You're reading How Big Should Your Legs Be? by Shane Duquette, originally posted on Bony to Beastly. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, check out our website Bony to Beastly.

Most guys have a subconscious instinct to squat a little less, bench a little more. Most lifting programs tell us that we should suppress that instinct. But what if those lifting programs are wrong?

What if this whole “don’t skip leg day” thing is making us think that we should be training our legs far more than we actually should be?

What if it’s just this new bodybuilder “X-physique” trend trickling down to the mainstream lifter, even though the average lifter is far more interested in building a strong, healthy, athletic, attractive, v-taper?

In this article we’ll cover:

• The advantages of training your legs enough.
• The advantages of prioritizing your upper body after that.
• The most attractive proportions.
• How most workout programs might have more leg work than you need.
• How to get the most benefits with the fewest downsides.

Curious?

Most guys go to the gym without a workout program, and most of those guys do spend too much time benching, too little time squatting. That’s not a… good… approach, but it’s a whole helluva lot better than nothing.

You’d think this would leave tons of guys with imbalanced physiques, but more often than not it just leaves guys stuck in a perpetual plateau. They gain ten pounds and then their gains stop. Their non-program just isn’t good enough to get them to the next level.

It’s no big secret that following an actual workout program is critical if you want results that go beyond a few weeks. And I’m going to argue that most of those workout programs will have you spending too much time on lower body training.

Yep, I said it. I think most guys would benefit from a more upper-body dominant program. Not just in terms of looking more attractive, but also when it comes to general strength and general health.

Now, before I tell you why most programs have too much lower body work, nobody is saying you should always skip leg day. Training your legs is important. In fact, the best programs have at least a little leg training in every workout. (The more frequently you do leg lifts, the better your coordination gets.)

So. Let’s start with the not-so-controversial stuff.

The Five Reasons You Shouldn’t Neglect Your Legs

Most people realise that they shouldn’t skip every leg day ever. As I like to say, chickening out on leg lifts will literally make you look like a chicken. That’s why you rarely see guys who look like the fashionable man above.

But I have a confession to make. I skipped leg day. Now, to be fair, I was skipping push and pull day too. (And I didn’t know that dividing workouts into legs/push/pull was pretty silly.) But I was a graphic design student who didn’t know a single person who went to the gym. I’m not even sure I knew what a gym was. Anyway, I had no legs for 22 years. Just stilts.

Here I am participating in a university photography project.

And here are five reasons that you shouldn’t be like me:

5. Training your lower body is great for your health and your brain. You can get some of these benefits just with cardio, but for others, you need to be doing some pretty strenuous lifting. There are some upper body lifts that surely have this effect, but all the really heavy lifts are the ones with a major lower body component (e.g. deadlifts).

For example, here’s a study looking at the brain function of identical twins as they age. The guys with the stronger legs had better brain function and more grey matter than their identical twins. Lifting heavy can physically change our brains. Pretty gnarly.

4. Mastering the lower body lifts will make you a better athlete. No real room for argument here, at least for most sports. The bigger the muscle, the more powerful it is. This helps with sprint speed, strength, and verticality. Moreover, weightlifting is one of the best ways to improve coordination and flexibility.

Heavy fully-body lifts are also the best for increasing bone density, reducing your risk of injury. (This is a major athletic advantage despite what soccer players would have you think.)

3. Leg lifts burn the most calories. Just kidding. I mean, this is true, but I’m just kidding about this being a benefit for us. #ectomorphstruggles

2. Having a powerful butt will help with nearly everything. There’s a common misconception that women like guys who are asses. In reality, women like guys who have asses. We’ve even had the wives and girlfriends of Beastly members write in, thanking us for giving their lover a butt.

I’m not even kidding.

As with most things that are considered attractive, there’s a reason for this. Asses are a natural indicator of health, athleticism, and strength. A strong pair of glutes will even help prevent lower back pain, which is one reason why the deadlift is so good for building up a strong, injury-resistant back.

1. Strength transference. Your legs are used to transfer strength in every single action that you do. Want to pick up a couch? Your grip strength, bicep strength or trap strength will probably be your limiting factor, yes, but if you don’t have a powerful lower body, you might throw out your back.

Hell, leg drive is even an important part of the bench press.

Now, the crazy part:

But You Still Might Want to Skip Some Leg Days

It’s pretty common for a guy to secretly skimp on his lower body training, but it’s very rare for a guy to be crazy enough to argue that we should be skimping on our lower body training.

Let me be that crazy person for a moment.

1. The health benefits of having a strong lower body cap out at a certain point. For example, last year I went to get a DEXA scan to measure my body fat percentage (which was 10.8%). Here in Toronto, you get DEXA scans at The Bone Wellness Centre, so, along with my body fat analysis, I got a bone-health consultation. I’ve only been lifting for a few years now and my bone density is already at the very top of the chart. No room for improvement.

That’s good news, yes, but hardly motivation to try and add another 100 pounds to my deadlift. At the time, I was deadlifting 375 pounds. I’ve since pulled 405. Is there really a reason to think that getting to 500 would further improve my general health?

It wouldn’t.

In fact, it would come with risks. While deadlifting heavy is fantastic for our brains, health and athleticism, deadlifting very heavy has a whole different risk/reward ratio. It’s actually pretty rare to see elite powerlifters who aren’t nursing some aches, pains, and injuries.

Same with squatting. (And, for the record, benching.)

2. The day-to-day benefits of having a strong lower body cap out at a certain point, too. Helping someone move when I was a super skinny guy was… not pretty. I was physically incapable of lifting heavier things, but even the lighter items were putting me at risk of injury.

I’m lucky that I didn’t throw out my back like my dad did. He was also super duper skinny, and a bad moving day left him with a lifelong injury that he still deals with today, several decades later.

I’ve helped with a surprisingly large number of moves since gaining 50 pounds, though, and I haven’t run into a single lower body strength issue. Not even one.

I’m not saying I’m immune to becoming tired, it’s just never my lower body that gives first. My fingers get tired, my traps get tired, my biceps get tired. It’s the same thing when I’m carrying around my girlfriend. Same with carrying groceries home.

In fact, I can’t think of a single time since getting to a 2-plate deadlift that my lower body strength has been a limiting factor. The main advantage to nearly doubling my deadlift strength was that it made my traps and forearms stronger.

I think we could probably do a better job of improving our day-to-day performance by swapping out some squats for farmer carries.

3. You don’t need huge legs for athletics. Again, the benefits cap out at a fairly modest point. If you disagree, check out Josh Norman, whose medium-sized legs are enough to earn him 15 million each year as one of the top cornerbacks in the NFL.

Nobody with a brain is saying he’s got chicken legs, but come on now, these are legs that still fit into regular jeans.

On that note…

4. Clothing companies don’t make pants for guys with jacked lower bodies. As Gregory O’Gallagher (from Kinobody) pointed out, if you keep going hard with the leg lifts, at a certain point, you need to start buying a too-large waist size or switch over to pants designed for overweight people.

Like us, O’Gallagher wasn’t saying that we should have small, weak or useless legs—he can also deadlift over 400 pounds—just that we don’t need to dedicate a ton of gym-time to them.

5. Squats won’t do much for your upper body. There’s a myth that to grow your upper body, you need to lift real hearty with your lower body. The idea is that it’s the lower body lifts, like squats, that stimulate the anabolic hormones—testosterone, growth hormone and IGF-1.

That’s true, yes, and a few notable studies are often thrown around. It’s important to look at all the studies, though. To quote Dr. Brad Schoenfeld, who published a paper reviewing all of the studies done thus far, “What seems relatively clear from the literature is that if a relationship does, in fact, exist between acute systemic factors and muscle growth, the overall magnitude of the effect would be fairly modest.”

But even if you want to fully capitalize on that factor, starting off your workout with a couple big, heavy compound lifts will have you covered. Lifts like: the bench press, chin-up, overhead press, squat, deadlift, row.

6. Doing more upper body work than lower body work will make you look better. This is a contentious point, so let’s give it a whole section. Maybe two. After all, most of our readers are single but not planning on staying that way forever.

And for the guys who aren’t single, well, you already have someone who might appreciate this.

What Proportions are the Most Attractive?

Different people have different stances on aesthetics. Women prefer guys who look fit/strong; guys will often want to look like bodybuilders; and bodybuilders will think that fit/strong guys don’t even lift.

If you want to know all about aesthetics, we’ve got an in-depth article on it here.

What we care about in this article is how big your legs should be compared to your upper body. Most guys have a fairly reasonable view on that. Women, too.

There’s one notable niche that disagrees: modern bodybuilders. Back in the golden era of bodybuilding, you’d have guys like Frank Zane (my favourite) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (most popular) winning the Mr Olympia title, and they had rather large upper bodies compared to their lower bodies.

Now it’s all about the X-physique. Here’s the most recent Mr Olympia winner:

That’s cool. Mad respect for those guys. This isn’t a professional bodybuilding website, though, and I suspect you aren’t on the road to Mr Olympia.

Pro-bodybuilding stuff really doesn’t have much to do with attractiveness, either. Almost all women prefer guys who are dramatically smaller than that. Guys who look like lumberjacks or athletes, not steroids. There’s a reason why Schwarzenegger stars in films for dudes and Ryan Reynolds stars in movies for women.

This kind of physique is widely considered attractive (and it’s way healthier):

We can get far more specific, though.

Dr Casey Butts found that Ancient Greeks and modern women tend to prefer a similar kind of physique, so he crunched some numbers and created a set of proportions that he calls the “sexy physique.” These proportions are optimally attractive to women while still looking badass and masculine.

It also reflects the physique of a man who’s fairly athletic in a wrestler/strongman/Olympian kind of way, which is why it looks so good in the first place—it looks like a manly man with elite athletic prowess.

According to Butts’ guidelines, your hips should be about 25% larger than your waist, your thighs should be about 25% smaller than your waist, your shoulders should be around 62% larger than your waist, and your biceps should be around 50% the size of your waist.

Here are the calculations:
Sexy waist = approximately 12% body fat
Sexy hips = waist x 1.25
Sexy thighs = waist x 0.75
Sexy shoulders = waist x 1.618
Sexy biceps = waist x 0.50

Here’s an example of a well-proportioned dude:
Waist: 30 inches
Hips: 37.5 inches
Thighs: 22.5 inches
Shoulders: 48.5 inches
Biceps: 15 inches

So to answer the question from up above, the beast in the middle is the most attractive.

Even for the very hardgaineriest of ectomorphs, all of these proportions are realistically achievable.

Why Are Bigger Upper Bodies More Attractive?

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it’s because of sex differences. When we hit puberty, our shoulders grow broader. We also start storing fat primarily in our stomachs. We also tend to grow longer torsos than women.

The way that we build muscle lines up with this as well. We have a lot of androgen receptors in our trapezius and shoulder muscles, meaning that we tend to build muscle there quite easily. Far more easily than, say, our calves.

When women hit puberty, their hips grow broader, they start storing fat mostly in their lower bodies, they grow longer legs, and they have fewer androgen receptors in their upper bodies.

So men are kind of naturally upper-body dominant. If we get really fat, we look like that guy from Despicable Me. If we build a freakish amount of muscle, we look like Frank Zane. Even if we don’t have a single gain to our name, our upper body length and width is larger than it would be if we were women.

So being a man will usually make our upper bodies proportionally bigger than our lower bodies. But with enough deliberate effort, we can undo this…

If we spend a lot of time focusing on squats, for example, we’re going to wind up gaining a lot of lower body size without gaining a proportionate amount of upper body size.

How Much Leg Work Should You Do?

It’s time to get a little bit technical. Bear with me. The more time you spend lifting with a particular muscle, the more that muscle will grow. More lifting = more growth. But keep in mind that our ability to recover is finite. If we lift too much, we accumulate fatigue instead of gains. (Here’s a meta-analysis of all the studies done on this topic.)

So the perfect workout program is one that has you lifting as much as you can fully recover from. Dr Mike Israetel calls this our maximum recoverable volume (MRV). The closer we can get to our MRV, the more quickly we’ll grow.

Since we can only lift so much, the price of a more powerful lower body is a less powerful upper body, and vice versa.

Furthermore, some lifts are harder to recover from than others. A squat is very taxing on our central nervous system, a bicep curl is not. If your program has 1 fewer set of squats, that might leave room for 3 more sets of curls. That might not sound functional, but I’d be willing to bet your biceps need that strength more than your legs do.

This means that when designing a program, we aren’t just trying to cram a bunch of compound lifts together, we’re trying to pick the lifts that offer us the best return on our investment.

I know this might seem like splitting hairs, but if you gain 30 pounds while following one program, you might wind up with a totally different physique than if you gained 30 pounds following another program. If you care about that, this matters a lot.

And different programs make these judgement calls differently.

Let’s look at a few popular approaches.

Upper-Lower Split Routine. An upper-lower split program alternates between upper-body days and lower-body days—50% volume for each. This is a popular approach for some athletes, and I’ve seen Eric Cressey recommend it in some of his programs. Great way of training for certain athletes and for X-physique guys.

Monday: Lower body.
Tuesday: Upper body.
Wednesday: Rest.
Thursday: Lower body.
Friday: Upper body.
Saturday: Rest.
Sunday: Rest.

5×5. Depending on the 5×5 program, it might have something like 40% lower-body lifts, 60% upper body lifts. (I got that breakdown from Stronglifts, which is a squat-based program.) The idea here is to gain a lot of strength in the powerlifting lifts, so that makes sense. 2 of the 3 powerlifting lifts are lower body lifts, after all.

Monday: Full body, squat emphasis.
Tuesday: Rest.
Wednesday: Full body, squat emphasis.
Thursday: Rest.
Friday: Full body, squat emphasis.
Saturday: Rest.
Sunday: Rest.

Triple-Split / Bro-Split / PLL. This kind of program has a push, pull, and leg day, with each of those days having a similar training volume. That’s 67% upper body, 33% lower body. These programs tend to be higher in volume (more lifts per muscle group per week) and thus do better at building overall muscle mass than strength-focused programs. Even these programs tend slightly more towards the X-physique, but depending on your style (and genetics), these can give pretty aesthetic results.

This isn’t my favourite way to design a routine for several good reasons, outlined in this article, but these programs are not at all bad.

Monday: Push, size emphasis.
Tuesday: Rest.
Wednesday: Pull, size emphasis.
Thursday: Rest.
Friday: Legs, size emphasis.
Saturday: Rest.
Sunday: Rest.

Bony to Beastly (Classic Full Body). Now for the crazy-sounding part. Bony to Beastly is around 75% upper body, 25% lower body. Our program is all about helping skinny guys gain size in a healthy and attractive way. As it turns out, this is best accomplished by mixing strength training and bodybuilding together. We even throw in some bulking tricks that strongmen and athletes use.

Monday: Full body strength + upper body size.
Tuesday: Rest.
Wednesday: Full body strength + upper body size.
Thursday: Rest.
Friday: Full body strength + upper body size.
Saturday: Rest.
Sunday: Rest.

This isn’t radical, just more classic. 50’s lifters like Steve Reeves would do full-body workouts three times per week that were around 75% upper body. His aesthetic became so famous that guys still aspire to look like him today.

It’s worth noting that not all aspects of his workout were ideal. Bodybuilding was a new thing back then, and over the past 60 years, we’ve learned a lot more about how to build an optimal workout program. He hit the nail on the head by doing 3 full body workouts per week, though, with modern research showing it to be the most effective way to bulk up. I think his upper/lower body ratio was spot on as well, although that’s more subjective.

The Takeaway

I think this whole “don’t skip leg day” thing is awesome. Training our legs is amazing for our health, fitness, brain and appearance. In fact, having strong, functional legs is important enough that I think we should train our legs three times per week (as part of a full-body workout). That higher frequency will give us the best gains, and also the best improvements in coordination.

But we don’t need to do that much leg volume, and I think most programs go way overboard with it. If we do too much leg volume, we’ll grow our legs larger than they need to be at the expense of our upper bodies. If you gain 10 pounds, that might not matter a lot. But if you’re on this site, I bet you’re after more like 30 pounds. Maybe more.

I would argue that leg training is an 80–20 kind of situation, where 20% of the leg-work yields 80% of the benefit (or more), leaving us lots of time and energy to focus on the areas that we’re more eager to grow.

So I think leg day is awesome. But we have this masculine instinct to spend more time on our upper bodies because we instinctively want to look more masculine.

And our instincts aren’t wrong.

If you want to see what that looks like, here’s an example. Thanos spent around 25% of his time in the gym on his legs, and I would say that he got very proportionate and aesthetic gains. Would he have looked or performed better if he did twice as much leg work and half as much upper-body work? I really don’t think so.

In fact, after just a few months of doing a workout routine that isn’t all that leg-centric, I bet he’s already at the most attractive leg size for his frame.

To wrap this up, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a higher leg volume. But there’s also no sort of moral imperative there either. You can do less if you want to. Or more. Just consider your goals when making that decision.

What do you think? Let us know down below in the comments!

You're reading How To Gain Weight If You’re Skinny by Jared Polowick, originally posted on Bony to Beastly. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, check out our website Bony to Beastly.

It’s always pretty entertaining reading articles meant for skinny guys looking to build muscle that are written by naturally muscular or obese writers.

They just don’t get how tough it is for us skinny guys to gain weight.

It’s like an obese person taking weight loss advice from someone who’s naturally skinny. The skinny guy would confidently say, “Well, yeah, just stop eating. It’s easy. I do it all the time.”

It took me years to realize how much of the mainstream fitness information is really weight loss information in disguise. It took me even longer to figure out how to convert all of it into information that we can use. And longer still to break it down into 5 simple concepts.

This information is hard to find, evidence-based, and if you put it into action, it will radically change your life. Just like it did for the thousands of members in our program.

1. Eat More Food Than Your Body Needs—Consistently

Your body gets the energy that it needs from food. Your body then uses this energy to breathe, generate new cells, think, move around, etc. If you want to gain weight, you’ll need to eat more energy than your body needs.

Remember our well-meaning and naturally muscular writers? They tell us skinny guys to “just eat more”, or lecture us about how we “obviously don’t eat very much food because we’re skinny.” This is what they’ll typically write and then move on.

We may indeed need to eat more, but simply telling us that isn’t helping us actually do it.

We know what it’s like to be a skinny guy, and how hard it is gain weight. The skinny struggle is real.

I remember the bony version of myself would commonly eat an obscene amount of food. Back when I was skinny, I calculated one day of eating, and it was well beyond 3200+ calories.

So how come I wasn’t gaining weight?

There’s this scientific term, homoeostasis, and it describes the physiological process where a variable is held constant through active regulation.

What does that even mean?

It means our bodies are actively trying to maintain their current weight.

If you eat more energy one day than your body needs, what do you think your body will do with that extra energy? A naturally fat guy might store that weight, but as hardgainers, our bodies will try to burn it before storing it.

We naturally try to maintain our current weight!

You may notice that you start to fidget more. You might feel energised to go for a walk somewhere, or play some sports. You might even do some extra deep thinking and burn more energy that way.

If you still have a surplus after all of that, your body will approach the problem from another angle—by limiting the amount of food coming in. The next day you might forget to eat a meal, or consistently under-eat at every meal that day.

So that day I ate a whole bag of chips with 1200 calories, a box of cookies, and a pint of ice cream on top of my regular meals—what happened on the next day?

I moved more. I thought more. And I probably ate less. And that balanced everything out. No weight gain for me.

If you’re struggling to gain weight too, it’s because you’re running into that exact same issue. Every time you get ahead, your body cancels out your efforts retroactively.

So here’s how to beat your body’s natural systems:

• Track your energy objectively through an app like MyFitnessPal. If you try to “just eat more,” you won’t be able to account for your body making you forget things. It sounds crazy how your body might make you “forget” to eat breakfast the day after a previous day of eating big, but that’s just because you don’t remember all the times it happened to you!
• Track your calories weekly too. You might eat a lot of food 6 out of 7 days, be on track to gain weight, and then under-eat on the 7th day by quite a lot because you’re busy or stressed. That could wipe out all that extra energy you stored up over the week.

Eating More Can Be Tough

What if you find it hard to eat more than you need? Shane’s written an excellent article that breaks down all the science on this, and he shares research-backed tips. Here’s the breakdown:

• Drink your energy. Drinking calories doesn’t make us feel full in the same way as chewing our food. Smoothies, protein shakes and milk are excellent choices. In our program, we have a half-dozen recipes for a custom, homemade workout drink which will help you annihilate up to 1,000 calories in just one shake.
• Eat foods that are less filling. Foods that have less fibre (like nuts) and less water (like dried fruits) tend to be less filling. This makes foods like trail mix great for sneaking in extra calories.
• Eat more often. Studies show that those who snack between meals eat more calories than those who eat larger meals less often.
• Make your food taste incredible. A bit of salt, sugar, and oil goes a long way. It’s pretty hard to eat a lot of plain boiled chicken wings—even just writing that is making me less hungry—but if you make a delicious homemade sauce, you can eat wings forever. (And no, a little salt, oil and sugar will not make you gain more fat while bulking.)
• Add a variety of foods and flavours to your diet. Studies have shown that if you eat foods with different flavours during a meal, you’ll eat more. Perhaps this is one contributor to why so many people gain weight during Thanksgiving and Christmas potluck dinners, where there are 20 different flavours to taste.

How Much More Should I Eat?

A conservative (aka slow, lean gains) starting point is to take your bodyweight and multiply it by 18. So if you weigh 130 pounds, you’d start off eating around 2300-2400 calories daily. Since you’ll also be tracking your calories daily, your weekly goal will be 16,380 calories.

(If you’re already tracking your calorie intake, even better—increase your daily calories by 250, which should get you gaining about half a pound per week.)

What if you do this and you don’t gain weight? We answer this in step 4.

2. Don’t Just Build Fat, Build Muscle

Okay. Now that you’re eating more food than you need, and you keep it up, where does all this extra energy go?

Well, if the closest you get to lifting weights is sitting here reading about them on this blog, that energy is going to be stored as fat.

If you’re see-your-rib-cage kind of skinny, like we were, you might not care if you gain fat. In fact, if you’re under 10% body fat, gaining some fat could even be healthy for you.

But if your goal is to take up more space, look better, stand taller, and be stronger, you’ll still want to build mostly muscle with all that extra energy. Even if you’re starting out at 8% body fat, wouldn’t it be great if you gained 20 pounds of muscle before you hit a nice, healthy 10%?

So how do you tell your body to take that extra energy and turn it into muscle instead of fat?

The answer is by lifting weights and eating enough protein to support muscle growth.

HEADS UP: It’s important to remember that you shouldn’t increase the amount of food you’re eating until after you start working out. If you start eating big before you start lifting, you’ll be gaining mostly fat until you start up your lifting program.

Lifting Weights

The simplest way of putting it is, lifting weights helps you build muscle because when you stress your muscles enough, your body thinks that it must need bigger muscles to better handle that kind of stress.

The complicated answer, well, get’s quite complicated. We could talk about how stressing your muscles by focusing on mechanical tension is superior to focusing on just muscle damage. Or how without a solid workout program, you could fail to stress your muscles enough and gain more fat than you need to. And not just gain fat but also injure yourself.

There’s a lot of science available now about how to build muscle optimally. And we integrated and considered all of it when putting together our program. You just do it and know that it works.

If you’re a curious fellow, Shane’s written an excellent article titled “The Skinny on Just Lift Heavy.” It covers all the popular methods of working out and gives their pros and cons.

We would highly recommend that you do not make your own workout. There’s a lot to consider regarding movement patterns, volume, intensity, injury prevention, progression, picking exercises to match your skill level and mobility, and even scientific behavioral tricks to make working out more addictive.

If you haven’t studied how to design workout programs you could injure yourself, get terrible results (just gain fat), build an unbalanced physique that is more prone to injuries down the road, and just waste time that you could have been used to build muscle. If you’re a personal trainer, you probably aren’t reading this, but even the smartest coaches we know get other trainers to program their workouts. It’s the only way to get what you need instead of what you want to do.

Lifting is not so unlike eating. Your body will usually get tired or lazy at the homeostasis point. If you wing it, you’ll probably stop your workout at the exact moment that will have you perfectly maintaining your results. Automatic plateau.

Eating Enough Protein

Muscle requires protein. To build new muscle, you’ll need more protein in your diet than someone who isn’t trying to build muscle. And the average guy under-eats protein anyway. So you probably need to eat more.

But eating enough protein is hard for a couple of reasons.

The first issue is that protein is incredibly filling. Try eating three chicken breasts and tell me you’re still hungry. Having a protein shake like whey makes this a lot easier as it uses the tricks from earlier (no chewing and no fibre). If you want to see what protein powders we recommend, see our supplement guide.

The second issue is that protein is expensive. Whey protein powder tends to be cheaper per gram than eating chicken, so it’s possible that protein supplements could be helpful in keeping your costs down. Keep in mind that not all your protein needs to come from animal sources. There’s a little bit of protein in beans and nuts, which will get automatically tracked in your tracking app. If you’re eating lots of food in general, and you will be, then all those little bits of extra protein will help you reach your goals.

But what should your daily protein goal be?

Make sure to get at least 1 gram of protein per pound bodyweight (2.2 grams per kilo).

3. Rest Well

When you stress your body, your body uses sleep to recover from that stress. Without proper rest, your hormones get bent all out of shape. When that happens, your body is more likely to store the extra energy you’re eating as fat (study, study).

Being sleep deprived is catabolic, which is a sciencey way of saying it puts you into a state where you break down more muscle mass.

Sleeping well is anabolic, meaning you’ll be building more muscle and storing less fat.

If gaining weight and building muscle is important to you, you should make an effort to improve your sleep.

Some extra bonuses from sleeping enough are:

• You’ll look better
• You’ll be smarter

How do you rest well? You’ll need to sleep enough and also get good sleep. So the quantity and the quality matters.

Most of the research says that if you’re one of the overwhelming majority, you’ll need at least 7.25 hours, and probably closer to 8 hours, of sleep every single night.

Okay, so how do you improve the quality of your sleep?

• Sleep in a quiet bedroom. If you live in the city, use a noise machine to cover up startling sounds (loud drunk people, sirens, dogs barking)
• Sleep in a dark bedroom. Get blackout curtains to block out streetlights or be thankful that you live in the country-side.
• Sleep in a climate-controlled room. Keep it cool enough that you can use at least one blanket. Having a blanket will prevent rapid heat changes that can disrupt your sleep.
• Avoid screens 1–2 hours before you go to bed. I know it’s the 21st century, and this is incredibly hard, so just get F.lux to reduce the effect. Or make baby steps and listen to podcasts/radio pre-bed.
• Try not to eat within 30 minutes of going to bed. If you’re trying to gain weight, this might mean cramming calories in right until you go to bed. But if you can do it a bit earlier, your sleep may be better.

4. Measure & Pivot

The masses often paraphrase Peter Drucker as having written, “What get’s measured, gets managed.” And he’s 100% right.

If we want to gain weight as naturally skinny guys, we can’t just do what we naturally do… because we’re naturally skinny. But the good news is that once we gain weight, that becomes the new natural. (Remember that homoeostasis effect? It will help you stay big and muscular too.)

So if you want to gain weight, you’ll need to measure your weight each week. Make sense?

Buy a digital scale; they’re more accurate out of the box than a mechanical one.

Weigh yourself once a week right after you wake up and use the washroom. Alternatively, you can also weigh yourself daily and then divide the number by 7 at the end of the week. It’s normal for your weight to fluctuate a bit depending on water retention, food in your system, etc. Measuring yourself every day and then taking an average can help deal with that. So can waiting for a week’s worth of muscle gain to add up before weighing yourself.

If after your first week, the scale did not budge, here how to get back to gaining weight:

• Increase your daily energy intake by 250 calories (to create the surplus that was missing)
• Improve your daily and weekly calorie consistency (to actually hit your targets)

You can use an app on your phone or computer like MyFitnessPal to make tracking a lot easier (member’s guide here).

5. Make It Easy & Bet On Yourself

It’s going to take a lot of smart planning, effort, and consistency for quite a while in order to gain a significant amount of weight and muscle.

It doesn’t matter if what you’re doing is 100% optimal for gaining weight if the routine isn’t sustainable.

While your motivation is high, it’s easy to force yourself through the tougher parts of a plan. But eventually some stressor will come into your life. If the routine isn’t easy to maintain, you’ll stop doing it. So your plan should not have parts that are too tough.

Getting a cold, work downsizing, breaking up a long-term relationship—things like this can totally throw your routine out the window. Even good things like vacations or holidays can replace a weight-gain routine with higher priorities like spending time with family. It’s not realistic to think that you’ll never have something knock you off your plan. So your plan needs to be able to survive a good punch.

Focus on the 20% of what you’re doing that’s giving you 80% of your results.

• Eat enough food consistently
• Eat enough protein consistently
• Lift weights 3x a week consistently (and follow a good program!)

How can you do that?

The way to do that is by making all these things into habits so that you do them instinctively. If you want to know more about the science behind building a habit, check out our habit article. Here’s a quick breakdown:

• Goal-setting: Pick one tangible and realistic goal, such as gaining 5 pounds in 5 weeks.
• Make it easy to stick to the plan: Pick a program that’s designed well, change things in your environment to make it easier to stick to your goal (cook food and freeze it in advance, build a home gym if the gym is too far away, make small gradual changes to your diet, etc.), eat foods that are easy to eat lots of (liquids, dried fruits, etc.).
• Improve your willpower: Get enough sleep (which will also make your gains leaner.)
• Use willpower to get started: It takes 18-66 days to build a habit so consider using accountability as a failsafe such as betting with a friend to help you last that long. We recommend 5 weeks to start.
• A reward is part of habit building: Celebrate every milestone you reach. A milestones is something that is measurable and important in your progress. Not just regular ol’ stones a few feet ahead of you along the road.

Summary

If you’ve previously struggled with gaining weight, you now have the 5-step action plan of what you need to do. Here’s how it’d look with everything together.

• Get an evidence-based training program that will help you build muscle leanly (like ours)
• Go to the gym 3x a week
• Hit your energy goals daily, weekly, monthly (we have a guides on making this easier in our program)
• Hit your protein goals daily, weekly, monthly
• Work on improving your sleep quantity and then quality (member’s guide by DoctorB here)
• Measure your progress weekly and adjust what you’re doing if it’s not working
• Use accountability to help you stick to the plan long term (that’s why we have the Beastly community)

Have you gained weight before? And what worked well for you? Do you have any questions we can help to answer? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

You're reading What’s Your Body Type? Ectomorph, Mesomorph or Endomorph? by Shane Duquette, originally posted on Bony to Beastly. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, check out our website Bony to Beastly.

There’s a theory that guys can be sorted into 3 distinct body type categories: endomorphs, mesomorphs and ectomorphs.

Is that true?

Different people do have different heights and bone structures. That’s a fairly uncontroversial fact. What’s far more interesting is how these traits can combine together to form groups of guys who respond to exercise and diets in fairly different ways.

For example, people don’t grow proportionally. Our limbs grow longer faster than they grow thicker. So shorter guys tend to be thicker, taller guys tend to be thinner. Then consider that being a heavier person causes your body to develop thicker bones to support the extra weight, and that having thicker bones allows you to build more muscle mass. So you have shorter, stockier guys who can build more muscle more easily than taller, skinnier guys. Then factor in that these naturally skinny guys need to expend more energy to move their longer limbs, but because they aren’t as wide, they also have proportionally smaller stomachs.

We already have 2 archetypes that require totally different approaches to exercise and nutrition, and we haven’t even covered half of the reasons why.

The History and Controversy of the Body Types

You’ve surely noticed that different people are, well, different. People have different muscle shapes, insertions, bone lengths, bone shapes, types of hips, they came in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and can be different in a million different ways. That’s not in dispute.

It’s a little more controversial when you try to organize people into distinct categories and then make assumptions about them. It’s the fitness version of stereotyping, and it can seem a little arbitrary. While doing research for this article, I realized that a lot of writers want to believe that everyone is different in their own unique way.

There’s some truth to that. But the categories are far from arbitrary. Certain clusters of characteristics do go together.

If you don’t believe me, ask any ectomorph why he doesn’t “just eat more,” then ask any endomorph why he doesn’t “just eat less.” As they collapse onto the ground into fetus-shaped balls of exasperation, you’ll realize that people really do have distinct issues based on their body types. If you tried to put them on the same diet, they’d both hate you for totally different reasons.

The next question is why? Why do these characteristics so often cluster together?

There are a lot of reasons. For one example, shorter people tend to have proportionally larger heads than taller people, not unlike how babies have proportionally larger heads than adults. The same is true with our feet, hands, bone thickness and muscles. As we grow taller, everything grows a little bigger, but not by as much as you’d expect.* Shorter guys are a little stockier than average, taller guys are a little slenderer.

*You would expect our mass to scale with the cube of our height, but Adolphe Quetelet, a renowned statistician, defined our body mass index (BMI) as our weight divided by the square of our height. This reflected his observation that taller guys are often more slim than average while shorter guys are often stockier. He took it too far, though. We’ve since discovered that neither the cube nor the square of our height predicts how our mass changes as we grow taller. It’s probably something in the middle (study).

You can see how proportions can differ here, comparing 5’6 Ed Coan with 6’6 Michael Jordan. Both of these guys have very different strengths and weaknesses due to their opposite body types. Ed Coan’s stocky body type helped him become one of the best powerlifters in the history of powerlifting. Michael Jordan’s lankier body type helped him become one of the best basketball players of all time.

There is a lot of bad body type science, though. In the 1940’s a psychologist named William Herbert Sheldon began his body type research by sorting people into 3 body type categories that he called somatotypes:

• Endomorphs: Guys with a sturdy, round bone structure: wider hips, stocky limbs, and a barrel-shaped ribcage.
• Mesomorphs: Guys with a broader, triangular bone structure: narrower hips and broader shoulders.
• Ectomorphs: Guys with a slighter, rectangular bone structure: longer limbs, thinner bones, and a flatter ribcage.

All is well and good here. Ed Coan is the perfect example of the endomorph body type. Michael Jordan is the perfect example of the ectomorph body type.

So far so good, but then Sheldon tried to associate personality traits with the body types. He thought that having a more athletic, mesomorph structure made someone more adventurous; having a more ectomorphic, slender structure made someone more intellectual; and having a more endomorphic, stocky structure made someone more affectionate (among other things).

He was then accused of just rattling off common stereotypes. A 1989 study by Ryckman et al found that we have a natural inclination to assume that fat people spend too much time eating and too little time moving, that fit people are more confident and capable, and that skinny people must be nonathletic intellectuals (study).

Or perhaps Sheldon was just noticing the differing fitness levels of people with different interests. It’s not that farfetched to think that people who get lost in deep intellectual activities may sometimes forget to eat and exercise and wind up thinner. That’s not why most ectomorphs are skinny, but I can see how someone might think that.

Regardless of his reasonings, the psychology side of his somatotypes didn’t pan out. His theory was refuted. Nowadays, somatotypes are just used to describe someone’s physical characteristics—especially those that are genetic.

And for that, they’re very good.

The Heath-Carter version of Sheldon’s somatotypes, which just uses someone’s physical characteristics, is now the most respected way of classifying body shape. Moreover, it’s been 70 years since Sheldon coined the terms endomorph, mesomorph and ectomorph, and they’re still widely regarded as one of the key things every guy needs to know before attempting to build muscle or lose fat.

The better we understand our differences and similarities, the easier it will be for us to become strong, fit and healthy.

Going through these categories, keep in mind that most people are a combination of a couple different body types, if not all three. 7,0,0 refers to a pure endomorph. 0,7,0 refers to a pure mesomorph. 0,0,7 refers to a pure ectomorph.

The Endomorph Body Type

Endomorphs are stocky, heavy guys with wider hips, shorter limbs, thicker bones and rounder body shapes. Their shorter limbs often put them on the shorter side, but not always. It also seems like being proportionally heavier causes the body to develop thicker bones in order to support the extra weight, especially in the lower body (study). This is a possible explanation for why endomorphs have stockier, more bottom-heavy physiques.

What’s the best type of exercise for endomorphs? Cardio is popular for a reason. It’s an effective way to burn calories, and calories are the mortal enemy of endomorphs. But being proportionally heavier can make many cardio activities rougher on endomorphs. If an endomorph goes out for a jog, there’s a lot of weight landing on their joints with every footfall. Moreover, when measuring their fitness levels (VO2 max), the endomorph’s heavier body weight lowers their scores, perhaps unfairly (study).

However, being sturdily built allows endomorphs to excel at strength sports, like powerlifting. Their crocodile-like proportions make for great lifting leverages and reduce the range of motion of most lifts, such as the bench press and squat. Their thicker, denser bones are also able to safely support heavy loads.

An endomorph’s muscles respond well to lifting too. According to the research of Dr. Casey Butts, guys with thicker bones are able to build muscle far more easily than those with narrower bones, and ultimately become far more muscular.

You could argue that having naturally thicker, denser bones and larger muscles removes the need for lifting weights. After all, some of the main benefits of weightlifting have to do with improving bone density and muscle strength—something that endomorphs don’t tend to struggle with.

However, lifting helps with the endomorph’s calorie problem as well. Even a pound of fat burns around 2 calories per day, so with every pound lost, their metabolism slows, and their diet must become more strict. This can lead to yo-yoing in and out of leanness.

This is where weightlifting comes in. A pound of muscle burns approximately 6 calories per day, giving a muscular endomorph the opportunity to keep his metabolism high by building a pound of muscle for every pound of fat lost.

Moreover, endomorphs are often able to build muscle even while losing weight because of their great muscle-building genetics and higher body fat percentage. If they can do that, there’s another benefit they can take advantage of. It takes over 2,000 calories to build a pound of muscle, speeding up fat loss or giving their diet some wiggle room.

Lifting is also good for the brain, and is associated with a host of other benefits. Same with cardio.

A combined lifting and cardio approach to exercise often works well (study, study).

What’s the best diet for endomorphs? Endomorphs tend to have lower insulin sensitivity and slower metabolisms, meaning they don’t handle high-carb or high-calorie diets very well.*

The endomorph’s lower insulin sensitivity might be due to their naturally higher fat mass, meaning that becoming leaner could help a great deal. Muscle development will help as well. Still, there may be a genetic component that can’t be changed via lifestyle.

A possible reason for their slower metabolisms is how efficient this body type can be. It takes less energy to move a shorter limb than a longer one, even if the shorter limb is proportionally heavier—both a blessing and a curse courtesy of physics.

It seems like endomorphs have proportionally larger stomachs as well, since their stockiness comes from shorter limbs, not narrower torsos. If a 5’7 guy has the stomach size of the average 5’10 guy, this can create challenges.

To make things easier, endomorphs may want to primarily eat foods that are filling, rich in micronutrients and low in calories. Minimally processed foods that are higher in protein, fibre and water are good for that. Chicken breast is an example of a food that’s filling because it’s rich in protein and water. Broccoli is an example of a food that’s filling because it’s rich in fibre and water. Sugar is an example of a food that isn’t filling because all the fibre and water is processed out. But a fruit, with it’s sugar bundled up in plant cells alongside fibre and water, is just perfect (study).

And here lies the secret to every pop-culture diet. Cupcakes, french fries, and chips are very high in calories for how filling they are, so they’re shunned. Apples, carrots, and white fish, on the other hand, all contain a lot of micronutrients and hardly any calories at all—far better.

This allows endomorphs to feel fuller on fewer calories while still getting all the vitamins, minerals and fibre that they need.

Another approach is reducing the amount of meals per day (aka intermittent fasting). If an endomorph normally eats 500 calories for breakfast, skipping breakfast for a week would lead to about a pound of fat loss. (A pound of fat contains around 3,500 calories.)

*Some experts, like renowned sports nutritionist Dr. John Berardi, recommend keeping carb intake as low as 25% of total calories. Most research shows that keeping protein intake higher is a more important factor, but experimenting with a lower carb approach is helpful for a lot of guys.

The Mesomorph Body Type

Mesomorphs are athletically built men with broad shoulders, narrow hips, and triangular body shapes, perhaps from having more testosterone shaping them as they go through puberty. They’re known for being naturally leaner and more muscular than the other body types, again possibly due to having naturally higher testosterone levels shaping them.

The mesomorph is also defined by being neither as stocky as an endomorph nor as slender as an ectomorph. This gives them some of the strengths and weaknesses of both body types. There may even be something magical about being a man of middling height and proportions. For example, a 2015 study by Li Xiaoxin found that men of average height (5’9–5’11) had better coordination than guys who were shorter or taller (study).

What’s the best type of exercise for mesomorphs? Mesomorphs are known for having thick enough bones to support quite a lot of muscle growth, but another advantage comes from having a good balance between muscle bellies and tendons—which are both important. This makes them well suited for a variety of types of exercise. They particularly excel at Olympic weightlifting, where having a huge shoulder-to-waist ratio is a very strong predictor of success (study).

It seems that as people grow taller, our limbs grow in length a little more quickly than they grow in circumference (study). This could at least partially explain why taller ectomorphs have thinner, longer bones. For example, I’m 6’2 but have the wrist size of a 5’4 man. A less extreme ectomorph might be 6′ and have the wrist size of a 5’8 man. Or a short ectomorph might be 5’6 but have the wrist size of a 5’2 man. This makes us “hardgainers,” as having narrower bones limits how muscular we can become. (Although even the strong ectomorph pictured above shouldn’t have too much trouble naturally building another 20 pounds of muscle without hitting his genetic ceiling.)

What’s the best type of exercise for ectomorphs? Ectomorphs excel at cardio. Not because of our height—most marathon runner are actually unusually short ectomorphs—but because our frames are proportionally lighter. It takes little energy for a light person to travel long distances.

Our cardiovascular health is often fairly good as well. Our metabolisms are usually quite high, helping us resist fat gains and ward off heart disease, and we’re often more active than the other body types, even when we aren’t trying to be, because of something called non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). More colloquially, you could say that we’re often fidgety or restless, causing us to burn a startling amount of calories without ever realizing.

However, while our hearts are strong, our bones and muscles are not.

While we can quite literally run a wildebeest into the ground, we may have quite a lot of trouble picking it up afterwards.

Fortunately, this can be remedied with some time under the bar, some time under the sun, and some time under the sheets. Lifting will make our muscles far bigger and our bones far denser.

We do need a bit of a different approach, though. Lifting is not a form of exercise designed for us, even though we’re the ones who benefit from it the most. Our narrower, hardgainer bone structures don’t start us off with as much muscle mass as the other body types, and our postures often crumble if we don’t take the time to strengthen the muscles that hold us in a proper position.

Some lifts will be harder because of our proportions. Having long limbs makes it harder to squat and bench competitively, and while the larger range of motion stimulates greater muscle growth, it can make it harder for a beginner to do the lifts safely—especially if he hasn’t strengthened his postural muscles yet. This makes progression more important. It also makes loaded carries important, which are one of the best things for improving an ectomorph’s posture and strength.

But we also have other lifts, like the deadlift (especially the sumo variant), that favour our longer reach and relative lightness. There are even lifting techniques, like the hook grip, that don’t work for guys with stubbier fingers.

Here’s our article outline the pros and cons of different styles of lifting for an ectomorph.

Here’s our article about how to lift with ectomorph proportions.

What’s the best diet for ectomorphs? Ectomorphs have higher metabolisms and better insulin sensitivity than the other body types, allowing us to eat more calories and carbs than the other body types. We can benefit from getting as much as 50–60% of our daily calories from carbs.

Having a higher metabolism doesn’t just mean that we can eat more food, it also means that even while eating more food, we’re more likely to remain lean (study). Being able to eat more calories also means that we can often eat foods that are proportionally lower in micronutrients while still getting enough to be optimally healthy.

For example, consider an endomorph who burns 2,000 calories per day and needs 10 grams of vitamin X for optimal health. He needs 1 gram of vitamin X in every 200 calories that he eats. Then consider an ectomorph who burns 3,000 calories per day and needs 10 grams of vitamin X for optimal health. He only needs 1 gram of vitamin X in every 300 calories that he eats.

Because of our smaller appetites, rampaging metabolisms, higher carb tolerance, and higher calorie tolerance, we don’t need to focus as much on restricting junk food as the other body types. It helps to think about eating more good stuff, not less bad stuff. Otherwise, it’s going to be too hard eat enough to grow bigger, stronger muscles and denser, sturdier bones.

The ectomorph’s problem is that eating enough food to be strong and healthy can be incredibly hard, especially if we try to eat like an endomorph. After all, it seems like our stomachs don’t scale up proportionally along with our height.

The same goes for meal scheduling. While a lot of endomorphs have success with skipping breakfast, we often benefit from taking the opposite approach. Instead of breakfast, lunch and dinner, ectomorphs may want to eat more like a hobbit—breakfast, second breakfast, lunch, second lunch, etc. These in-betweener meals don’t need to be fancy or schedule-breaking, though. A handful of trail mix, a protein shake, or a pint of milk is perfectly fine.

On that note, while the other body types might benefit from foods that are low in calories, we do not. We thrive on higher-calorie foods like: dried fruit, nuts, bananas, rice, cheese, dark chocolate, muesli, and trail mix.

We do well with liquid calories too, which don’t create as much fullness as solid food, and are more quickly digested. Smoothies, milk and even juice are great when trying to bulk up leanly.

Our article on creating a bulking diet as an ectomorph.

Bony to Beastly Plug: If you want a workout and diet program for ectomorphs that has all of these factors optimized, videos teaching all of the lifts, a yearlong membership in our ecto-community, coaching throughout your entire transformation, and a guaranteed 20-pound gain within 3 months, we recommend our Bony to Beastly Program.

Common Questions

Does being skinny-fat mean that I’m part endomorph?

Probably not. While it’s easier for some than others, any body type can gain fat. Endomorphs, with their shorter, thicker bones, wouldn’t be calling themselves skinny-fat, just fat. If you’re describing yourself as skinny-fat, it doesn’t sound like you have a naturally thicker, endomorph body. Sounds more like you’re an out-of-shape ectomorph. (We’ve got an article for you here.)

Does being short make me an endomorph? Or being tall make me an ectomorph?

No, not always. In the Bony to Beastly community, for example, we noticed that a lot of our members seemed fairly tall. One of our members started up a poll, and it turns out that the average height of a b2B member is around 6′ tall. Still, though, that’s just an average. We have ectomorphs who are 5’2 all the way up to 6’10.

For another example, most elite marathon runners are very short ectomorphs, averaging 5’7 or so. It’s just that their bone thickness might be similar to men who are shorter still. They’re taller than their bone size would have you think, you could say.

Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (The Mountain on Game of Thrones) is an incredibly strong 6’9 endomorph. Here he is next to Pedro Pascal (Oberyn Martel on Game of Thrones), who is of fairly average ectomorph height—5’11.

You can see how Björnsson, even though he’s incredibly tall, still has proportionally thicker bones, longer muscle bellies, a thicker neck, and even a proportionally bigger head.

As an ectomorph, is there anything I can do to change the thickness of my bones? For example, can I make my wrists thicker?

There are no muscle bellies around your wrists, just tendons. They have no muscular growth potential. Looking at your wrists is a great way to tell what body type you are because they cannot be changed with exercise—at least not in any significant way. The more interesting question is whether you can make your bones thicker by progressively preparing them to lift heavier and heavier things. Unfortunately, assuming you’re past puberty, the main way your bones will respond to weightlifting is by growing denser, not thicker. They’ll probably grow a little thicker as you lift heavier and heavier weights over the course of several years, but by the time you get that strong, you’ll be so muscular that you won’t be worried about your wrist thickness anyway. It will come too late.

Are ectomorphs and hardgainers the same thing?

Usually yes. The word hardgainer is used to describe someone who struggles to build muscle for whatever reason. This describes most ectomorphs, as most of us will struggle to eat enough to gain weight. Calling ourselves hardgainers is a little misleading, though. While we might not be able to get the extremely muscular appearance of a fully developed endomorph, ectomorphs are the body type that can build muscle the most quickly. It’s not uncommon for an ectomorph to gain 30+ pounds in just their first year of lifting—something that the other body types wouldn’t be able to do (or at least not leanly).

More questions? Ask them below. 

Conclusion

Whichever body you happen to have been born with, all of them can be perfectly strong, healthy and attractive. The path there is just a little different for everyone. While trying to transform themselves, endomorphs will have to fight to become fitter while trying to curb their appetite using whatever method works best for them, whereas ectomorphs will need to focus on getting stronger while scheming up ways to eat more.

The good news is that once you’re strong and lean, maintaining your physique over the long term will be far easier. After all, there’s no calorie deficit required if you aren’t trying to lose weight anymore, and no calorie surplus required when you aren’t trying to gain weight anymore.

I hope this article makes it a little easier to get to that point!

You're reading How To Get Back To The Gym by Marco Walker-Ng, originally posted on Bony to Beastly. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, check out our website Bony to Beastly.

You’re at a dinner party and you’ve just finished telling your uncle how you started going to the gym, got all kinds of sick gains, and then how you lost them all when school intensified and you just couldn’t keep it up.

He retorts, “Max, you just need to get back on the horse.” Uncle, this is actually sound advice and we will listen, but there are some things you need to know. Not everyone gets back on the horse the same way. Heroin overdoses tend to happen more frequently in users who are newly clean because they forget that their body does not have the same tolerance anymore. If you haven’t lifted weights in a while and you attempt the same workouts you once bullied in the gym, you may find yourself on the wrong side of the bullying.

You may also be surprised at how little it takes to rebuild muscle, or how quickly you can do it.

Inside this article we’ll be discussing a quick and safe way to return to the gym and the skillset needed to make you a landmark in your own fitness world.

Lifting is Like Riding A Bicycle… Right?

I recently jumped on a skateboard—something I haven’t done in 14 years—and was surprised I could still do a kickflip. Granted, it was the only trick I could do, but I still had it.

Returning to the gym isn’t so unlike riding a skateboard (or a bicycle). This phenomenon called muscle memory means that if you take the time and effort to learn a new skill, even if you heartlessly abandon that skill for for 14 years, your body, like Lassie, will always remember how to get back home.

However, while the memories are there, what you lack will be the things that consistency provides, namely; coordination, cardiovascular fitness, adequate ligament and tendon strength, muscle strength, and conditioning.

So, while I could muster up a kickflip on the ground, if I were to ride into a normal skate session that included 1-3 hours of jumping down stairs, there is a good chance I would be riding home in an ambulance instead of on my skateboard. To get back to my previous level of radicalness, I would have to slowly build up the aforementioned qualities that would allow a skate session of said intensity to benefit me instead of destroying me.

Rest easy knowing that your strength and muscles will return much faster than when you first gained them, but keep in mind that you still desperately need to go through a reintroduction period.

Getting Back To The Gym After An Injury

Injuries are a part of life. They are great lessons that teach us how to change tactics to get what we want. As wonderful as your injury may have been for your character and intellectual growth, though, they are often not so kind on our muscles. After a serious injury, there are a lot of things you can’t do, and it takes a great deal of courage and discipline to put that aside and focus on what you can do.

A long period of inactivity following an injury can make returning to the gym riskier than normal.  You have a kink in your armour, and you need to take that into consideration with every lift you do. Fortunately, these kinks can usually be repaired, and getting back to the gym is often a great way to do that.

The main points to consider if you are coming back from an injury are these:

• Go see a physiotherapist. It will be well worth it.
• Make sure you are fully cleared to exercise, then exercise (asap). Training in an unsafe way too soon will just lengthen your recovery process, achieving the exact opposite outcome of what you were trying for.
• Once you area cleared, don’t avoid the troublesome areas. Make sure your routine has something in it designed to strengthen the area you hurt, and also any weak areas that may have led to the injury. For example, if weak, malaligned hips caused your knee injury, you need to strengthen your hips and get used to using your knees again.

Planning the Big Return to the Gym

Step 1—Assessment and Goal Setting

• If you are coming off of an injury, make sure you are cleared to be able to lift again.
• Know what caused your injury so that you can proactively address the issue in your workouts.
• Set a realistic goal. For example, regaining 10 pounds of muscle over the course of a couple months.
• Make sure your plan is effective for accomplishing that goal. For example, going to the gym twice a week for 30 min each workout might be enough to regain 10 pounds of muscle within that timeframe. But it may not be enough to gain another 10 pounds of new muscle after that.
• Progress your goals as you accomplish them.

Step 2—Planning the Workouts

• I normally recommend using between and 40-60% of the weight you’d normally use during your first time back, but if you know that even climbing the stairs to the gym is going to be rough, maybe you want to squat 40–60% of the weight that you would normally curl. Increase the intensity of your lifting week by week until you’re hitting new PRs. Remember, when you are regaining lost muscle, even lower intensity will do the trick.
• Do plenty of warmup sets, but start with just 1 set per exercise. Increase volume week by week until you can handle even more than before. While lower volume workouts aren’t the best for building new muscle, keep in mind that they are enough to rebuild old muscle.
• If you are coming back from an injury, include a warm-up exercise aimed at fixing your weakness, and choose a lift to strengthen the muscles associated with your injury. For example, doing exercises for your core after a back injury. (Different plank variations are good choices here, focusing on long, slow exhales).

Step 3—Execution!

This is the fun part. Go forth and prosper. If you follow my advice of easing back in, it will be a relaxed cruise back to fit muscularity and beyond. The trick is to start slow, succeed, and build momentum out of those successes. Because if you start full force, boy will your body ever demand a break. This is one of those tortoise beats the hare situations.

How to Make Sure You Don’t Ruin Everything Again

There are a plethora of reasons people stop going to the gym. Some of the common ones we hear about in the Beastly community are:

• Overwhelming busyness
• Stressful life events
• Poor results (many of our members buy our program after having tried to build muscle many times before)

Some guys will even get injured, either through lifting or through regular life.

While life is inevitable and unpredictable, a strong skill set of life habits can keep you on track regardless of a hectic schedule, injuries, and emergencies.

Of all the habits needed to gain muscle, exercising is actually the most tangible and easiest to do. Once you’re in the gym, you do your best to follow your workout plan, and you try to get stronger and more skilled at the movements.

The problem is often organizational. Planning the time needed for travel, grocery shopping, meal preparation, etc., are skills in and of themselves, and we need to consider the time and effort required to become competent in these skills if you are going to have any hope of successfully building muscle.

If you’ve never cooked before, learning to cook can be extremely daunting. Imagine for a second what it would be like to try and write a poem in a language you find completely incomprehensible. You would be at a loss for words.

Skills take time to learn and must be learned one word at a time. As the old saying goes, those who fail to plan, plan to fail. (Benjamin Franklin.)

Principles to ‘lock down’ your life habits:

1. Know Yourself: a huge part of habit development (and lifting) is knowing your current level. To have consistent progress, you need don’t need to be going way outside of your comfort zone. You can instead work to expand your comfort zone. You’ll get to the same place in the end, but you’ll be less likely to fail or get injured. to be working to expand your comfort zone. Besides, even if you get lucky, working constantly above your level will burn you out and leave you sapped of motivation.
2. Time Management: know how much time you have allocated for your goals. Include gym time and also the time needed for complementary skills like; grocery shopping, meal prep, traveling to the gym, life. Guess what? A lot of people bite off more than they can chew and figuratively choke to death.
3. Support System: feeling lost, weak, and insecure are all a part of trying something new. While it is important to be independent, it is also important to realize that you don’t know everything. We are a social race for a reason. Having a professional on hand to guide you after you’ve given it your all and failed can save you serious time and frustration. The lone wolf thing looks cool in movies, but the most successful people in every field have advisors, coaches and consultants. Knowledge of how to accomplish what you want to accomplish is an often overlooked step in attempting to reach goals. It also raises the stakes and makes you more accountable for your actions.
4. Discipline: To me, discipline is staying on task regardless of fatigue or temptation. In those moments of weakness, when your habits and willpower have failed, sometimes you will fail too. And that’s okay. Yet, the more you can go back to why you are doing this—the more you can think about the goals you are trying to achieve—the easier it will be to stay committed and consistent. Discipline is also a muscle that can be built, and one of the most beneficial rewards of succeeding in a plan like this one, so the more you practice discipline, the easier it gets to stay disciplined.

Practical Recommendations:

1. Figure out where you stand. What skills are you good at? Some people are great at cooking but have no idea how to prepare meals for an entire week. Try to figure out the things you still need to learn.
2. Buy an agenda and use it. What gets measured gets managed.
3. Find a professional, or someone who has achieved what you long for, and become their student. Be a really good, proactive student. You’d be surprised at all the gems people will give you.
4. Be disciplined.

Example from a client:

Richard works in the film industry, is constantly travelling, is pretty fit because of his job, but has a hard time keeping consistent with his muscle-building routine.

He’s committed to building muscle, but understands the difficulty of his schedule. Therefore, we are going to start small, with shorter at-home workouts that he can do anywhere, and then gym workouts in person with me when he is in town. It’s been a while since he’s been to a gym, so his workout will look very similar to the one posted below, yet it’s tailored uniquely to him.

I should mention that you never have to “get back in the habit” if you never lose the habit in the first place. If you have a body, you can train a muscle. I’ve been fortunate enough to train athletes who crutched around the gym after an ankle sprain. Even one man who was recovering from a heart attack. Sometimes you have to prioritize other things in your life, but even 10 minutes a few times a week can maintain you enough to avoid having to go through a re-conditioning process.

Fortune favours the bold, and action will always beat idleness.

If you are new to lifting, or just deciding to come back to the gym, our program contains an optional starting point for those who are completely new to weightlifting or who haven’t lifted weights in a long time. Even if you begin there, at the beginning, we’ll help you gain 10 pounds of muscle and get you up to the intermediate level within around 5 weeks. From there we’ll help you gain a full 20 pounds of muscle over the course of 3–5 months. You can find more information at this link here.

You're reading The Skinny on Newbie Gains by Shane Duquette, originally posted on Bony to Beastly. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, check out our website Bony to Beastly.

I gained 12 pounds during my first 5 weeks of bulking. Jared gained 22. Then, after blogging about it, we started hearing that it was impossible. Imagine that. You’ve just finished doing something, your friend did an even better job, and then everyone starts telling you that you couldn’t possibly have done it. What’s even crazier is that everyone […]

You're reading Train Around Chronic Pain & Still Build Muscle by Marco Walker-Ng, originally posted on Bony to Beastly. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, check out our website Bony to Beastly.

I will be the first to tell you that chronic pain can really take away from exercise. It’s a huge reason a lot of people do not enjoy activities as much as they could. Over the years training clients and conversing with fellow gym folk I’ve noticed a trend in fitness and in sports where […]

You're reading A Conversation On Aesthetics and Fitness by Shane Duquette, originally posted on Bony to Beastly. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, check out our website Bony to Beastly.

In this article we’re going to do something a little bit different. The idea came from one of our members. He started off by saying something fairly controversial. Then, as other members prodded him, instead of backing away from it, he doubled down. And I think his arguments are pretty compelling. First, let’s set the stage. In our articles about […]

You're reading The Skinny on Testosterone (With Dr Bhavsar) by Shane Duquette, originally posted on Bony to Beastly. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, check out our website Bony to Beastly.

In the Beastly community, we get a ton of questions about testosterone. It’s a tricky hormone that has a huge effect on our physiques, and there’s a lot of misinformation out there. In the past, we stuck to the standard advice: get good sleep, eat well, eat a lot, follow a good lifting program, and […]

You're reading Warming Up For Gains by Marco Walker-Ng, originally posted on Bony to Beastly. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, check out our website Bony to Beastly.

In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to warm up. We’d all live active lives from birth, and our professions would keep us moving all day. Darkness would send us to bed, and sunlight would wake us in the morning. We could roll out of bed and go for a jog because our bodies would […]

You're reading I Know Everything About Building Muscle—I Just Haven’t Done It Yet by Jared Polowick, originally posted on Bony to Beastly. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, check out our website Bony to Beastly.

Couple quick questions. Are you satisfied with how much muscle you’ve built? If not… do you know what to do? I mean the basics: Eat 1g of protein per pound bodyweight, get into a calorie surplus, lift weights, and sleep. That kind of thing. Know them inside and out? Rad. But if you know the basics […]

You're reading How I Overcame My Skinny Body-Image Issues and How You Can Too by Bony to Beastly, originally posted on Bony to Beastly. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, check out our website Bony to Beastly.

We’ve got a new guest post for you guys. This one from a naturally skinny science communicator who reads a lot. You might think some of his points are controversial, and we’d love to hear what you think. We think his perspective on dealing with body image issues as a skinny guy is incredibly thought provoking […]

You're reading How To Bolster Your Upper Back by Marco Walker-Ng, originally posted on Bony to Beastly. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, check out our website Bony to Beastly.

There is something about a straight back that screams power. It makes me think of a person who can accomplish whatever they want. Take, for example, the venerated George Washington, who was well known for his formidable posture. To quote social psychologist Amy Cuddy from her moving Ted Talk, “Our bodies change our minds, our […]

You're reading How To Build Broader Shoulders by Jared Polowick, originally posted on Bony to Beastly. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, check out our website Bony to Beastly.

Is it possible to build broader shoulders? If you’re an ectomorph, chances are you have a thinner bone structure build, and perhaps that’s why you’re interested in finding out if you can build big, broad shoulders. Lots of guys want broad shoulders, but why? Inside we’ll discuss why men want broad shoulders, what we can […]

You're reading Changing your Set Point by Shane Duquette, originally posted on Bony to Beastly. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, check out our website Bony to Beastly.

You could think of your body as having a built-in bodyweight thermostat. You might have your weight set at, say, 130 pounds. If you go above 135, your appetite automatically turns off until you get back to 130 pounds. If you go below 125 pounds, your appetite automatically turns on until you get back up […]

You're reading The Skinny on Clothing & Style by Shane Duquette, originally posted on Bony to Beastly. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, check out our website Bony to Beastly.

Being a man is about being a good person, and part of being a good person is knowing how to fit into society. Demonstrating that social savvy will make you more attractive to women, earn you more respect with other men, and make frailer people feel safer around your strength instead of threatened by it. […]

You're reading The Ectomorph’s Guide to Body Fat Percentage by Shane Duquette, originally posted on Bony to Beastly. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, check out our website Bony to Beastly.

Did you know that being skinny means you can’t use the normal way of measuring your body fat percentage? Or that being just a little bit too skinny-fat might sabotage your ability to build muscle leanly? Or that most body fat percentage charts are ruined by a fatal flaw? In this article we cover why…

You're reading 10 Things I Didn’t Know About Lifting Weights When I Was Skinny by Jared Polowick, originally posted on Bony to Beastly. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, check out our website Bony to Beastly.

Shane, Marco and I all built muscle. But our reasons for building that muscle in the first place couldn’t have been more different. For Marco, as a teenager, his initial reason for getting into lifting was that he wanted girls to like him and he was dealing with injuries from sports. For Shane, he wanted…

You're reading How to Eat More Calories by Shane Duquette, originally posted on Bony to Beastly. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, check out our website Bony to Beastly.

It’s rare to want to learn how to eat more calories. Most guys feel like their stomachs are too big and their metabolisms are too slow. And they’re right. Their stomachs really are too big, and their metabolisms really are too slow. However, there are also a small minority of guys—guys like us—who are naturally…

You're reading Is Intermittent Fasting Good For Bulking? by Shane Duquette, originally posted on Bony to Beastly. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, check out our website Bony to Beastly.

Have you ever wondered if intermittent fasting was good for bulking? After all, it helps you produce more growth hormone, which could help with muscle growth; it increases increase in insulin sensitivity, which could help make your gains leaner; and research shows that it helps preserve muscle when losing weight. This could theoretically make intermittent…

You're reading Creatine: The Complete Guide to What It Is, How To Take It While Avoiding Side Effects, Natural Sources, The Best Brands & More by Jared Polowick, originally posted on Bony to Beastly. If you enjoyed this post and want to read more, check out our website Bony to Beastly.

(Last updated on October 28, 2018) Once upon a time, I was 23 years old and 130 pounds at 6 feet tall. I was dangerously skinny and clinically underweight, with a BMI of 17.6. I stood hunchbacked from all my time spent hunched over my desk studying graphic design. I was not a beacon of…