What Every Hardgainer Should Know
If you consider yourself a "hardgainer", then your main concern should be to gain weight, preferably muscle weight.
You do that by consuming more calories, avoiding unnecessary burning of calories, training smartly and allowing your body to recover.
But I see slim people who want to gain mass shoot themselves in the foot everyday by going against this logic and hindering their results.
In my free Hardgainer Nutrition eBook I mentioned that your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) plays the biggest role in your ability or inability to gain weight. The BMR is basically a measure of the rate at which your body burns calories when you are resting, to maintain bodily function such as breathing, sleeping, pumping blood and basically sustaining life.
An important aspect of gaining mass is keeping your Basal Metabolic Rate from escalating. The speed of your BMR is determined mostly by your genetics, but there are other things that can increase it. If you want to gain muscle mass, the logical thing to do is to eliminate or minimize the things that increase your BMR.
One thing that can, without a doubt, make you burn calories and also affect you BMR negatively, as a hardgainer, is exercise; both strength and aerobic exercise. It is important to know what it means to train or exercise smartly; to make exercise work for you, and not against you.
For someone who struggles to gain mass, less is more. The first step is to minimize strength training. You cannot afford to completely eliminate strength training, you can only minimize it, as it will increase your desired muscle mass provided that there’s an excess of calories.
Aerobic exercise on the other hand, would only serve to burn your calories or may even reduce your muscle mass. So someone who is seriously struggling to gain weight should:
You can minimize the frequency of strength training and still reap the benefits by doing the following:
The truth is that you don’t have to exercise often and for long hours to gain muscle mass. This is because you don’t grow at the gym; you grow when you are resting. So by training less often you allow for more recovery time and more growth. When you do the opposite and exercise a lot and for long hours, you burn more calories and run the risk of over-training; which makes you lose muscle mass.
Since muscle growth occurs when you are resting, make sure you get enough sleep. Listen to your body, sleep early and let it decide how much rest it needs.
The whole point of going to the gym is to stimulate the muscle fibers enough for muscle growth to occur. Intense compound exercises make the job easier (and the workout harder) for you because they move the body through more than one joint and use more muscle and thus stimulating more fibers for growth. But doing compound exercises won’t benefit you much if you don’t do them with intensity. You have to give every set your all, lift heavy weights and make sure that you rest enough between sets.
You do that by consuming more calories, avoiding unnecessary burning of calories, training smartly and allowing your body to recover.
But I see slim people who want to gain mass shoot themselves in the foot everyday by going against this logic and hindering their results.
In my free Hardgainer Nutrition eBook I mentioned that your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) plays the biggest role in your ability or inability to gain weight. The BMR is basically a measure of the rate at which your body burns calories when you are resting, to maintain bodily function such as breathing, sleeping, pumping blood and basically sustaining life.
An important aspect of gaining mass is keeping your Basal Metabolic Rate from escalating. The speed of your BMR is determined mostly by your genetics, but there are other things that can increase it. If you want to gain muscle mass, the logical thing to do is to eliminate or minimize the things that increase your BMR.
One thing that can, without a doubt, make you burn calories and also affect you BMR negatively, as a hardgainer, is exercise; both strength and aerobic exercise. It is important to know what it means to train or exercise smartly; to make exercise work for you, and not against you.
For someone who struggles to gain mass, less is more. The first step is to minimize strength training. You cannot afford to completely eliminate strength training, you can only minimize it, as it will increase your desired muscle mass provided that there’s an excess of calories.
Aerobic exercise on the other hand, would only serve to burn your calories or may even reduce your muscle mass. So someone who is seriously struggling to gain weight should:
- Completely eliminate aerobic exercise.
- Keep the strength training to a minimum.
You can minimize the frequency of strength training and still reap the benefits by doing the following:
- Training less often: 3 or 4 times in a week
- Keeping workouts short: 20-60 minutes (it can take longer if you have a gym partner)
- Stimulating maximum muscle fibers: doing compound exercises with intensity
The truth is that you don’t have to exercise often and for long hours to gain muscle mass. This is because you don’t grow at the gym; you grow when you are resting. So by training less often you allow for more recovery time and more growth. When you do the opposite and exercise a lot and for long hours, you burn more calories and run the risk of over-training; which makes you lose muscle mass.
Since muscle growth occurs when you are resting, make sure you get enough sleep. Listen to your body, sleep early and let it decide how much rest it needs.
The whole point of going to the gym is to stimulate the muscle fibers enough for muscle growth to occur. Intense compound exercises make the job easier (and the workout harder) for you because they move the body through more than one joint and use more muscle and thus stimulating more fibers for growth. But doing compound exercises won’t benefit you much if you don’t do them with intensity. You have to give every set your all, lift heavy weights and make sure that you rest enough between sets.
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