Transformations
Is Intermittent Fasting Good for Bulking & Building Muscle?
Intermittent fasting is popular for weight loss. But what if you’re a skinny guy trying to bulk up? Can you use intermittent fasting to build muscle faster or more leanly? After all, intermittent fasting raises growth hormone production, which purportedly helps with muscle growth; it increases insulin sensitivity, which could help make your muscle gains leaner; and research shows that intermittent fasting may help preserve muscle when losing weight.
On the other hand, bodybuilders are known for eating frequently—every few hours. They eat more often than the average person. Why is that? Could there be an advantage to eating more meals more often?
Finally, does intermittent fasting make it harder to eat enough calories to gain weight? Skinny guys are notorious for having smaller stomachs, faster metabolisms, and more meagre appetites, all of which can make it harder to eat enough calories to gain weight. Will intermittent fasting make that even harder?
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Before & After Creatine: How Much Extra Muscle Will You Gain?
Creatine has earned a reputation for being the most powerful muscle-building supplement, and with good reason. It has thousands of studies proving its effectiveness. Still, most people don’t know how much extra muscle it will actually help them build. 5% more? 50% more?
One way to get an idea of how well it works is to look at before-and-after photos of guys combining weight training, a good bulking diet, and creatine supplementation. But that won’t tell you exactly how effective creatine is. That’s why we need to look at the research.
There are two big meta-analyses looking at how creatine affects muscle growth. The first tells us how much extra lean mass we can expect to gain. The second tells us how much extra muscle mass we can expect.
We don’t sell supplements. There are no affiliate links in this article.
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How to Build an Attractive Physique
Most men want to have an attractive physique. Few know exactly what that means. When they guess the degree of muscularity women prefer, they’re off by thirty pounds (study). Many have a deeper misunderstanding, failing to connect their appearance to their fitness and strength. Some shun attractiveness, mistakenly thinking it’s superficial. Others are superficial on purpose, thinking it’s the best way to become attractive. That’s never as convincing as the real thing.
We’ll cover the attractiveness research. We’ve spoken to some of the study authors. We also went deeper, testing our hypotheses by conducting our own surveys. We collected thousands of responses for each: survey 1 and survey 2.
But be warned: this article is long. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, here’s a simple trick to improve your appearance: have a drink. It will boost your attractiveness (to yourself) by 50%. This is called “The Reverse Beer Goggles Effect,” also known as Beauty is in the Eye of the Beer Holder (study). It’s not a perfect solution, but it will save you twenty minutes of reading.
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Average Bulking Results: Weight Gain, Measurements & Photos
Before-and-after photos are great, but there’s a problem. The guys who post them tend to be the ones who got the most impressive bulking results. Other times, the most disastrous results spread the furthest. Either way, the results you see online rarely represent the average.
Muscle-building studies have their limitations, too. They’re measuring what happens with different workout variables, dietary supplements, or rates of weight gain. They seldom tell you what to expect if you do everything properly.
In this article, we’ve taken 23 bulking transformations from our online member community. These guys started posting their photos and measurements before they started bulking, before knowing what results they would get.
We didn’t select the best transformations, we selected a random sample. That way, we can show you the full range of results, including the average.
By the end of this article, you’ll know exactly how much weight you can gain, how much muscle you can build, how much bigger your arms can get, and how long it will take.
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Hollywood Bulking Transformations ARE Realistic for Skinny Guys
There are a ton of articles talking about how Hollywood body transformations are unrealistic. There’s some truth in that. Most guys are overweight. For them, even just dieting down to a healthy body-fat percentage can be surprisingly difficult.
Most Hollywood transformations are coming at it from the other side, though. From the naturally skinny side. From our side. These actors aren’t losing a dramatic amount of fat, they’re building an impressive amount of muscle, and they’re doing it suspiciously fast.
Many of us can do that, too.
Let’s dive into it.
Dive In
The Skinny Guy’s Guide to Building a Hollywood Physique
In this article, I want to talk about realistic physique goals, both in terms of understanding the timeframe that it takes to build muscle, as well as how good you can expect to look by the end of it. Perhaps it’s our audience, being largely made up of skinny guys who actively seek out information, but we tend to see things differently than a lot of other fitness professionals.
Can you look like the sex icon from the latest Hollywood movie? Well, you can’t transform your face, and building muscle won’t automatically make you more charismatic, but can you have physique of Brad Pitt from Fight Club, Christian Bale in American Psycho, Will Smith in I Am Legend, Gerard Butler in 300, or Daniel Craig in James Bond? Yes, you probably can.
None of those actors have great muscle-building genetics. All of them are naturally skinny—so-called ectomorphs. Some of them are naturally lean, yes, but so are many of us. And believe it or not, most of them didn’t even routinely lift weights until a few months before shooting for those films. These aren’t just realistic physiques, these are physiques you can probably build with just a few months of dedicated weight training.
I realize this might sound crazy, but hear me out.
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How Long Does it Take to Gain 20 Pounds?
Gaining 20 pounds is a great goal for a beginner. It’s ambitious enough to produce dramatic results. You’ll be noticeably bigger, stronger, and more robust. You’ll push your clothes to their limits.
Most skinny guys can gain 20 pounds within a few months. That’s long enough to build good habits and get some momentum going, but not so long that it becomes demotivational.
We have personal experience bulking up. Perhaps more importantly, we’ve helped over 10,000 other skinny guys bulk up over the past decade. We’ve averaged some client stats and got permission to share progress photos and measurements from one of their bulks.
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How A Skinny Guy Gained 10 Pounds in 5 Weeks
The skinny man on the left is Jeff before starting the Bony to Beastly Bulking Program. He started the program at 136 pounds with internally rotated shoulders, a head that jutted forward, and a posture that made his belly stick out—issues that he was eager to fix. Most of all, though, Jeff was tired of being skinny and eager to bulk up.
The muscular man on the right is Jeff 5 weeks later, weighing in at 146 pounds and with most of his postural problems greatly improved. He also succeeded in balancing out most of his muscle asymmetries. Most of all, though, he had succeeded at gaining 10 pounds. In just 5 weeks, he had overcome his skinniness. And he was still just getting started.
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