Hardgainer Workout Basics

I am a hardgainer. If you are too, that means you find it extremely difficult to put any new muscle on your skinny frame. I'm here to tell you that it is possible to build significant muscle on your body, if you go about it the right way.

So that you'll believe that I know a little about what I'm preaching, I'm going to tell you about my own experience as a hardgainer. When I graduated high school, I weighed 140 lbs soaking wet (I'm 5'9" tall) and struggled to bench press 135 lbs. On top of that, I had scholiosis to contend with, so I was not an athlete by anyone's definition. Today, at 38, I weigh 180, carry about 8% body fat, and am in better shape than many 20-year-olds, as far as I can tell.

Although I started weight training in high school, and I even stepped it up in college, I struggled to make any significant gains (in my muscle or strength) for years. Thankfully, when I was 25, I found a Hardgainer workout routine online, which started me on the correct path to a better physique. Within a year, I gained about 10 lbs. After 2 years, my average weight was around 160 - 165 and I had made some real increases in strength. I've continued to build on that foundation with more advanced techniques in both training and diet, but it all started with an approach that works for the average person, not the 220-lb. natural (or not so natural, if you know what I mean) athlete.

If you can remember and apply 4 simple principles, you can overcome the challenge of being a hardgainer:

1. Progression
2. Intensity
3. Compound Exercises vs. Isolation Exercises
4. Muscle Fatigue vs. Systemic Fatigue

Progression. To build muscle, you have to recruit more work out of a muscle than your last workout. Work = resitance (weight) X distance (sets + reps) / time. That means consitently performing the exercise with more weight, or with more sets/reps, or doing it in less time. If you're a beginner, you should focus only on progressing (increasing) the weight you use, while keeping the sets, reps and time-frame (rest time between sets) constant. When you progress to an intermediate or advanced level, you can adjust your reps and time frame to get more work out of your muscles per exercise.

Intensity. The level of difficulty you experience to complete a set of a particular exercise should increase with each workout until you reach a plateau and cannot perform the exercise with any more weight, keeping the number of sets and reps constant, using the same rest time between sets.

Compound exercises vs. isolation exercises. Compounds are those exercises that utilize large muscle groups, multiple muscle groups, and multiple joint movements, such as the bench press, military press, dips, pull-ups/lat pulldowns, squats, and deadlifts. When starting out, you really should focus on compound exercises and minimize isolation exercises, which are things like bicep curls, tricep extensions, deltoid flyes, leg curls, and leg extensions. Compounds will help you build core strength and build multiple muscle groups simultaneously, so focus on these first, and your muscles used in isolation exercises will in turn benefit. A person who wants big arms will never get as good results doing only curls and tricep extensions vs. the person who has first developed a strong bench press and pull-up strength.

Muscle fatigue vs. Systemic Fatigue. This can be a little difficult to understand and apply in your muscle-building efforts, so I'll give you an example to try to explain this adequately. Let's say your beginner's hardgainer routine looks like this (this is the routine I started with some 13 years ago):

Day 1:

• Squats - 3 sets of 8 reps with 185 lbs.
• Lat Pulldowns - 3 sets of 8 reps with 140 lbs

Day 2: Rest day

Day 3:

• Deadlifts - 3 sets of 8 reps with 185 lbs.
• Bench press - 3 sets of 8 reps with 125 lbs.

Day 4: Rest day

Day 5:

• Military Press - 3 sets of 8 reps with 95 lbs.
• EZ Curl Bar Bicep curls - 3 sets of 8 reps with 60 lbs.
  
• Tricep skull crushers - 3 sets of 8 reps with 75 lbs.

Day 6 & 7: Rest days

(I rested 1 minute between each set in the above routine)

Muscle fatigue meant, for example, that after Day 1, I felt soreness in my legs for a couple of days and probably could probably not repeat or improve my squat routine for 5, 6, or 7 days. However, systemically, after one day of rest, I was ready to go on Day 3 for deadlifts and bench presses.

You need to be aware of systemic fatigue when you have increased your weight in all exercises in your overall routine and the intensity of your workouts grows to a point that you will need to add an extra full day of rest between training days in order to perform. That said, please do not underestimate the need for additional rest days as you progress. If it takes you 10 days to complete your full routine instead of a week, that's ok...if, systemically, you need that time to recuperate. Don't overtrain...it's very counter-productive!

How do you know when you're overtraining and your system is not getting adequate rest? Here's a few clues:

• Loss of appetite
• Sleeplessness
• Feeling tired, fatigued throughout the day.
• No gains (or even a loss) in your strength/performance.
• Muscle pain that lasts for more than a couple of days. Muscle pulls, sprains.
  

1. Always warm up. Perform 1 to 2 warm-up sets of an exercise before doing the work (heavy) sets.
2. If you do cardio, do it after your strength training. Studies prove you get more benefits from your cardio and strength training that way.
3. When trying to perform a heavy set, and you can't do it without cheating, reduce the weight and perform the set with proper form. There's a place for cheating in lifting weights, but that's more of an advance technique, with a right way and a wrong way to do it.
4. Consume more lean protein. Ideally, to add muscle, you need to consume 1.5 grams of protein per lb. of body weight.
5. After 2 months using a certain workout routine, it's time to rest for a full week and go back to the gym with a new routine to start a new cycle. That means changing your exercises, the number of reps, the number of sets, rest time, or any combination of those. Each cycle should be 1 to 2 months long.