Muscle Gain
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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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 Build Much 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.
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 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
Calisthenics Vs Weights: Which Builds More Muscle?
Both calisthenics and weight training can stimulate muscle growth. That’s not answering your question, though. Resistance bands, bodybuilding, and powerlifting all stimulate muscle growth. So can cardio. So can flexing your muscles (study).
We’ve helped thousands of people bulk up over the past decade, some using weights, others with pure calisthenics. We’ve seen how their results compare. There’s also research comparing the results people get with calisthenics vs weight training. We can take that into consideration, too.
We don’t have a bias. We don’t sell weights or gymnastic rings. Our brand isn’t built on one approach or the other. We’ve trained both ways. We’re happy to use and recommend whatever gives the best results.
Dive In
Does Flexing Build Muscle? Yes, But It’s Not What You Think
I came across this fascinating story about Charles Atlas years ago when I was writing an article about training for muscle size. If you don’t know, we’re a muscle-building site for skinny guys, and Charles Atlas was the first person to mass-market a workout program specifically designed to help skinny guys bulk up.
His story is much more interesting than I expected. First of all, it’s a flexing program. You buy the guide, and then you do a flexing routine at home. The “dynamic resistance” from flexing is supposed to stimulate muscle growth. There’s nothing wrong with that idea in theory, but does it actually work?
There have been studies measuring muscle growth from flexing, too. We can look at the results of a recent one.
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Does Collagen Help Build Muscle? A Quick Research Overview
Collagen is a popular “anti-aging” supplement for maintaining skin elasticity, keeping our joints strong, and helping our connective tissues recover. So far, the research has been modestly positive and fairly consistent (study, study). Collagen appears to support tendon, bone, joint, and skin health.
Lifters often run into nagging aches and pains in their joints and tendons. Supplementing with collagen appears to be a reasonable way to improve recovery. And it is. Collagen enhances the tendon and joint adaptations we already get from weight training (study, study). That raises an obvious question: what about muscle growth? Does collagen help build muscle?
Jacinto and colleagues compared whey protein against collagen peptides, seeing which yielded more muscle growth. It’s a neat study. We’ll go through it. And then we’ll go into the rest of the research.
Delve Deeper
Does Cardio Kill Muscle Gains?
Cardio can kill muscle gains. We’ve known this for many decades. It’s common knowledge among lifters and shows up in studies. Most recently, a study found that cardio cut muscle growth in half. We’ll go over the nuance of that study in a moment.
That isn’t normal, though. Most people who combine weight training with cardio build muscle just fine. The latest meta-analysis found that cardio didn’t interfere with muscle growth at all (meta). In fact, I’ve noticed the opposite.
If you’re clever, you can use cardio to build more muscle. We’ll go over some interesting research. It’s something I’ve seen with clients, too. The guys who get the best results are often the ones who get fit while they’re bulking up.
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How Many Calories Do You Need to Gain Weight? (With Calculator)
You’ll often hear that the number of calories you need to gain weight depends on your age, sex, height, weight, activity level, and metabolic health. That works well if you’re overweight like everyone else. It works less well if you’re starting off thin and trying to become muscular, neither of which is typical.
If you’re trying to gain weight or build muscle, you can forget most of those factors. They’re for estimating how lean and muscular you are. If you lift weights, you can be lean and muscular at 20 or 50, so those proxies won’t do you much good. If you have a rough idea of your body-fat percentage, you can be much more accurate.
The other thing to consider is how fast you’re trying to gain weight. If you’re bulking leanly, you’ll need fewer calories. If you’re bulking more aggressively, you’ll need more.
So, I’ve made a simple calorie calculator that will ask you all these questions and spit out an estimate. Once you have that estimate, we can talk about what to do with it.
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