Posts by Shane Duquette
How to Make High-Calorie Bulking Smoothies (to Gain Weight)
When you blend whole foods into smoothies, they keep their nutritional value, they get quicker to prepare and eat, and they don’t leave you feeling as full. 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.
If you make a high-calorie bulking smoothie, it can shift you into an effortless calorie surplus, making it much easier to gain weight (study). 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 professional and Olympic athletes.
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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 (for Skinny Guys)
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.
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 their before/after photos and measurements to give you a realistic idea of how much broader you can get your shoulders.
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How Long Should You Bulk For?
In theory, you could bulk slowly over several years. That’s what some natural bodybuilders do. They eat in a small calorie surplus as part of their regular lifestyle, only stopping when they need to lean down for a bodybuilding competition. However, they have fierce appetites and large stomachs, making it relatively easy to gain weight.
For most skinny guys, eating in a sustained calorie surplus is incredibly difficult, not least because our metabolisms adapt to larger calorie intakes. You might start a bulk by eating 3,000 calories per day. A few months later you might struggle to gain weight on 4,000 calories. You could add even more calories to your diet, but that’s easier said than eaten.
As a naturally skinny guy with a meagre appetite, the thought of bulking forever fills me with a deep sense of dread, leaving little room for extra food. My first and second bulks were 3 months each, which was enough time for me to gain a lean 45 pounds. My third bulk was 5 months long. The longest I’ve made it was 8.
Over the past 10 years of helping over 10,000 guys bulk up, we’ve developed a system for figuring out how long to bulk and when to stop.
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Before & After Creatine: How Much Extra Muscle Will You Gain?
Creatine helps you build muscle, sure, but how much? Creatine has thousands of studies proving its effectiveness, and every expert recommends it, but most people don’t know how whether it will help them build 5% or 50% more muscle.
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 Bigger Arms
I’ve managed to bring my arms from 10 inches up to 16 inches. But I got off to a rough start. During my first two years of successful bulking, I gained 40 pounds at 11% body fat, bringing my bench from 65 to 225 pounds and doing chin-ups with 50 pounds around my waist. Yet, despite my progress, I had only added 2 inches to my arms. My arms were still 1.3 inches smaller than average, and the average man doesn’t even exercise!
That’s when I realized my mistake. I was relying on compound lifts to bulk up my arms. When I finally added proper arm exercises to my workout program, my arms quickly shot up to 14 inches, then gradually climbed to 16 inches. Surprisingly, my bench press started going up again. I was finally able to bench 315.
We’ve used these same methods with over 10,000 skinny clients and millions of readers. If you add these methods to your workout routine, you can expect to add around 2 inches to your arms within the next 6 months. That’s what our clients gain, on average.
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How Fast Can You Build Muscle Naturally?
You may have heard that natural lifters can gain 20 pounds of muscle in their first year, 10 in their second, 5 in their third, and then a few pounds per year until they reach their natural potential. That doesn’t seem to be true for the average man, and you may not be average anyway.
How fast can you build muscle naturally? That depends. Let’s take a deeper look.
Delve Deeper
A Beginner’s Guide to Bulking & Cutting
Bulking and cutting are key terms in the muscle-building industry. Bulking is when you gain weight to facilitate muscle growth. Cutting is when you lose weight to burn fat. Some people do them in sequence, bulking, then cutting, and then bulking again.
Bulking is controversial, and understandably so. The average person is already overweight. They don’t need to gain even more weight. However, if you’re skinny, thin, lean, or in good shape, bulking is by far the most effective way to gain muscle and strength.
Cutting is less controversial. Most people have extra fat, and cutting is the best way to burn it. It’s a great first step for the average beginner. However, many seasoned lifters get distracted by trying to maintain overly lean body-fat percentages.
The main concern is that you could get stuck in an endless cycle of bulking and cutting seasons, bulking until you become overweight, cutting until you wither away, and then going back to bulking. This is especially worrisome for “skinny-fat” people who already feel too thin and fat.
We have solutions for all these issues.
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Do Skinny People Have Faster Metabolisms? Yes, Sometimes
There’s a common myth in the fitness industry that skinny people don’t have faster metabolisms, they just don’t eat as much food. According to this line of thinking, there’s no such thing as a fast or slow metabolism. Rather, your metabolism is determined by your height, age, weight, lean mass, exercise habits, and activity levels. There are two problems with this line of thinking.
First, those variables can result in huge changes in metabolic rate. For example, in a study published by Science, they found that a 180-pound person could burn anywhere from 1,400 to 5,700 calories per day (study).
Second, even if you account for every single one of those variables, metabolisms can still vary greatly between people. Even when living totally average lifestyles, naturally skinny people often have unusually fast metabolisms.
Let’s go over the research and implications. Then we can talk about how to gain weight and build muscle with a fast metabolism.
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