How Should Skinny Guys Train to Build Muscle?

Most skinny guys are eager to gain muscle size. I don’t blame them. I was the same way. When I weighed 130 pounds, with a BMI of 17, I wasn’t interested in powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting, or chiselling out my abs for a bodybuilding show. Instead, I was interested in not being skinny anymore.

The good news is, once we start lifting weights and eating enough food, we can often gain muscle faster than any other body type. We have plenty of room on our frames for growth. We’re primed for. Some of our clients have gained forty pounds in their first 6 months of working out.

We’ll teach you the exact training methods we use to help our members stimulate muscle growth.

The History of Muscle-Building Workouts

The Very First Muscle Size Program for Skinny Guys

Back in the 1920s, Charles Atlas came up with the first muscle-building program for skinny guys. This was back in the good old days, back before the word “ectomorph” was coined, back before skinny guys even knew they could build muscle. Back then, being skinny was just a body type. If you were skinny, you were skinny. That was it.

The problem was, the good old days weren’t so good for skinny guys. Even back in the 1920s, muscular men got more attention from women and more respect from other men. The skinny guys didn’t want to be skinny, but they didn’t realize they could do anything about it. It was considered an immutable trait.

Charles Atlas saw an opportunity there. He designed a workout program that he could market to these skinny guys. He called it the Dynamic Resistance Fitness Course. He placed advertisements in magazines calling out to “98-pound weaklings” who were desperate to bulk up.

It worked, too. All over the world, pre-ectomorph ectomorphs began placing their orders, eager to finally build enough muscle to look good on the beach, eager to stop having sand kicked in their faces.

Atlas’ theory was that you could “pit muscle against muscle” to create the tension needed to stimulate muscle growth. For example, when you flex your biceps, you need to clench both your biceps and your triceps. The two muscles work agonistically, allowing them to flex against each other. He claimed that this muscle-against-muscle tension would stimulate muscle growth. Then, as your muscles become stronger, the resistance you create becomes more intense, allowing you to become stronger still. Best of all, you could do this workout program from the privacy of your own home. No equipment required.

The Fall of Charles Atlas

However, Charles Atlas was soon accused of false advertising. Bob Hoffman, the founder of York Barbell, believed lifting weights was the only way to build an impressively muscular physique. He saw that Atlas was impressively muscular and figured he must be a weight lifter. When Atlas claimed that he built his physique with his bodyweight routine, Hoffman accused him of being a liar—a fraud!

Hoffman brought Atlas to court. On the stand, Atlas proclaimed his innocence. He really did do his flexing routine every day. However, when the lawyers asked him if he also lifted weights, he admitted that he did, occasionally, but only to test his strength. Under cross-examination, he admitted that he “tested his strength” three to four times per week. Charles Atlas didn’t even trust his own routine.

A 2014 study published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology found that doing a biceps flexing routine three times per week for 12 weeks produced a 4% increase in both biceps and triceps size. You can build your biceps simply by flexing them. However, those results pale in comparison to the amount of muscle you can build with a proper workout routine.

This is the grey area that most workout programs live in. They work, yes, but not very well. And they work on most people, yeah, but not on everyone. This is how skinny guys wind up trying workout routine after workout routine without ever getting results.

The Face of P90X Was a Bodybuilder

P90X is a bodyweight workout routine supposed to help guys build muscle (among other things). It’s fronted by Tony Horton, who you might assume built his physique with P90X. But you shouldn’t make those assumptions. Horton built his body by lifting weights. He was a bodybuilder. That’s why they hired him to be the face of P90X.

I don’t mean to single out P90X. This is standard practice in the fitness industry and is often relatively innocent. You’ll have a guy who builds muscle by lifting weights. At that point, he loses interest in building more muscle. After all, he’s already muscular. So he becomes passionate about other things, and people never realize how he built all his muscle. That’s what happened with Horton. He never lied. People just never bothered to check.

The Colorado Experiment and the Magic of Muscle Memory

Jumping forward to the 70s, Arthur Jones is one of the biggest names in the fitness industry, famous for inventing new bodybuilding equipment and methodologies.

In 1973, he introduced his most famous idea: High-Intensity Training (HIT). The idea behind HIT is that you do a single set for each exercise, moving the weight extremely slowly and going all the way to total muscular failure. This training style is quite hard to do with free weights simply in terms of the balance it requires. So to allow the lifters to focus all of their energy on simply pushing the weight through a fixed path, he recommended his Nautilus lifting machines, which he had invented for this very purpose.

To advertise this new bulking method and his new lifting machines, he enlisted the help of his protégé, a professional bodybuilder, Casey Viator. Over the course of 28 days, Arthur Jones coached Viator through the HIT program. They trained three times per week, with each workout lasting 30 minutes. In a single month, Casey Viator gained an astounding 63 pounds of muscle.

This was unheard of at the time. It’s still unheard of to this day. Was this revolutionary new bulking routine really that powerful? Unfortunately, no. It wasn’t. A recent study looked at how training volume impacts muscle growth. I’ve extrapolated the results for a 150-pound man:

• 1 set of squats per week: 0 pounds muscle, 0 pounds fat, squat strength went up 36 pounds.
• 4 sets of squats per week: 0 pounds muscle, -3 pounds fat, squat strength went up 46 pounds.
• 8 sets of squats per week:  5 pounds muscle, -2.5 pounds fat, squat strength went up 82 pounds.

In this study, doing a single set per exercise wasn’t enough to stimulate a noticeable amount of muscle growth. 4 sets was better, but the participants weren’t eating enough, so it didn’t help them build muscle. 8 sets was enough to cause simultaneous muscle growth and fat loss.

That leaves us with a mystery. If Casey Viator’s methods were worse, why were his results so extraordinary? There are a few possible explanations:

• Casey Viator had some of the best muscle-building genetics in the world. He’d won the title of Mr. Universe at age 19. He was an extreme outlier.
• One year before the experiment, Viator injured one of his fingers while lifting weights. He got a tetanus shot to prevent infection but had a severe allergic reaction to the shot. He lost his ability to eat and exercise for almost a year, losing dozens of pounds of muscle mass.
• Viator was being paid for every pound of muscle he gained. He wanted the most dramatic transformation possible. So for two months, he restricted himself to 800 calories per day, losing as much muscle as he could.
• During the experiment, Viator supposedly snuck in extra sets, knowing that it would improve his results and increase his paycheck.
• Viator had a reputation for steroid abuse. He was presumably using PEDs during the experiment.

Tim Ferriss & Occam’s Protocol

There are a few cases of people using a similar approach to rebuild muscle and getting similar results. Arthur Jones followed the same protocol as Viator. First, a starvation diet, then detraining, and then rapidly recovering 17 pounds of lost muscle in just 28 days. The results were advertised, the starvation diets and detraining leading up to those results weren’t. Despite mounting evidence that HIT didn’t work very well, it became a popular way to bulk up.

Over the past five decades, research has consistently shown that slow lifting isn’t a good way to build muscle (study, study, study). Neither is low-volume training (systematic review). Taking sets to total muscle failure doesn’t help either (study, study).

Why is this relevant today? In his Geek to Freak experiment, the best-selling author Tim Ferriss followed the same protocol as Casey Viator, using it to rebuild 34 pounds of muscle mass in 28 days. Like Viator, Ferriss was detrained and underfed in the year leading up to his transformation, which allowed him to regain muscle incredibly fast. Ferriss was fully open about that.

The only problem is that when Tim Ferriss published his fitness book, The 4-Hour Body, it featured his Occam’s Protocol workout routine. Those workouts were based on Arthur Jones’ old HIT routine. For a few years, that workout routine became extremely popular with skinny guys trying to build muscle. They saw that Tim Ferris was skinny in the before photo and muscular in the after photo, not realizing the role muscle memory played in his transformation. Eventually, it became clear that most skinny guys couldn’t reproduce Tim Ferriss’ dramatic results, so the routine gradually faded from popularity.

The Liver King Scandal

A Perhaps the most nefarious decievers of all are the guys who falsely claim to be natural. The so-called “fake natties.” These guys build impossible physiques by abusing PEDs, then sell supplements that ostensibly produce those impossible results.

The most famous example is the Liver King, who made millions by selling “ancestral supplements” and teaching a primal lifestyle. It eventually came out that he was using tens of thousand of dollars of PEDs every month. He was forced to admit the lie, and his supplements immediately lost their lustre.

Unconventional Methods are LESS Likely to Work

Plenty of bizarre muscle-building workouts are marketed to skinny guys. As a teenager, I tried my fair share of them. I thought that maybe, just maybe, a radical new workout program could produce radical new muscle growth.

We’re quick to toss out conventional wisdom because we want to get better-than-conventional results. But the very things that make unconventional workouts appealing are what make them unlikely to work.

We forget that conventional methods are able to consistently produce great results. We averaged out the results of guys bulking with our Bony to Beastly Program. On average, they gained 26 pounds and added 2 inches to their arms within 6 months.

There’s no magic method. It’s just a proper combination of good hypertrophy training, a nutritious bulking diet, eating enough food, and living a healthy lifestyle that supports muscle growth. We also offer feedback on every progress update, answer questions, and help them deal with issues. That’s how we’re able to guarantee results.

The Foundational Principles of Training for Muscle Size

The Power of Specificity

Specificity is the idea that if you want to get good at a specific thing, you should train for that specific thing. If you want to deadlift more weight, practice the deadlift, gradually add weight, and add in extra exercises as needed to bulk up the relevant muscles in your hips and back.

• If you want to run a 20-minute 5k, you need to improve your running technique , toughen up your shin bones, and improve your cardiovascular fitness. The best way to do all of those things at once is to practice jogging.
• If you want to deadlift 4 plates, you need to improve your deadlift technique, toughen your grip, bulk up your hips and back, and learn how to contract your muscles more forcefully. The best way to do all of those things at once is to practice deadlifting.

If your goal is to bulk up, follow a dedicated bulking program. Don’t do 100-push-up challenges. Don’t follow a strength-training routine. Train for muscle growth directly, with hypertrophy training. Some strength and endurance will come along as a byproduct, but the main result will be muscle mass.

The same is true with the specific areas you’re trying to grow. No amount of squatting, deadlifting, or bench pressing will help you build bigger biceps. Your biceps aren’t being challenged by those lifts. There’s no need for them to adapt by growing bigger. If you want bigger arms, train them directly. If you do, you can add around 2 inches to your arms in the next 6 months.

The 2–3 Pathways of Muscle Growth

When evaluating different types of training, it’s important to have a clear grasp of what makes a muscle grow. As the research currently stands, Brad Schoenfeld, Ph.D., has the dominant theory of hypertrophy, which posits that there are 2–3 pathways that stimulate muscle growth:

1. Mechanical tension: This is the tension placed on our muscles as we lift weights. The heavier the weight (study) and the larger the range of motion (study, study, study), the more muscle we’ll build. An example of this would be doing heavy chin-ups for our biceps, starting from a dead hang and bringing your chest all the way up to touch the bar. If you aren’t strong enough to do a full chin-up yet, you can jump up to the bar and then lower yourself back down. Even with lowered chin-ups, you’ll still get a tremendous amount of mechanical tension simply by resisting gravity on the way down. These heavy compound lifts are where most of your muscle growth will come from (study).
2. Metabolic stress: This is the “burn” or the “pump” that you get while lifting weights, causing your body to produce local growth factors in the muscles that you’re training (study). For example, after finishing your heavy chin-ups, you might want to do some biceps curls to build up a biceps pump. This will produce extra local growth factors that will cause your biceps to grow slightly more quickly. How much more quickly? If we pool the data from the seven relevant studies, we can predict about 27% more muscle growth from doing curls after chin-ups. (This data analysis is from Monthly Applications in Strength Sport).
3. Muscle damage: This is how much damage you inflict on your muscles during your training. The muscle soreness you feel a couple of days later is caused by inflammation as your body sends in nutrients to repair the damage. If everything goes right, your body will build your muscles back bigger and stronger than they were before (study). This is by far the least important factor. In fact, you may even want to minimize muscle damage so that more of your resources are used to build muscle instead of repair it.

So there are technically three pathways that allow us to stimulate muscle growth, but the third pathway is too weak and tenuous to put much faith in. In fact, we might even want to minimize it. Mechanical tension and metabolic stress, however, are quite powerful. They’re a foundation that we can build a reliable bulking routine on top of.

In fact, you could build a bulking routine out of one or the other. If you really wanted to focus on mechanical tension, you could build muscle with a heavy strength training routine, whereas if you wanted to focus on metabolic stress, you could build your routine out of high-rep pump work. So long as the routines are properly programmed, both will produce a similar amount of muscle growth.

These pathways fit in with specificity. If you specifically train for muscle growth—doing a 6-rep set of chin-ups followed by a 12-rep set of biceps curls, say—then you’ll be building muscle via mechanical tension and metabolic stress.

If you were to train less specifically—with strength training, say—you might only stimulate muscle growth via mechanical tension. Less specificity, and therefore a slightly less relevant adaptation. That works well for a lot of guys. It tends to work less well for skinny guys.

The Principle of Progressive Overload

Progressive overload can be illustrated with the apocryphal story of the ancient Greek wrestler, Milo of Croton. Milo was eager to bulk up, so he started training by carrying around a young calf in his arms. He was skinny, so even that small calf was enough to challenge his small muscles, provoking an adaptation.

As his muscles grew bigger, so did the calf. Before long, he was famous for being able to carry around a full-grown bull on his back. In fact, Milo became so confident in his strength that he tried to tear a tree apart with his bare hands. Unfortunately, he got his hand stuck in a crevice in the trunk and got devoured by a pack of wolves. It’s amazing what one can accomplish with a little grit and patience.

Just like Milo, we must challenge our muscles by lifting just barely within our means, right up against the limit of what we’re capable of. Our muscles will realize that they need to grow bigger and stronger, and so they will. Then we need to use that greater strength to lift greater weights. And so on.

This is why weights were invented. They allow us to lift progressively heavier as we grow progressively stronger. Every workout, we can increase the load by a couple of pounds.

Barbells, dumbbells, and exercise machines are all great for this. Dumbbells and barbells stimulate more overall muscle growth by demanding that your muscles also work to stabilize the weight. However, regardless of what you’re using, the important thing is that you gradually lift heavier and heavier weights as you grow stronger.

Bodyweight exercises like push-ups and chin-ups are also valuable, but since you need to make them heavier as you grow stronger, they won’t stay bodyweight exercises for very long. Lowered chin-ups soon turn into bodyweight chin-ups. Bodyweight chin-ups soon turn into weighted chin-ups. This can make it tricky to build muscle with bodyweight workouts.

Every time that you lift weights, focus on progressive overload. Add a bit of weight or fight to get extra repetitions. Ensure that you’re always striving to outlift yourself. That’s how you’ll get bigger and stronger, just like Milo did. Eventually, with enough patience, you may even be devoured by wolves.

Lifting Often Enough (But Not Too Often)

Lifting weights stresses your muscles, provoking an adaption. Then we have to wait until the adaption takes place. During this period, we’re weaker (and often sore). Then, once we’ve adapted, we can stimulate a new round of muscle growth. We’ll be stronger than before, so we should be able to lift a little heavier or eke out another rep.

That gives us our bulking cadence:

• Lift
• Rest
• Lift more
• Rest
• Live even more

A good bulking workout will stimulate 24–72 hours of muscle growth in the muscles that you train, at which point you can lift weights again to stimulate a new wave of muscle growth (study).

This is why doing full-body workouts three times per week tends to be the quickest and most reliable way to build muscle, especially if you’re still relatively thin. That way, you can stimulate every muscle with a few challenging sets each workout, keeping your entire body growing steadily all week.

Of course, you could lift more often than that if you wanted to. You could split your workouts up into different body parts. For example, you could train your lower body one day, your upper body the next, allowing you to lift weights every day. It wouldn’t hurt. It just wouldn’t help, either.

Beginners are quite good at stimulating muscle growth but also quite vulnerable to muscle damage. They need to cautious about overdoing it. And if your first workout causes a week of crippling muscle soreness, you’ve overdone it.

For beginners, doing just a few challenging sets per muscle group per workout tends to be best. That makes it quite easy to stimulate a maximal amount of growth in all of your muscles with a full-body workout.

A good bulking routine might look like this:

• Full-body workout 1
• Rest
• Full-body workout 2
• Rest
• Full-body workout 2
• Rest
• Rest

You don’t need that second day of rest, but it can help clear up any lingering damage and fatigue before starting a fresh week.

Even at an intermediate level, full-body workouts can work quite well. If you ever run into a plateau, you might want to add a fourth day of training, though. Or maybe you enjoy training more often. 3-day routines work well, but they’re by no means mandatory, especially beyond a beginner level.

What Type of Lifting is Best for Gaining Size?

Now that we’ve talked about building muscle let’s talk about a few different types of workout routines that guys often use to bulk up. The frustrated skinny guy that I was, I’ve tried all of these. I even succeeded with some of them.

General Fitness Workouts

At one end of the spectrum, there’s the idea that we don’t need to get strong to build muscle. This is where bodyweight workouts, P90X, and CrossFit come in. This concept is even more tenuous: that we can become more muscular by becoming more physically fit.

Improving your physical fitness does cause a number of beneficial adaptations:

• Improved muscular endurance
• Better blood flow
• More efficient oxygen usage

General fitness workouts are great for you, don’t get me wrong. However, they’re also awful for making our muscles bigger. Yes, you’ll build some muscle, especially if you’re a total beginner, and especially if the exercises are still quite heavy for you. But you won’t build very much.

The problem with fitness-oriented training is that the limiting factor is rarely mechanical tension or metabolic stress in your muscles. You’re much more likely to be limited by your cardiovascular fitness, coordination, or pain threshold. And since your muscle strength isn’t a limiting factor, your muscles won’t see any need to grow bigger.

It doesn’t matter how gruelling the workouts are, how fearsomely your muscles burn with a Hellish fire, or how many times you throw up. If the stimulus isn’t heavy enough, it won’t cause you to adapt by becoming bigger and stronger (study, study, study, study, study). Now, don’t get me wrong. These aren’t bad programs. They’re popular for a reason: because they work quite well for most people. But we’re skinny guys who are eager to bulk up.

The Pros and Cons of Strength Training

At the other end of the spectrum, there’s this idea that strength is everything. This is a much more compelling argument, especially since it’s mostly correct. However, the Devil is the details.

When I started searching for bulking information online, I kept running into programs like Max/Size, Starting Strength, StrongLifts 5×5, Reverse Pyramid Training, nSuns, 5/3/1, and GreySkull LP. These are strength training programs that seem to be advertised to everyone, regardless of their goals. The idea is that if you want to build muscle, just get stronger at the big compound movements, and the muscle size will follow.

That’s where the “just lift heavy” mantra comes from. It comes from guys who are interested in eking more strength out of their already large muscles. By lifting heavy, they strengthen the neural connections between their brains and their muscle fibres, allowing them to contract all of their muscle fibres simultaneously for a single all-out rep (study). This adaptation, nicknamed neural gains, helps people lift more efficiently with the muscle they already have. It makes people stronger for their size.

Strength training is great in a few different ways:

• It’s focused on the big compound lifts. Most strength training programs are built around the squat, bench press, and deadlift, which are fantastic lifts for building muscle. They stimulate hundreds of muscles at once, loading them up with a tremendous amount of mechanical tension.
• It uses free weights. Strength training is usually done with a barbell, which does a great job of building up stabilizer muscles, bone density, and tendon and ligament strength. Furthermore, the strength that you build will be totally versatile.
• Progressive overload is always front and centre. They always keep the focus on gradually lifting more and more weight.
• The programs tend to be simple, focused, and methodical. You can’t get much simpler than Starting Strength or StrongLifts 5×5, and that’s a good thing. It makes lifting seem much less overwhelming.
• Oftentimes there’s enough rest between sets to catch out breath and recover our strength. Those longer rest times between sets can help us lift more weight for more sets.

Strength training does stimulate muscle growth, it doesn’t do it quickly or efficiently. Here’s why:

• Strength training technique tends to be centred around lifting heavier weights, not building muscle. For example, Starting Strength is build around the low-bar barbell back squat not because it’s better for building muscle but because it gives people better leverage, allowing them to load more weight on the barbell.
• The range of motion is totally arbitrary. Some people can squat deep; others can’t. There are a variety of reasons for this, ranging from technique to mobility to anatomy. With strength training, though, guys who can squat deep are usually incentivized to cut their range of motion short, missing out on the benefits of going deeper. Worse, the guys who can’t squat deep still need to hit depth, so they have to force it.
• The Big 3 lifts themselves are arbitrary. The squat, deadlift, and bench press aren’t the foundation of strength training programs because they’re the best lifts for bulking up; they’re just the lifts tested at powerlifting competitions. The chin-up, for example, is an incredible lift for stimulating muscle growth in your biceps and upper back, but since having big biceps is irrelevant to powerlifting performance, you won’t find it in most strength training programs.
• The rep ranges are too low for hypertrophy. Strength training is all about doing sets of 1–5 reps. That will yield some muscle growth, sure, but it’s by no means ideal for building muscle. For most of us, it’s better to spend most (but not all) of our time lifting in moderate rep ranges.
• The training volume is generally pretty low. Heavy compound lifts impose a large amount of stress on our central nervous system. As a result, we fatigue quite quickly. In fact, we fatigue before we’ve done enough training volume stimulated a maximal amount of muscle growth. 
• There’s too little upper-body development. Powerlifting is 2/3 lower-body training, which is perfectly fine, but most guys prefer to have a more balanced physique with more upper-body size and strength.
• Strength training workouts can be plodding due to the longer rest times between sets.

I find strength training interesting because it’s so close to being good for building muscle. If you want to learn more, we’ve got a full article about strength training for muscle growth. Long story short, strength training programs are great for developing strength, it’s just not quite the kind of strength that will help us build muscle. It’s also not ideal for avoiding injuries, improving our appearance, or improving our general health.

Besides, most of us aren’t trying to get stronger for our size. If we’re small, why limit ourselves to being strong for a small guy. Why not become big and strong?

The Pros and Cons of Bodybuilding

The word “bodybuilding” has a few different definitions. To some people, bodybuilding is a sport that involves cutting down to very low body-fat percentages, getting a spray tan, and stepping on stage in a thong. Most of us aren’t interested in becoming competitive bodybuilders, though, so we can forget that part of it.

To most people, bodybuilding is simply lifting weights to build muscle and become better-looking. We’ll use that definition. Still, though, most bodybuilding routines trickle down from the competitive bodybuilders, so the workout routines don’t tend to be much different.

Anything that helps to build muscle can be incorporated into a bodybuilding routine. As a result, there are a ton of different bodybuilding routines out there. Still, most of them have a few things in common:

• More emphasis on the pump (metabolic stress). Instead of loading up the bar with as much weight as possible and lifting for 1-5 reps, a bodybuilder will often prefer sets of 8-20 reps. They’ll focus on building up a mind-muscle connection, feeling the burn, and getting a pump.
• Totally customized lifting technique. Instead of adhering to powerlifting competition standards, bodybuilders have total flexibility with their lifting technique. They can squat, bench, and deadlift as deep as benefits them. No more, no less. They can also pick the variations that suit them best and allow them to stimulate the most muscle growth. This can make bodybuilding less likely to cause injuries, too.
• More exercise variety. Having more exercise variety won’t cause you to gain more muscle size, but it will cause you to build rounder, fuller, and more evenly developed muscles (study). Again, this can make bodybuilding less likely to cause injuries.
• More emphasis on the upper body. If you’re doing a push/pull/legs routine, about 2/3 of your training will be dedicated to your upper body, which is about twice as much as you’ll find in a standard strength training routine. This is done to improve aesthetics since aesthetics depends mostly on upper-body size.

Most of these things are quite good. If your only goal is to build a bigger and more aesthetic body, then your training will be quite good for that. And since there’s less of an emphasis on getting stronger at three specific lifts, the risk of injury tends to be quite a bit lower, too.

However, bodybuilding routines are often criticized for a few reasons:

• There’s no foundation of strength. Strength training routines are built around the big 3 compound lifts. Progress is measured in terms of how much strength you’re gaining on those lifts. This keeps strength training workouts focused and deliberate.
• There’s not enough mechanical tension. The main driver of muscle growth is mechanical tension, and bodybuilding workouts are notorious for not having enough of it. They’d benefit from putting more emphasis on the big compound lifts. Maybe not going as heavy as 1–4 reps, but certainly as heavy as 5–10 reps.
• Bodybuilding workouts are often quite inefficient. Bodybuilders have a reputation for being maximalists. They do leg extensions, leg curls, glute bridges, and calf raises instead of simply squatting.
• More days in the gym. The most classic bodybuilding routine is a push/pull/legs split. You train your chest, shoulders and triceps on Monday. Then you train your back and biceps on Tuesday. Then you train your legs and abs on Wednesday. And then you repeat the routine, finishing on Saturday. Sunday is a rest day.
• Bodybuilding workouts can be chaotic. You show up in the gym and do a dozen different exercises for your chest. But is your chest actually getting bigger and stronger? If so, what’s causing the growth? And what happens if you plateau? Increase the volume, I suppose.

So although bodybuilding tends to be better for bulking up than strength training, it also abandons many things that make strength training so appealing. As a result, many people combine the two types of training. This combined approach is called powerbuilding.

The Pros and Cons of PowerBuilding

Powerbuilding is a combination of powerlifting and bodybuilding training. Strength training is great for gaining strength, but it isn’t ideal for bulking up or becoming better looking. Bodybuilding is great for gaining size and aesthetics, but it loses that foundation of strength that makes strength training so badass. Powerlifting is the attempt to get the best of both worlds.

And you know, in most ways, powerbuilding succeeds. It will indeed make you big and strong. And for a long time, I thought this was surely the best way to bulk up.

Powerbuilding usually goes something like this:

• Start with strength training. Start your workout with big compound powerlifting lifts to improve your strength, make your workouts more efficient, and gain the many benefits of heavy barbell training.
• Finish with bodybuilding. Finish your workout with bodybuilding exercises to gain more muscle mass, improve your aesthetics, and bulk up your upper body.

There are a few different variations, though. For example, with daily undulating periodization (DUP), you’ll have a couple of heavy strength training days and a couple of lighter bodybuilding days every week.

That’s a pretty compelling approach to training. It won me over, anyway. Except then you realize that you’re also getting the downsides of each style of training:

• You’re still doing the powerlifting lifts with arbitrary technique and range of motion. You’re still doing those damn low-bar barbell back squats to legal powerlifting depth. Those still aren’t great for building muscle.
• You still have the mind-numbing inefficiency of a bodybuilding routine. You’re still doing a ton of different lifts with a high volume and in painfully high rep ranges. Except now you’re doing it after a strength training routine.
• Your workouts will take forever. Strength training workouts plod along slowly because you need to rest so long between sets. And bodybuilding workouts grind on for ages because of how many different isolation exercises they have you running through. With powerbuilding, you have to do both.

So if you don’t like strength training, you won’t like powerbuilding. And if you don’t like bodybuilding, you won’t like powerbuilding either. In fact, the only people who are going to like powerbuilding are the people who love both powerlifting and bodybuilding.

Over the years, I’ve realized that I like some aspects of strength training: the structure, the emphasis on big compound lifts, the idea of being deliberate and minimalistic, the focus on progressive overload. But I’m not a competitive powerlifter. I don’t want to go through the pain of optimizing my body for a sport that I don’t even play.

I’ve also realized that I like some things about bodybuilding, too. I like how the varied lifts produce more versatile muscles, I like the lower risk of injury, I like the extra emphasis on the upper body, and I love the idea of actually getting bigger. But I don’t want to run around doing leg extensions six days per week, I don’t want to abandon my foundation of strength, and I want a more structured approach to becoming bigger and stronger.

This is all to say that powerbuilding is cool for the people it’s designed for—people who love both powerlifting and bodybuilding—but I’ve realized that it isn’t for me.

Hypertrophy Training

When I’ve been talking about strength training and bodybuilding, I’ve mostly been talking about stereotypes. There are plenty of strength training programs that don’t recommend spending all of your time doing low-bar back squats. For instance, Chad Wesley Smith is a powerlifter who’s famous for his idea of “building a wide base.” His approach involves doing a wide variety of big compound lifts to become strong in general. Then, using that base of strength, you can specialize in the powerlifting lifts in the months leading up to a competition.

For another example, Mike Israetel, Ph.D., makes powerlifting programs that start with hypertrophy blocks, where you spend 1–3 months focused on simply building bigger muscles with big compound lifts. Then you do strength blocks, where you become stronger for your size. And finally, you do a “peaking” block where you prepare specifically for your powerlifting meet. It’s only during these peaking blocks that you spend all of your time doing low-rep powerlifting variations.

Again, he knows that the big powerlifting lifts aren’t ideal for gaining general size and strength. So even with his powerlifters, he recommends focusing on other big compound lifts for most of their training. It’s only in the 2–3 months leading up to a competition that they focus more exclusively on the powerlifting lifts.

These styles of strength training don’t suffer from any of the downsides that I mentioned when criticizing strength training. However, these aren’t the most popular strength training programs. Furthermore, these aren’t “general strength” programs; they’re specifically designed for people interested in becoming competitive powerlifters.

The same is true of bodybuilding. There are plenty of great bodybuilding programs out there that are built around the big compound lifts. Except, again, they don’t tend to be the most popular programs. They aren’t enough to reverse the negative bodybuilding stereotypes.

But this is all to say that if we back off from the strict training styles associated with strength training and bodybuilding, we can build a routine that has the advantages of both, with none of the downsides. There’s a perfect word for it, too: hypertrophy training. “Hypertrophy” means muscle growth. It’s not bodybuilding or powerlifting; it’s just bulking.

The Big Five Approach to Building Muscle

Most strength training programs are focused on the Big Three lifts: the back squat, the deadlift, and the bench press. And with good reason, too: they’re fantastic lifts for developing and testing strength. They’re not bad for building muscle, either. Even so, unless you’re a powerlifter, you’ll probably want to use a different approach. The Big Three are great for developing the lower body and spinal erectors, but they inevitably lead to physiques with limited upper-body size and strength.

If you’re trying to bulk up in a way that improves your general strength, muscle size, and aesthetics, focus on the “Big 5” movement patterns:

• Squats (knee-dominant)
• Horizontal press (chest dominant)
• Deadlifts (hip and back dominant)
• Overhead press (shoulder dominant)
• Upper-body pull (back and biceps dominant)

That gives us a program around 3/5ths upper body (depending on how you count the deadlift), which we think is a good balance for overall size, general strength, and aesthetics. Because we’re stimulating more overall muscle growth, it also lets us bulk up faster and can help prevent extra calories from spilling over into fat gain.

If we had to choose a best bulking lift for each of those movement patterns, we’d wind up with something like this:

• Front Squat: Given that they allow a deeper range of motion, front squats tend to be better for overall quad development. Plus, having the barbell in front does a better job of bulking up the core and upper back, as well as helping to improve posture. That’s why, overall, we prefer front-loaded squats for bulking.
• Conventional Deadlift: The conventional deadlift is a great exercise for bulking up the hamstrings, hips, lower back, and spinal erectors. This is going to thicken up our thin torsos.
• The Bench Press: Most thin powerlifters bench with a fairly wide grip to minimize the range of motion, allowing them to lift more weight. We want to do the opposite, using a moderate grip and bringing more overall muscle mass into the lift. As a result, the moderate-grip bench press often does a better job of building the chest, upper chest, shoulders, and triceps.
• The Overhead Press: The bench press is a great lift for building a bigger chest, and it’s also pretty great for developing the fronts of our shoulders, especially if we use a narrower grip and touch the bar lower on our chests. The overhead press, though, is great for bulking up our upper traps, the sides of our shoulders, and our serratus muscles, making it a crucial lift for building broader shoulders and a stronger-looking upper body.
• Chin-Ups: There’s no better exercise for the biceps and upper back than heavy chin-ups. You’ll want to do them with an underhand or neutral grip and a full range of motion, starting from a dead hang and bringing your chest all the way to the bar. Rows are sometimes used for this, but they fail to develop the biceps (study), the range of motion is too short, and they have a poor strength curve. They’re a good accessory exercise for the deadlift, but chin-ups are a much better bulking exercise overall—especially for your biceps (study).

However, these are all fairly advanced lifts. They’re what an experienced lifter would use to test and develop his already formidable strength, not what a beginner would use to bulk up for the first (or second) time.

If you’re already big and strong, we talk more about these end-game lifts here. But if you’re still fairly skinny, let’s talk about the best lifts for gaining your first 20–30 pounds.

• The Goblet Squat: Goblet squats are done by holding a dumbbell on your chest. They’re simple and easy to learn, and they bring your shoulders and biceps into the lift, making them a true brute strength lift. This allows beginners to build a ton of muscle and full-body strength. Of course, dumbbells only go so heavy, so once you can goblet squat the heaviest dumbbell for a dozen reps, it’s time to progress to the front squat. (Or, if the front squat is too difficult, to a high-bar back squat.)
• The Romanian Deadlift: Full deadlifts require a great deal of hip mobility and spinal stabilizer strength, making them a poor choice for beginners. A better lift is the Romanian deadlift, where you start in a standing position and then lower the barbell as low as you can comfortably go. It’s going to bulk up our posterior chain just as well, but it’s safer and easier to do correctly.
• The Push-Up (Or Dumbbell Bench Press): Once you get strong enough, the barbell bench press is hard to avoid. There’s only so heavy you can load a push-up. For beginners, though, it’s usually best to start by mastering the push-up. They’re just as good for developing the chest, but they also help bulk up your abs and serratus muscles (the muscles under your armpits). When you can do 20 push-ups with a full range of motion, switch to dumbbells. When the dumbbells are too heavy to get into position comfortably, switch to a barbell.
• The Incline Bench Press (or Landmine Press): It takes good shoulder mobility and stability to press weight overhead with good technique. As a beginner, you can bulk up your shoulders with dumbbell incline bench presses or landmine presses. They’ll develop the strength and mobility you need to press weights overhead.
• Lowered Chin-Ups (or Lat Pulldowns): Most skinny guys can’t do sets of chin-ups with a full range until they’ve built up a significant amount of size and strength in their biceps and upper back. You can start with lowered chin-ups or lat pulldowns (or even dumbbell pullovers). Rows done alongside biceps curls can help, too.

Because we aren’t locked into the powerlifting lifts, we have the option of starting with lifts that make bulking up much, much easier for beginners. In fact, I’d already gained 40 pounds by the time I tested our Bony to Beastly Bulking Program. Going back to these beginner variations spurred on a new wave of growth. That’s how I wound up gaining 55 pounds overall.

These variations can seem simple, but their simplicity means that your muscles need to work damn hard to move the weight. For example, you won’t find a harder full-body lift than the goblet squat. You’ll often see grizzled lifters challenge themselves to see how many reps they can goblet squat with the heaviest dumbbell (often 120 pounds).

However, we aren’t locked into doing a minimalist program, either. Narrowing in on just a few specific lifts will cause our muscles to develop specifically to those lifts. Instead of becoming bigger and stronger in general, they become bigger and stronger in a more specialized way. This isn’t really a problem, per se—strong muscles are strong muscles—but it can make us more specialized instead of more versatile.

For example, if you’re a skinny guy who’s trying to bulk up his lanky arms, you’re definitely going to want to be doing biceps curls. Chin-up variations are great, sure, but you’ll only get complete biceps development if you also include curls in your routine. Not only will that give your biceps more overall stimulus, but it will also work them through a different range of motion with a different strength curve, causing different muscle fibres in your biceps to grow.

There are a few different accessory exercises that we consider fairly essential for ectomorphs:

• Lateral raises to build broader shoulders.
• Biceps and triceps exercises for bulking up lanky arms.
• Chest flyes to help bulk up the chest.
• Core exercises to bulk up small ab muscles.
• Neck exercises to help bulk up skinny necks.

That last point is a peculiar one. Neck training is super common in sports training. If you play football, rugby, or fight, you need a thick neck to defend against concussions and knockouts. Neck size also has a huge impact on how strong and aesthetic someone looks. But for some reason, hardly any strength training or powerlifting programs include any neck training.

I asked Eric Helms, Ph.D., about this. He’s a top hypertrophy researcher and a competitive natural bodybuilder. He told me that professional bodybuilders don’t bulk up their necks because the steroids already cause neck growth. As a result, further neck training could result in overly thick necks that restrict airflow (causing sleep apnea and such).

Developing an overly thick neck isn’t a concern for non-obese people who don’t use steroids, of course. Still, bodybuilding culture flows down from the professional bodybuilders, so neck training isn’t a judging factor. So the natural bodybuilders don’t train their necks either. Then with strength training, neck strength isn’t relevant on the big 3 powerlifting lifts. It doesn’t matter, and so it’s ignored.

The Last Word

This has been a long post. You surely know everything by now. Even if you don’t, you still have the rest of the site to explore. To wrap up, the best way to bulk up is to:

• Choose the best exercise variations for stimulating muscle growth. Think of lifts like goblet squats, push-ups, Romanian deadlifts, chin-ups/pulldowns, biceps curls, triceps extensions, and lateral raises.
• Focus on the mythical hypertrophy rep range. You can build muscle with anywhere from 4–40 reps, but sets of 6–15 reps tend to be the most efficient (study).
• Focus on progressive overload. Try to add weight to your lifts. Strive to eke out more repetitions than last time. Fight to outlift the man you were last workout.

We have a free bulking newsletter for naturally thin guys. If you want a full bulking program, including a 5-month workout routine, diet guide, recipe book, and online coaching, check out our Bony to Beastly Bulking Program. Or, if you want an intermediate bulking routine, check out our Outlift Intermediate Bulking Program. If you liked this article, you’ll love our full programs.