Training
A Review of Interesting Muscle-Building Research for Skinny Guys
In this article, let’s take a closer look at some of the most interesting research that could help us ectomorphs, hardgainers, and skinny guys bulk up, including studies looking into:
- How important are bicep curls for building bigger arms?
- Does muscle memory really exist?
- How long should we rest between sets?
- Does doing more sets increase muscle growth?
- What happens if we bulk on a ketogenic diet?
- Are high-protein diets healthy?
- Does having casein for bed help with muscle growth?
- Are 5×5 workouts good for building muscle?
- Are 10×10 German Volume Training workouts good for building muscle?
- Are push/pull/legs splits good for building muscle?
- Which lifestyle intervention caused simultaneous muscle growth and fat loss?
All of those answers and more inside.
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Beginner Bodyweight Workout Plan for Building Muscle—Full Guide
Bodyweight workout plans can be incredibly good for building muscle, especially in your upper body. If you put enough mechanical tension on your muscles, they’ll grow. That’s just as true with bodyweight exercises as it is with free weights or exercise machines.
However, most bodyweight workout plans are designed to help people get fitter, not more muscular. If you’re trying to build muscle, that won’t cut it. To maximize your rate of muscle growth, you need to train for muscle growth. You need to do bodyweight hypertrophy training.
In this article, we’ll teach you the best bodyweight exercises for building muscle, then give you a full hypertrophy training workout routine you can do at home.
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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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Do Resistance Bands Build Muscle? Yes, But How Well?
Resistance bands are cheap, portable, and convenient. They challenge our muscles. What more do we need? There’s a whole grain of truth there. Resistance bands can stimulate muscle growth. Plenty of people get great results from training with them. You don’t need anything more.
But what if you’re trying to build muscle as quickly, efficiently, or painlessly as possible? Are resistance bands the best tool for that? That’s a different question. In that case, we need to compare resistance bands against the alternatives: bodyweight exercises, dumbbells, barbells, and exercise machines.
So, how do resistance bands compare to callisthenics and free weights? Let’s delve into it.
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How to Deadlift for Muscle Growth
Deadlifts are one of the only true full-body lifts, challenging our muscles from our fingers down to our toes, stressing our bodies from the skin on our palms all the way down to our bones. They’re hard, tiring, and absolutely amazing for building muscle, gaining strength, improving our fitness, and becoming much better looking.
When it comes to bulking up, the only lift that can rival the deadlift in terms of sheer muscle growth is the squat (and especially the front squat). Even then, the deadlift has a few unique advantages:
- Deadlifts bulk up our traps, spinal erectors, and glutes, as well a number of other muscles in our upper backs, all of which is great for improving our aesthetics.
- Deadlifts are one of the best ways to increase the density of our bones and the health of our spines, making them great for our health and longevity.
- The strength we develop with deadlifts transfers near-perfectly to our daily lives, making us look strong because we are strong.
- Squats and deadlifts train different muscles, with the front squat emphasizing the quads and upper back, and the deadlift emphasizing the hamstrings, glutes, and entire back.
As with all the big lifts, though, there are several different ways of deadlifting, each with different pros and cons. And given how many different sorts of adaptations deadlifts provoke, it’s not surprising that some ways of deadlifting are much better for building muscle than others.
Most guys who are interested in strength favour the conventional deadlift, which is wise—and we’ll explain why—but they deadlift for low reps and drop the bar to the ground after every repetition, making it worse for building muscle mass.
The most heinous sin, though, belongs to the bodybuilders who forego the deadlift altogether, thinking that it’s not a good lift for gaining muscle, which couldn’t be farther from the truth.
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The Benefits of Goblet Squats & Front Squats
Squats are the biggest lift, engaging the most muscle mass and stimulating the most muscle growth. And of all the squat variations, front squats are the best for building muscle.
Powerlifters have low-bar squats, which allow them to lift more weight. Athletes have high-bar squats, which allow them to focus on their quads. We usually use goblet squats and front squats, which allow us to stimulate more overall muscle growth, especially in our postural muscles.
Front-loaded squats are a better default for almost everyone else. They let us squat deeper, thicken our back muscles, straighten our posture, and bulk up our serratus muscles. They’re also the safest squat variation, rivalled only by safety-bar squats and hack squats.
Here’s why.
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Bulking Set Point and “Muscle Memory”
You could think of your body as having a built-in bodyweight thermostat. You might have your weight set at, say, 130 pounds. If you go above 135, your appetite automatically turns off until you get back to 130 pounds. If you go below 125 pounds, your appetite automatically turns on until you get back up to 130 pounds. There’s more at play here than just your appetite, but you get the idea: your body is automatically regulating your weight around a given “set point.”
When you’re bulking up, you’re fighting that set point. It’s trying to regulate your body weight back down. It’s trying to eliminate all the progress you’ve made.
So how do we get your set point to 150, 180 or even 200 pounds? Is that even possible? That’s what this article is about.
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Are You a Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced Lifter?
How can you tell whether you’re a beginner, intermediate, or advanced lifter? That’s a good question. The answer can change which exercises you build your routine around, which workout program you pick, how quickly you can add weight to the bar, and how quickly you should gain weight.
Let’s delve into different ways of determining your lifting level. We’ll demonstrate why some of those methods are flawed, then cover a more useful way of doing it.
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The Skinny Guy’s Guide to Fixing Bad Posture
It’s common for skinny guys to have crooked posture. Part of that is because we’re skinny. We lack the muscular strength to hold ourselves up straight. The other problem is we often have longer spines that are harder to stabilizer.
The good news is both of these issues are the same issue. You can think of posture as weakness in the muscles that are supposed to hold your body in the proper position. If you can learn how to lift weights with good posture, you’ll strengthen these muscles, and your posture will improve.
My expertise is in helping thinner athletes bulk up, including college, professional, and Olympic athletes. Fortunately, these postural techniques work just as well on everyday skinny guys like us.
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DOMS: Is Muscle Soreness A Sign of Muscle Growth?
When I first started lifting weights, I was absolutely crippled by muscle soreness. I would wince when sitting in chairs, struggle to lift my knees high enough to climb stairs, and barely be able to get glasses from the cupboard. I loved it. I was sick and tired of being skinny, and I thought muscle soreness was a sign that my muscles were growing.
A couple of months later, my soreness faded away to almost nothing. I could sit down in a chair without everyone in the room grimacing. I could even hold myself upright in it. I started to feel less like a burning puddle of oil, more like a human being. It was awful.
My gains had started to slow down as well, and I was convinced that my waning muscle growth was connected to my fading muscle soreness. Was my fading muscle soreness causing my plateau?
Muscle soreness is intimately connected to muscle growth, but most have no idea how it works, making the process more confusing. So in this article, let’s go over a few of the more common muscle soreness questions that we get:
- What’s the link between muscle soreness and muscle growth?
- How much muscle soreness is good?
- Should you work out if you still feel sore from the last workout?
- Can muscle soreness interfere with muscle growth?
- What can you do to reduce muscle soreness?
- Can you build muscle without getting sore?
- What if a muscle never gets sore?
- What if your joints or tendons get sore?
- What if your lower back gets sore?