Illustration showing a 16:8 intermittent fasting meal schedule (with no breakfast).

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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Illustration of a skinny man with no abs doing ab workouts to build a bigger six-pack.

The Skinny Guy’s Guide to Building Bigger Abs

It’s common for skinny guys to be lean and still not have abs. That’s because there are two parts to having good muscle definition: body-fat percentage and muscle size. Our body fat percentage is fine, but our abs aren’t big enough.

If you try to search for information about how to get abs, you’ll probably come across one of two recommendations:

  1. Abs are built in the kitchen, not the gym: The idea is to focus less on building bigger abs and more on getting lean enough to reveal your abs. But many of us are already lean enough. You might not need to get any leaner. You might do better by gaining weight.
  2. Abs are built with ab circuits: The most popular ab workouts are high-rep, low-rest circuits. Those circuits will absolutely stimulate muscle growth, but they’re needlessly painful, and they aren’t as effective as hypertrophy training.

Neither of these recommendations is great for us. We need to build bigger ab muscles. We need a proper bulking routine for our abs.

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Illustration of men with varying leg sizes.

How Big Should Men Build Their Legs?

What’s the ideal male leg size? How often should we be squatting and deadlifting? How much emphasis should we put on leg training if our goal is to improve our health, general strength, and appearance? What’s interesting is that there are popular views at opposite ends of the spectrum:

  • Some aesthetics-oriented approaches have us spending more of our time doing upper-body training: more incline bench pressing, chin-ups, overhead pressing, and biceps curls. If lower-body training is included at all, it’s often lighter stuff, such as one-legged squats and Romanian deadlifts.
  • Some strength training programs tell us that we should focus our energy on getting stronger at the Big Three lifts: the squat, bench press, and deadlift. In those circles, it’s common for every single workout to start with a few sets of strenuous back squats. Is that a good way to build a strong and attractive physique?

If we’re trying to build strong, healthy, and attractive physiques, how big should our legs be? How often should we train them? And what lower-body lifts should we choose?

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The Skinny Guy’s Guide to Natural Testosterone Production

This is a guest post written by Dr. Robin Bhavsar, a physician with a specialization in urology (the field of medicine concerned with testosterone). He works at St. Joseph Health. You can see his credentials here.

After bulking up with our Bony to Beastly Program, he wrote a guide in our coaching community that became immensely popular with our members. He also answered many of their questions, including ones like:

  • Does being skinny mean I have low testosterone?
  • Am I skinny-fat because I have low testosterone?
  • How can I increase my natural testosterone production?

In this article, Dr. Bhavsar will explain everything a skinny guy should know about their own natural testosterone production.

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Illustration showing the three somatotype body types: endomorphs, mesomorphs, and ectomorphs.

The Male Body Types: Ectomorph, Endomorph, Mesomorph

In bodybuilding and fitness communities, people commonly use the terms endomorph, mesomorph, and ectomorph when talking about male body types. Endomorphs are purportedly stockier and chubbier, mesomorphs are said to be broader and more muscular, and ectomorphs are supposedly thinner and leaner.

Or that’s what people say, anyway. Men do have varying heights and bone structures, and have different propensities for being overweight or underweight, but do these traits really combine together to form three distinct body types? Is it correct to call a naturally skinny guy an ectomorph?

And even if we do use these slang terms to sort people into different body types, do the different body types benefit from different diets and workouts? For example, is there such a thing as an ectomorph workout or an ectomorph bulking diet? Or do all body types benefit from the same workouts, diets, and lifestyles?

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How to Gain Weight If You’re Skinny

Sometimes you’ll find an article about how to gain weight that doesn’t quite make sense. It’s not that it’s wrong, it’s just that it’s clearly written by someone who isn’t skinny and who’s never struggled to gain weight. They just don’t get how tough it is for us skinny guys to gain weight.

It’s like an obese person taking weight-loss advice from someone who’s naturally skinny. The skinny guy would confidently say, “Well, yeah, just stop eating. It’s easy. I do it all the time.”

It took me years to realize how much fitness information is really weight-loss information in disguise. It took me even longer to figure out how to convert all of it into information that skinny guys can use. And longer still to break it down into five simple concepts.

This article is written by a skinny guy who has spent the past eight years helping other skinny guys bulk up. If you put this information into action, it will help you gain weight, just like it did for the thousands of members in our bulking program.

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Illustration of a skinny hardgainer with an ectomorph body type.

How to Know If You’re an Ectomorph

Most of us ectomorphs describe ourselves as being naturally skinny and we tend to have a hard time gaining weight. More specifically, though, ectomorphs are usually defined by having narrower shoulders, lankier longer limbs, thinner bones, and a lower body-fat percentage. Being an ectomorph is also associated with having a higher metabolism and a smaller stomach.

If you’re curious about whether you’re an ectomorph or not, there are a few simple tests that you can do. All you need to do is measure the width of your frame, the thickness of your wrists, and the length of your muscle bellies. You can do it at home in just a couple of minutes.

We’ll also cover how the various ectomorph traits affect our ability to build muscle, what our genetic muscular potential is, and how we should approach bulking up.

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