Articles
The Skinny Fat Workout & Diet Guide
Skinny fat is when you’re overfat but undermuscled, giving you a normal BMI but an unhealthy body composition. It’s when you’re not quite fat but not quite skinny, either.
The good news is you aren’t overeating or undereating, so you won’t need to force yourself to eat more food (bulking) or less food (cutting). That’s the hardest part of any physique transformation. You don’t need to worry about that. Not yet, anyway.
Instead, the best way to get rid of skinny fatness is to improve your nutrient partitioning. You need body recomposition. There are a few methods that can help with that: following a good workout program, eating a good diet, living a good lifestyle, and getting enough good sleep. Each can work on its own, but combining them all together works much better.
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What is the Skinny Fat Body Type? Not Skinny But Not Fat
“Skinny fat” is the casual term for someone with normal-weight obesity, also known as Metabolically Obese Normal Weight (MONW). It’s when you aren’t quite skinny but aren’t quite fat, either. More specifically, it’s an abundance of visceral fat combined with a paucity of muscle mass, both of which can cause problems (study).
Note that being skinny-fat isn’t a body type, per se. It’s more akin to being out of shape. There are a few methods you can use to get rid of it. They each work on their own. You can combine them together to get even better results.
There’s an easy way to tell if you’re skinny fat. All you need is a measuring tape.
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How to Bulk: the Complete Beginner Guide
Bulking is often derided as the fool’s way of building muscle. That’s true on average. Most people are already overweight. The last thing they need is more weight. But if you’re thin, underweight, or lean, bulking is by far the best way to build muscle.
In this guide, we’ll teach you exactly how to bulk.
Delve Deeper
The Best Fast Food Restaurants for Bulking
We get this question a fair bit. Most people associate fast-food restaurants with processed junk food, but that only describes some of them. If you want to get a healthy, high-calorie bulking meal from a fast-food restaurant, you can. There are some really good options.
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How Age Affects Muscle Growth
We’ve helped 15,000 skinny people bulk up, ranging from 18 to 80 years old. Marco has coached college, professional, and Olympic athletes revelling in the peak of their athletic performance. He’s also coached sedentary desk workers in their 20s, 40s, 60s, and 80s.
What we’ve seen matches what we see in the research, and what the research shows is shocking. We have pictures. You’re going to love this.
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How Often Should You Lift Weights to Build Muscle?
Most guys assume that training more often stimulates more muscle growth. If that were true, then to build muscle faster, you’d train as often as possible—maybe as many as 5 or even 6 days per week. To do any less would be to miss out on muscle gains.
That’s the wrong way to think about it.
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How to Make High-Calorie Bulking Smoothies (to Gain Weight)
A good bulking smoothie makes it easier to get into a calorie surplus, allowing you to gain weight and thus build muscle. We’ve used these smoothies to gain nearly 70 pounds each. We’ve also used them with thousands of clients, ranging from everyday people all the way up to Olympic athletes.
When you blend whole foods into smoothies, they keep their nutritional value, but they lose much of their bulk and hassle. That’s why they’re so popular in the fitness industry. Smoothies are the easiest way to consume several servings of protein, fruits, veggies, omega-3s, phytonutrients, and fibre.
Smoothies are even better for naturally thin people trying to build muscle. When you blend whole foods into liquid calories, you don’t need to cook them or chew them, and they won’t take up as much space in your stomach. You also break them into smaller pieces, helping them digest faster and leaving you hungry again sooner.
High-calorie bulking smoothies are nature’s weight-gainer. You just need to learn how to harness their power.
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How Much Protein Powder Can You Have Per Day?
One of the most common questions we get is how much protein powder is too much protein powder? One scoop of whey per day is probably fine, right? But what about 2 scoops? 3 scoops? 4?
I’ve seen dozens of muscle-building studies where the researchers give participants upwards of 60 or even 90 grams of protein per day for several months in a row, measuring what effects it has on muscle growth.
There are other studies looking directly at how much protein powder you can safely have per day.
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The Best Time to Have a Protein Shake
You can have a protein shake at any time. The most important thing is to consume enough protein overall. Still, some times are better than others.
Maybe you’ve heard of a bodybuilder who wakes up in the middle of the night to chug the shake they’ve left on their bedside table. You can do better than that.
And what about the anabolic window? Should you be having protein shakes before and after working out? Maybe, yes.
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How to Build Broader Shoulders
Broad shoulders are touted as one of the most attractive features a man can possess. That’s not wrong. You can build broader shoulders, and when you do, it will improve your appearance. But that’s not quite how aesthetics works. In fact, it’s almost entirely backwards. More on that in a moment.
Then there’s the issue of bone structure. The length of your collarbones is largely genetic, and that’s a big part of determining how wide your shoulders can get. If you have a thinner build, it’s easy to assume you’re fated to have narrow shoulders. But that isn’t quite right, either. I’ve added over a dozen inches to my shoulder circumference.
Finally, we’ve helped over 15,000 people bulk up, tracking their progress along the way. If you spend the next 6 months bulking up your shoulder muscles, how much broader can you get them? To answer that question, we tracked our client results. We’ll show you before/after photos and measurements.
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