or inches). If the number you get is smaller than 0.1045, you have skinny wrists. Welcome to the hardgainer club.

Now, to figure out what an exceptionally thick bone structure is, let’s take a couple pre-steroid era bodybuilders and run their numbers. Thanks again to the research of Dr. Casey Butts, we have some good numbers to use. Ron Lacy (Mr. America 1957) had a moderate ratio of 0.1058, whereas thicker boned John Grimek had a ratio of 0.1138.

Taking this further, Butts found that most guys who can get world class biceps are over 6’ tall and/or have over 8” wrists (over 183 cm tall with over 20 cm wrists). This beast of a dude would have a ratio of 0.1111. Not quite as sturdy as Grimek, but still larger than some of the thinner Mr. America winners. With a ratio like this you can rest assured that your bone structure will be propelling you forward, not holding you back. If you’re reading this though, I doubt that describes you at all. It certainly doesn’t describe me!

Bony to Beastly Ectomorph / Hardgainer Genetics Skinny Wrist Size

So for the purposes of our chart we’ll use a ratio of under 0.1045 to denote a hardgainer and a ratio of over 0.1111 to represent guys who can become very muscular very easily.

  • If your ratio is over 0.1111 you’re an easygainer
  • If your ratio is 0.1045–0.1111 you have average muscle-building genetics
  • If your ratio is under 0.1045 you’re a hardgainer

However, we quickly realized that not a single b2B member even had a ratio over 0.1. We’re super hardgainers, you could say. For example, my wrist size is 6.5” and my height is 74” (6’2), making my ratio 0.088. (In metric this would be 16.5 cm divided by 188 cm, still giving a ratio of 0.088.) With wrists this small, I’d be a hardgainer even if I were 5’4 (163 cm).

What should you do if you have hardgainer bones? “Small bone type” guys, aka ectomorphs, are the more “delicate” type of guys, as Google so asshole-ishly points out to anyone who looks up the word ectomorph. It also makes us weigh less, even when heavily muscled. Sometimes this is an advantage, such as when running, doing chin-ups, or playing sports with weight divisions. Sometimes this is a disadvantage, such as when trying to fill out the sleeve of a t-shirt, win a bodybuilding competition or avoid broken bones.

It’s not a disadvantage when it comes to being considered attractive, manly dudes though.

Most Hollywood sex icons have hardgainer bone structures. This is true with guys like Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio, who both have attractive faces and personalities. You could argue that this has little to do with their physiques though, and you’d probably be right. Their attractiveness may be in part due to their thinner facial structure though. Regardless, let’s not count those guys.

What’s more interesting is that it’s the thinner boned actors who are known for having extremely attractive bodies. Some good examples are Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Cam Gigandet, Paul Walker and Michael Fassbender.

Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Cam Gigandet, Paul Walker, Michael Fassbender Bodies & Ectomorph Genetics

This goes outside of Hollywood as well. Almost all male models have very thin bone structures. Many of the athletes who are considered sexy have thin bones too. Take a look at Mr. Ward and David Beckham.

Mr. Ward and David Beckham Ectomorph Hardgainer Genetics

So what should you do if you have thin bones? Lift very heavy weights, eat enough calcium and get plenty of sun to strengthen your bones, not to mention pack a ton of muscle on top of them. With that done, relax and enjoy the attractiveness benefits.

Hardgainer Genetics Quiz #3: Muscle Bellies

We can make muscles larger by lifting weights. We can even make them a little longer (improving flexibility). What we cannot do though is change the length of them in relation to our tendons. This impacts how our muscles look and also how strong they can become.

An easy place to test your muscle belly size is with your biceps. A smaller bellies means more difficulty building up the biceps, but also a visually pleasant peak, as it will contrast nicely to the tendon right next to it.

Bony to Beastly Muscle-Building Genetics Small Muscle Bellies

Flex your arm to 90 degrees, face your palm towards your biceps, and see how many fingers you can fit between your biceps muscle bellies and your forearm. (See the video for an example.)

  • If you can fit 3 or more fingers between your biceps and forearm, your muscle bellies are fairly small. You have ectomorphic “hardgainer” muscle bellies, at least as far as your biceps are concerned.
  • If you can fit 2 fingers, you’ve got fairly average, well-rounded muscle bellies
  • If you can fit 0–1 finger you have mesomorphic “easygainer” muscle bellies.

In the above video you can see me easily fitting 3 fingers between my bicep and forearm, slotting me firmly in the hardgainer category. In the bodybuilding, fitness modelling and YouTube fitness world this is very rare. However, when you look at guys a little further away from bodybuilding, you see tons of famous ectomorphs and hardgainers. Some top tier actors, like Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt, are ectomorphs who have very small muscle bellies.

Brad Pitt & Ryan Gosling Hardgainer / Ectomorph Muscle Belly Genetics

What should you do if you have short bellies? Hit your arms a little extra, since they’ll grow a little more slowly. You aren’t the guy who can get away with doing just the compound lifts. You need the big compound biceps builders like chin-ups, but you also need an assortment of curls.

Also, remember that your biceps are just a small part of your upper arms. You can add tons of girth to your guns by training your other upper arm muscles, such as your brachialis, shoulders and triceps.

Realistic Examples & Wrap-Up

Okay so let’s say you’re a true ectomorph “hardgainer” in very sense, as the three of us are. This isn’t bad. Yes, it will be very hard to build a physique that will win you the admiration of guys who are into bodybuilding, but it won’t be that hard to build a physique that’s impressively fit, wickedly healthy and considered ideally attractive by women.

For an exaggerated example, check out the wrestler Brock Lesnar and the highest paid fashion model, Sean O’Pry. Lesnar has an elite mesomorphic physique that’s sure to impress most guys who are into bodybuilding, whereas O’Pry has an ectomorph physique that will woo the vast majority of women. If anything, women will think he’s too fit.

Ectomorph Muscle-Building Genetics Brock Lesnar Body vs Sean O'Pry

Neither body is better than the other, but each is better at different things. Given that we have more in common with the dude on the right, I would recommend aiming for something more like that. His face may not be something we can acquire, but his body probably is.

It’s not even that difficult to get a fit, healthy, attractive physique. Women aren’t looking for the next Steve Reeves or Arnold Schwarzenegger, just a guy with a masculine look who will make a rad dad and be able to protect his kids. With just three hourlong workouts per week, in a matter of months you could probably get the manly hunk physique of her dreams. Here are three more pop culture examples: Bradley Cooper, Jake Gyllenhaal and Shia LaBeouf.

Bradley Cooper, Jake Gyllenhaal, Shia LaBeouf (Realistic Ectomorph / Hardgainer Bodies)

Maybe your bone breadth, bone width and muscle belly size make it easier to look like Bradley Cooper than Jake Gyllenhaal, or vice versa, but chances are that some of the physiques mentioned in this article will be realistic for you, no matter how much of an ectomorph you are.

The catch is that you need to lift and eat for muscle growth. We often make the mistake of assuming that lifting weights is for guys who want to look like bodybuilders. Yes, if you want to look like a bodybuilder you’ll need to do bodybuilding, but even if you just want to build a little bit of muscle (or lose a little bit of fat) you should still be “bodybuilding,” since that’s the type of exercise designed to build muscle effectively.

Wolverine doesn’t look like a bodybuilder, but Hugh Jackman was deadlifting 405 pounds to get in shape for that role. That’s probably something that you’ll want to work towards also. And yes, deadlifting 300+ pounds is realistic for a guy with your genetics. But no, you don’t have to do deadlifts—you can lift weights at home and still build muscle perfectly well.

Hugh Jackman Deadlifting to Build Muscle

Most skinny guys will want to pursue types of exercise that line up with their natural strengths. They gravitate towards calisthenics, cardio, martial arts and general physical preparedness (CrossFit and P90X type stuff). They soon become frustrated that these styles of exercise aren’t bringing up their weaknesses—muscle size. But since they aren’t doing a type of exercise that is designed to build muscle very well, you’d need to have good muscle-building genetics to build muscle with that stuff.

Remember that Tony Horton used bodybuilding to build up his physique before becoming the P90X guy. Same thing with the calisthenics guys. Most of them build their muscle size and strength with weights before moving on to learning the calisthenics tricks.

This is even more true for guys like us. Pursuing “fitness” will usually make us naturally skinny guys look even skinnier, just like pursuing powerlifting will make most chubby guys look even chubbier.

If you want to bring up your weaknesses, you need to go outside of your comfort zone. Once you do that, I suspect that you’ll grow more quickly than you even thought possible. Soon you’ll be pretty thrilled with your genetics, given all the advantages we have outside of the “bigger is better” mentality of mainstream bodybuilding.

Bony to Beastly Ectomorph Transformation Skinny Hardgainer Genetics

If you want a program that will teach you absolutely everything you need to know about building muscle as quickly and efficiently a possible, you should sign up for the Bony to Beastly Muscle-Building Program For Skinny Guys. We’d really love to have you :)

PS, do you know anyone who might like or benefit from reading this article? We’d love it if you could give it a Facebook like and share it. Thanks!

The Social Workout: A Skinny Guy’s Guide to Confidence

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A few weeks ago we got an email from a Beastly member, Nick, saying that he had referenced our Ectomorph Aesthetics article on his site. He thought that it perfectly described the physique that women find the most attractive. That got me curious about what his site was all about, so I checked it out.

It turns out that Nick has started up a business teaching guys how to improve their confidence so that they can meet women in an honest, authentic way. This confidence extends to success in business and with friends.

His approach hit home with me.

As a skinny guy, building muscle was so important to me because I thought my skinniness would prevent me from attracting the amazing woman who I wanted to raise a family with, or that it would prevent me from defending her. My confidence suffered as a result, and I approached muscle-building with a sense of desperation.

By the time I met the woman of my dreams, I had gained over fifty pounds of muscle. We spent our first date drinking beer, chatting, and doing handstands in the park.

A couple of days ago my friend asked her what she first noticed about me. I was surprised by her answer. It wasn’t my long hair or tattoos; it was how strong I looked. She even told her roommate about it after our date.

As someone who runs a fitness website for skinny dudes, I wish I could tell you that she fell in love with me because of that strength. It sure made a strong first impression, but I think she fell in love with me because of something else.

Being a strong guy has value. So does being a confident guy. But being someone who can turn a weakness into a strength is the real ticket.

I think it’s amazing how Nick now makes his living teaching other guys how to do the thing he was known for being awful at. He turned his greatest weakness into his greatest strength.

This article might help you do the same thing, and if you’re a single guy looking for love, this could even be the article that changes your life.

And now, let me introduce Nick Durham! Everything that follows is written by him.

Most ectomorphs have their stories of brutal girlfriend insults.

“Hey honey, I’m going to go to the gym to lift weights because, you know, someone has to protect us…

“You should eat more. Here, let’s add some protein to your plate.” *dumps entire plate of meatballs onto your spaghetti*

“You are so tiny. I love you for that.”

All of them are completely demoralizing. Even the last one, which is passive-aggressive and sweet all at once, stings like a 50-pound dumbbell dropped on your littlest toe.

I consider myself lucky. I was never insulted by a girlfriend like that. This is most likely because I never had a girlfriend back when I was skinny and shy. I just heard the same insults from my friends, basketball teammates, and family instead. (Although my grandma knew I was tiny and really did love me for that.)

How to Become More Confident And Attractive As a Skinny Guy

My high-school basketball team loved to make skinny jokes. I’m the small guy whose head is barely visible :)

When I started lifting weights late in high school, it changed things for me. I felt better about myself and my role as a man, and I finally met an awesome girl who had the same (poor) sense of humor I had. She soon became my first girlfriend.

But even with my increased strength and emotional well-being, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I was a confident person. That relationship didn’t last forever either.

I’m an introvert, a quiet guy, and have always had anxiety and self-consciousness stalk me wherever I go.

When William Sheldon invented the ectomorph/mesomorph/endomorph body type system, he suspected a connection between being an ectomorph and having anxiety. Who’s to say if it’s true, but nonetheless, anxiety and a lack of confidence were traits that significantly affected me.

There was one moment where this affliction punched me square in the face.

I went on a routine coffee run one morning before work and while standing in line, in walked my version of a dream girl.

This girl was gorgeous—like, unbelievably gorgeous—and she had this energy that drew me right in. She caught me staring (pretty sure my mouth was agape too) and offered up a smile before shyly looking away. Is it corny to say I felt my heart flutter? Whatever, man—it did. I would’ve done anything to meet her.

But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

I froze. I was a statue. There was no chance I was moving. I was way too nervous, completely stuck in my head, too afraid of being rejected in front of total strangers.

This wasn’t even an uncommon occurrence for me. Around important people and during important moments, I choked. I labored to do new things outside my comfort zone, like talking to strangers or, say, taking up yoga or an acting class.

Public speaking and job interviews made me want to die.

And yeah, my dating life could have been going better.

Weightlifting for me was a gateway drug into self-improvement. It showed me that if you want to make a change in your life, you can, and you alone are personally responsible for that change.

Well, I lacked confidence, and I wanted to make that change.

It wasn’t until a few nights later—at the gym, of all places—that I figured out how to solve it.

Weak Muscles

Consider these hypothetical situations:

A skinny guy who hasn’t lifted weights in over a year walks into a gym. He confidently picks up two 45 pound plates and puts them on a barbell. He tries to bench press the weight, but the bar doesn’t budge.

An introverted/shy guy who has never approached a woman in his life finally musters up enough courage to start a conversation with an attractive girl at a coffee shop. He says “hi” but is too anxious to listen; the conversation becomes unnatural, and then it dies out.

Here I was at the gym on a Friday night, still reeling from the trauma of my inaction from earlier in the week, when it finally clicked for me: that shy guy in the coffee shop has the same problem as the skinny guy at the gym.

Both have weak muscles.

That’s right. Just like our physical muscles, we have our “confidence muscles.”

And we strengthen our confidence muscles the same way as we strengthen our physical ones—by starting small, lifting a manageable weight, being consistent, and putting in focused effort towards exercising them. If we never take the time to do these things, we stay weak and scrawny.

The analogy made perfect sense to me.

As an introvert, I was avoiding threatening social situations nearly as much as Shane, Jared and Marco avoid marathons.

I was too scared to present in front of company directors at work. I rationalized my way out of meeting a VIP who could have been my dream mentor. I had so many opportunities to meet amazing women, and I wimped out of all of them.

But of course that happened. My confidence muscles were tiny. I had never devoted time or energy to developing them, and here I was expecting to jump right into the deep end.

I was expecting to be able to bench a ton of weight without having ever gone to the gym.

I needed to get stronger, and the only way I knew how to build muscle was to create and follow a workout.

Introducing the Confidence Workout

I created my first confidence workout right there in the gym.

How to Become More Confident And Attractive As a Skinny Guy

As I designed it, I realized the most important thing was that it had to be doable.

Research shows that the reason most people struggle to build confidence is that they get stuck in their bedroom analyzing different theories because the idea of taking action seems too overwhelming. So I made the exercises small and manageable enough for me to actually want to do them.

I started by targeting three essential confidence muscle groups:

Stage 1: Self-Esteem Training (to work on my core confidence)

Stage 2: Social Lifting (to develop my social skills)

Stage 3: Big Moment Bodybuilding (for coolness in big moments like the job interview or work presentation)

I followed the workout to a T. Some days I loved it, some days I gave up. But each time I did an exercise, I was building momentum.

To give you a glimpse into some of the things I did, I went tango dancing for the first time in my life and made a complete fool of myself. I approached dozens of strangers in the mall and made new friends. I danced to Frank Sinatra in a department store with a shoe saleswoman. I gave an impassioned monologue in Starbucks. I got a lot of discounts on hotel rooms just because I asked.

How to Become More Confident And Attractive As a Skinny Guy

Sounds interesting, right? But did these unconventional exercises help me build real, tangible confidence?

About two months after completing the workout, I met a family friend for coffee. For the first five minutes, she looked me up and down like only a psychologist would. (She’s a psychologist.) I sensed she had something to tell me, and I was right.

“You know Nick,” she said while studying me. “You are… qualitatively different than the last time I saw you. You have this sense of calm about you. What’s changed?!”

What’s changed? Everything!

Professionally, I took a chance and started my own business. I started taking more risks in my dating life (and they were already paying off).

But most importantly, for the first time in my life, I felt confident.

My limiting social fears—that I wasn’t any good around people, that I had to be perfect, that I had to be liked by everyone—were destroyed.

Taking Other People Out Into The Social Gym

During the following months, I found other people asking me the same question as the psychologist. Except now, people were interested in learning about “The Confidence Workout.”

So I taught them.

I guess you could say I was their personal trainer.

I took out friends, colleagues, and complete strangers who found me on the internet into the social gymnasium (places like the mall, sporting events, and festivals) and taught them the exercises I had used to kill my own anxiety. Most of them were quiet and shy, just like I had been.

Some of their results were more profound than mine.

One social gym rat got his dream job because he met a complete stranger at a coffee shop. A female friend I worked with was able to get a promotion at work based entirely on a speech that she had been too terrified even to consider a few months prior. A shy client who worked in sales became the top performer just a few months later.

And there was even one guy who had never had a girlfriend. Less than three months after starting The Confidence Workout, he had to cross that off his resume.

I believe The Confidence Workout made them strong.

So what now?

Nick Durham—The Skinny Guy's Guide To Becoming More Confident

As I mentioned earlier, the most important thing you can do to build confidence is something. Something to start building up successful experiences that you can draw confidence from. Here are some very doable actions that you can take today to get your feet wet.

  1. Nod at strangers walking down the street. (5 reps.)
  2. Say hello to people in a British (or Canadian) accent. (5 reps.)
  3. Ask a stranger for a recommendation: food, drink, book, movie, TV show, etc. (1 rep.)
  4. Say “how are you?” to service people: cashiers, servers, bartenders, etc. (3 reps.)
  5. Ask a stranger if they have any big plans for the weekend. (1 rep.)
  6. Eat at a restaurant alone. (1 rep.)
  7. Hi-five a stranger. (1 rep.)

That’s right. My exercises from the very first workout I made.

My challenge to you: do three of them today.

If you complete them, 1) reward yourself with something great (you are creating a habit by doing this), and 2) email me and tell me how they went (I bet they will be more fun than you think).

The Call to Action

Offer for B2B community: do you want the full version (complete with every exercise) of The Confidence Workout? I’m turning The Workout into a book and giving it away to the B2B community and early readers for free. It’s coming out soon, so this free offer will soon end.

Head over and get it here: thesocialintrovert.org

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