Tired of being small and skinny? Go to the gym all the time but STILL not getting anywhere? I wish I had read this post ten years ago!
I started lifting weights when I was about thirteen or so. Although one couldn’t really called it ‘weight lifting’. I got some plastic dumbbells for Christmas and told myself that I would NOT stop lifting those weights until I was massive. I mean literally not stop, I imagined myself lifting them all day every day.
Fast forward to adulthood. I was still scrawny and yet had been in and out of gyms, on and off since being a teenager. I was twenty-one, almost twenty-two. Not only did I weigh a mere 120 lbs but I was 5’6″ tall. For someone who grew up with 80s action movies, my body was not an accurate representation of my glorious ego, which had been raised on a diet of Rocky and Commando!
I asked a few lifters how they got big. All of them just said “Eat. Lots.” Great, thanks. This did not help.
As you can imagine, more years went by with no growth until I’d had enough. I was in my mid-twenties when my girlfriend left me and with a bruised ego I vowed to put my skinny days behind me and pack on the pounds. This time the internet came to my rescue!
Internet research gave me the basics and then a couple of years later I got my Personal Trainer certificate from a teacher who trains natural competition bodybuilders. This gave me the next level of information I needed.
Armed with this new information I went from about 125 lbs to about 150 lbs and started really filling my clothes. It was awesome.
So, what I want to do is throw a handful of steps at you to get you on the right track. This is fairly easy to do for beginners because you’ll grow quickly and up to a point. Then you’ll plateau and stop growing. That’s when things get more complex. But I grew to that size through a basic diet and basic protein supplements and it’s that phase I want to explain now.
Step 1 – Be prepared
Putting on muscles requires you to be eating a lot more than you’d expect. It requires that you eat five or six meals a day, each containing protein and, for at least the first half of the day, a good dose of quality carbs. Oh and a good serving of quality fats too.
It’s a LOT of food. It costs money and it costs time to prepare it.
Don’t worry too much. You CAN put on size with a mediocre diet but you risk messing up your digestive system (like I did) and putting on more fat than you’d like. All of this can probably be undone if necessary but find the balance. No need to spend a fortune but don’t just eat a loaf of bread every day for all your carbs. That way lies wheat intolerance.
So, just brace yourself. Don’t turn around and say “Wait a minute, I can’t eat anywhere near that, I’ll just have a flapjack for my 2nd meal and maybe skip my last meal.” Unless you’re a mesomorph, your gains will be minimal. We’ll cover body types such as ‘mesomorph’ later.
Step 2 – Basic protein prescription
If you’re chubby then things are more complicated. Ideally, this article is for the skinny guy because he can afford to put on fat, which he will in a bulking phase.
For those who have a bit of body fat, I would suggest reading other articles on this site about fat loss and bear those factors in mind. Although don’t worry too much because lifting weights is highly metabolic and will help you to burn calories from fat while at rest.
With that out of the way, your next step is to weigh yourself. I’m going to make this step more simple and crude than if you were a paying client. Things can get VERY complex at this stage but we’ll just get an approximation, which is fine for a beginner.
Then you want to take your weight (we’ll used pounds in this example) and work out your protein from that. If we assume you’re pretty lean and skinny we can take your weight, let’s say it’s 140 lbs, and say that for every pound of body weight you need to multiply that by 1.5 to 2.5 to get your daily intake of protein in grams.
So that would be somewhere between 210g and 350g. If I were you I’d always start on the lowest number and see if you get results. Increase if your results stop or slow.
Step 3 – Your body type
There are three body types which cover most people: ectomorph, endomorph and mesomorph. Sometimes we’re a mixture of 2 or 3 but for the sake of making it simple, here’s a breakdown of each…
Ectomorph – High metabolism, naturally skinny, possibly hyperactive, hard to gain muscle.
Endomorph – Puts on fat easily, more lethargic, struggles to get slim.
Mesomorph – Puts on muscle easily, burns fat easily.
Basically, if you’re finding it hard to gain muscle despite this advice, you’re either ecto or endo and you need to eat MORE protein than the meso. If you’re ecto eat more carbs than either of the other two, if you’re endo you’ll need to eat less carbs.
Step 4 – Basic nutrition
Protein
The FIRST thing you’ll need to do is go out and buy some protein powder. Spend good money and start off with a small tub in case you don’t like the taste. Buy from a good supplement shop or web site. Don’t buy from a supermarket.
You’ll need a shake for breakfast and a shake IMMEDIATELY after your weight session every single time. A smaller shake about 20 minutes before your workout is also good.
Carbs
You’ll need quality complex carbs with every meal. Avoid eating carbs after about 8pm, assuming you go to bed at midnight.
Eat a larger serving of carbs for breakfast than for your last meal as your metabolism slows down as you get closer to bed time so is more likely to want to turn those carbs into fat.
Carbs help stimulate an insulin response which transport the amino acids from protein into your muscle cells for growth. This is why it’s good to have some carbs post-workout.
Fats
You can’t grow much without fat.
Consume good un-saturated fat from nuts, seeds, extra-virgin olive oil and omega oils. About 1g per pound of bodyweight is good.
Try and have a little bit with every meal. Read through this article to get an idea of food quantities.
Extras
Avoid sugar because apart from making you fat it harms your growth hormone levels.
Take a decent sized multi-vitamin every day with one of your meals.
While it’s not directly related to nutrition, try and get a good 7-8 hours of sleep per night. More ideally.
Step 5 – Bodybuilding basics
You need to fully grasp that less (frequency) is more at this stage. You’ll grow from the slightest stimulus. So don’t be surprised when, at first, your exercise regime is ridiculously brief. Rest is key, it’s not about doing chest 3 times per week so it will get bigger!
In the beginning you can train each body part once a week and you’ll grow. Later you can think about training muscles more than once a week, for now it’s not necessary.
Start off by doing two sessions a week, 2-3 days apart. Day one should be, say, upper body and day two would then be lower body.
Start with just one exercise per body part and go as heavy as you can for about ten reps. Maybe twelve. You know the weight is right when you can’t do any more than twelve.
I can’t list all exercises here so I recommend just doing an internet search for a guide. bodybuilding.com has many pictures and videos of exercise types.
Step 6 – Beyond the basics
After about 4-6 weeks you’ll want to workout about 3-4 times per week. Here we really focus on getting big and strong. Do biceps and triceps if you have energy, otherwise forget them for now. Here’s a sample week:
Monday – Chest
Tuesday – Back
Thursday – Shoulders
Friday – Legs
*Abs thrown in a few times per week.
We want to be using big compound exercises like squats, deadlifts, shoulder press, bench press and chin-ups.
Step 7 – Further workout detail
An exercise is a series of sets, a set is a series of reps (above I mentioned doing 10-12) and a rep is a movement where you cause a muscle to contract through a full range of movement.
You’ll want to perform 1-2 lighter warm-up sets, then 2-3 heavy sets. That’s one exercise. Then when you’ve moved from the ‘basics’ to ‘beyond the basics’ you’ll do it a second time but using a different exercise. So that would be another warm up followed by another 2-3 sets for a total of 4-6 full sets. For example 3 sets of bench press followed by 3 sets of flys, each with a warm up set.
Avoid more at this stage but note that soon after you will start training some muscles twice a week (exception of legs and back). This article is just to cover the first month or two of getting the basics right.
Eventually you will need to vary your exercises so your body doesn’t adapt and stop growing, but this becomes more advanced.
The above should keep you going for the first few months and you will see gains. After that you’ll need to start hitting the books and study biochemistry!
Useful bodybuilding links:
www.t-nation.com – This is a site for quite high level bodybuilders but also has a fair bit for beginners as well. Regular quality articles and some excellent interviews with top industry professionals.
www.bodybuilding.com - Ah, where it all began for me. Massive site with a store where you can buy just about any supplement in America. I live in the UK as of the time of writing this and have even had supplements shipped over here! But also features lots of articles and interviews.
www.charlespoliquin.com - Charles Poliquin is known as the greatest strength and conditioning coach in the world. Enough said. Add him on facebook for regular articles. Please note that he is an arrogant so and so. Be warned before asking him questions!
So if you need a Personal Trainer then drop me a line. Also please subscribe to my newsletter here.
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