5 Reasons Why Skinny Guys Have a Hard Time Building Muscle (And How To Fix It)
Hardgainer:
“A hardgainer is an arbitrary label that describes a person who practices bodybuilding but finds it challenging to develop musculature regardless of the amount of effort put in.”
- Wikipedia
Maybe you’re one of those skinny guys who seems to get away with eating whatever he wants yet doesn’t gain an ounce of weight. You can destroy Big Macs and pizza every day and wash them down with beer, yet you don’t seem to put on the pounds like the rest of us. You are the type of guy that has traditionally, in fitness circles, been labelled as a hardgainer.
Guys like you can also have an exceptionally difficult time building muscle. It may seem like no matter what, you can’t eat enough food to gain weight. I’ve had “hardgainer” clients tell me that they dreaded the amount of calories they had to eat everyday in order to see the number on the scale go up. Now, being someone who generally gains weight easily, loves food, and has greater difficulty losing than gaining weight, I find not eating enough food to be unfathomably absurd and I envy the hell out of you.
With that being said, it is undoubtedly a real thing and the usually accepted explanation is that you have a “fast metabolism”, but is that all there is to it? While some people do have a genetic predisposition to be more active and burn more calories, there is usually more to it than meets the eye.
Let’s take a closer look at many of the common mistakes that I see guys making when they’re trying to build muscle.
1. You’re too focused on “clean-eating”
Calories are a unit of measure for how much energy is in the food you eat. In order to lose weight you need to be in a calorie deficit. This means consuming fewer calories than you burn. In order to gain weight, the opposite is true and you must consume more calories than you burn. The excess calories are generally stored as fat or muscle. Without a calorie surplus, although a slower body recomposition may take place, no amount of training will cause you to grow or gain weight in an efficient way.
The biggest mistake that I see smaller guys making is copying the contest diet of their favourite pro bodybuilder, and normally a combination of chicken breast, broccoli, oatmeal, salmon, and other low-fat, high protein and high fibre foods. Although a subjective term, this is known throughout health and fitness circles as “clean-eating”.
Now, while these are all foods that you should typically include in a healthy diet, they are also very filling and low in calorie-density, meaning that they will fill you up very quickly but contain a relatively small amount of calories per serving. While this is an excellent dietary approach for trying to lose weight as comfortably as possible, it can be quite counterproductive if you already have a hard time eating enough food to gain weight, since your appetite is already low and these foods will fill you up before you can eat enough calories to gain weight.
In most cases, incorporating a bit of junk food like a hamburger, ice cream, chocolate milk, fattier cuts of meat, or calorie-dense “healthy” foods, such as nuts, nut butters or sugary breakfast cereals, makes it easier to eat more calories without getting too stuffed. The above all contain a large amount of calories in a pretty small serving size. As long as 70-80% of your diet consists of minimally-processed, nutritious food and you’re not excessively overeating, fitting in a few hundred extra calories of junk can make it much easier to get enough calories and won’t have any detrimental health effects.
Always remember that there are no good or bad individual foods in the context of a well-balanced diet but there can be poor overall unbalanced diets.
2. You're doing a bunch of random exercises in the gym
Another very common mistake that I see is guys going into the gym without a plan. You leave your routine up to what you “feel like training” on a given day. Now with most guys, especially younger ones, this leads to pissing around with some combination of bench presses and random arm exercises 4 times a week, zero leg days, and minimal back training. If I asked you what your training loads were on a previous week, you probably couldn’t tell me because you don’t log any of your workouts.
This is a surefire way to spin your wheels and get nowhere fast.
Training should progress over time. If you don’t know where you’ve been then you certainly won’t know where you need to go. Generally speaking, you should be getting stronger and/or increasing the number of sets and reps over the long term. Going into the gym and doing random exercises according to how you “feel” is for the most part, an exercise in futility (no pun intended).
For the most efficient rate of muscle gain, you should be training each major muscle group two to three times per week. There are an endless number of ways to structure your training, but for most people I recommend at least 6-12 months of 3-day full-body training before moving on to something like a 4-day upper-lower split. This helps most beginners and novices to build strength and make progress at a faster rate. While there is no perfect rep-range for muscle growth, the most time-effective way to accumulate effective training volume is to train mostly in the 5-15 rep range. You should produce enough effort so that you finish each set around 1-3 reps shy of muscle failure using good form, a full range-of-motion and no cheating.
“Why not take every set to failure?”, you ask.
Training to muscle failure on a regular basis causes a disproportionate amount of fatigue-to-benefit because it takes longer to recover from and it negatively affects how many total reps you can perform in your subsequent training sets as well as in the next session since you’ll still be very sore and fatigued. You don’t need to train to failure in order to grow, just train hard enough so that your last few repetitions feel like they’re between 1-3 reps away from muscle failure. Using this approach is a useful way to manage your fatigue and be able to train more efficiently over time and it will allow you to grow more over the long-term.
Now, I’ll digress for a minute by telling you that your experience level is not determined by how long you have been going to the gym, but rather how long you have been following an intelligent program which allows you to make progress over time. This means you could have been training for years and still, for all intents and purposes of this article, be classified as a beginner.
I’ve seen guys who have been training stagnantly for years on ridiculously high-volume 5 or 6-day body part splits go back to a very minimalist 3-day full-body training approach and make new gains by using the principles outlined above.
3. You’re not eating enough protein
Proteins are the tiny building blocks that make up your cells, tissues and organs, including muscle, hair, nails, bone, tendons and ligaments. If you think of all the muscle in your body as a house, then proteins would be the bricks from which it’s constructed.
Now think of each training session as a tornado passing through town and damaging your house. Without enough protein, you will lack the raw materials needed for building a bigger and stronger muscle, in the same way that you can’t repair the tornado damage to your house without having enough new bricks.
If you wanted to build a stronger house than you had before, one that is even more resilient in the face of another natural disaster, then you would need to fortify and reinforce it with even more bricks than were lost in the catastrophe. This is an easy real-world analogy for what happens with net protein balance in your body.
Training is inherently catabolic, which means “to break down”. Muscle proteins break down during training due to the structural damage and stress imposed on them while lifting heavy things.
During rest and recovery, your muscles go through a repair process, drawing from dietary protein for the raw materials to reinforce the stressed muscles and make them stronger. Over a consistent, long-term, overloading training period, the net result of this repeated process is muscle hypertrophy, the scientific term for muscle growth.
That’s why it’s very important to eat enough protein to support your training.
Guys who lift weights and are looking to maximize muscle-growth, should aim to eat between 0.7 to 1.1 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight. According to this guideline, a 200 pound guy should consume between 140 and 200 grams of protein per day.
An easier guideline which I borrowed from nutrition expert Alan Aragon is to aim for 1 gram of protein per pound of your goal bodyweight.
4. You’re neglecting rest and recovery
Sleep and stress management are probably the most overlooked factors that can make or break your muscle-gaining progress. People tend to believe that staying in the gym for longer periods and smashing the hell out of their muscles until they’re barely able to move, will force them to grow. This is backwards thinking.
While you do want some physiological disruption to occur in order to stimulate your muscles to adapt and grow bigger, there is also a point of diminishing returns.
The more often and harder you train, the larger your recovery debt becomes. Like any other kind of debt, if you don’t pay it off, it will keep building and will eventually become a huge burden, forcing you into bankruptcy. Overtraining and under-recovering can be thought of in a similar way as overspending yourself into debt and bankruptcy. After a certain point, excessive training reaches a point of diminishment. That means you can actually train to the point where you start to lose muscle, become weaker, and end up with lower testosterone levels.
You can think of stress management, relaxation and sleep as ways to make payments on your recovery debt. The thing is that your muscles don’t grow during the training session. Training simply provides the stressor stimulus to your muscles, giving them a reason to adapt and grow back bigger and stronger so that they’re better prepared next time.
The actual growth happens during rest and recovery, especially while you sleep. Not getting enough sleep is a great way to short-change yourself from making potential gains and spin your wheels. It also makes for lazier training sessions and decline in mood, strength, concentration and willpower, as well as increased cravings for high amounts of junk food, making you less likely to adhere to your nutrition plan.
I won’t even go into how negatively poor sleep can affect fat loss, since that’s a topic for another article.
I strongly suggest that you fix your sleep and aim to get about 7-9 hours every night if you’re not already doing so, as it could be the missing piece of the puzzle. Other relaxing activities like meditation, massage, sex, relaxing and reading a book or watching tv for an hour or two can also help you unwind.
If you’re doing everything else right and fix your recovery, the difference may really surprise you.
5. You’re too impatient
Muscle growth happens painfully slowly, especially after your first 6-12 months of proper training. That sounds pretty disappointing, right?
In the age of dishonest supplement ads, pharmaceutically-enhanced Instagram fitness models and 30-day transformations, you only see what advertisers want to show you. Unfortunately, those false promises of instant-gratification are easier to sell than the truth because as humans, we are hard-wired to take the easiest path. Marketers are fully aware of this fact and they fully exploit it, especially when targeting women who want to lose fat and guys like you who want to gain muscle.
The truth is that during the first year of proper training, a drug-free lifter like you, doing all the right things, can realistically expect to gain around 1-2 pounds of muscle per month. During your second year, you might be lucky enough to gain half that amount, and then, as your training career progresses further than that, the yearly gains become smaller and smaller, where an advanced trainee may only gain 1-2 pounds each year.
Patience and consistency are huge assets when it comes to any fitness endeavor. What I often see is guys trying a program for a week or two and then hopping onto another routine before giving the first one a chance to work.
Regular program-hopping is one of the best ways to get nowhere in your training. The truth is that consistently progressing over time at a few very basic movement patterns such as squats, deadlifts, pull-ups, and presses, trumps any magical promise of the holy grail “best program” you’re searching for.
Stick to the same program, give it months, not days or weeks, and strive to master and progress at the lifts and you will see progress over the long term.
Summing It All up
I’ve just given you the reasons why I see most smaller guys trying yet failing to gain weight or any appreciable amount of muscle.
Before you go out searching for the best magic supplement or workout routine, remember that the only magic of legally-available supplements is in the marketing and also keep in mind that most pro bodybuilders and physique models who get paid to promote them also have a powerful combination of exceptionally-good genes and drugs on their side, while dishonestly giving credit to the (mostly useless) supplements from companies that sponsor them.
Like in any other area of life, the real and not-so-sexy magic comes from being consistent, patient and continuously improving over time, while ticking off all the boxes outlined in this article. Do that and you’ll start out well ahead of most other guys.
Now get out there and do the work!
If you need step-by-step guidance along the way, including a personalized custom training program and nutrition coaching, you can hire a coach to help you become the best version of yourself.