A Hardgainer’s Guide To Build Muscle – Part 2 – Diet

Time for part 2 of my five part series on gaining muscle as a hardgainer. As we have already shown, hardgainer’s can’t train like everyone else. You have to train like your life depends on it and more. Well now that we have that out of the way, I am going to take you through the most CRUCIAL part of gaining muscle as a hardgainer: diet.

As a hardgainer you know your diet sucks. If it didn’t you wouldn’t be a hardgainer, I swear. You don’t want to lose those precious abs and you really want to build muscle. Well, lucky for you, bulking doesn’t necessarily have to mean losing abs at all. As a hardgainer you have a very hard time putting on fat in the first place, so buckle up, grab your fork and knife, and lets dive in to out diet rules.

Diet Rule #1 – Eat Like A Horse

If you aren’t eating twice what you normally eat already start today. Hardgainer’s have fast fucking metabolisms that Usain Bolt couldn’t even beat and you have to over-fuel that metabolism. Giving yourself extra calories on a daily basis is a must for hardgainers.

Gaining mass means you have to be in a state of caloric surplus, meaning that you need to take in more calories than you burn each day. This is especially important for hardgainers. Keeping your diet high in calories is tougher for a hardgainer because you have such a high metabolism.

The easiest way to calculate what you need to eat to gain yourself mass is to take how much you are eating now (probably not enough) and add 500 calories to it. If after a few weeks you still haven’t added any mass add another 500 calories to your diet. At this point you definitely should be eating enough to gain mass.

Diet Rule #2 – Take In Your Fat

Now I feel like it’s safe to assume that you all know that you must have protein in order to gain muscle, but what you don’t see taken into consideration a lot of the time is fat intake. I’ve seen lifters avoid fat like it’s the plague and they tend to never get anywhere with their bodies. Now I know you don’t want to lose your abs so I want you to know that taking in fat will not make you gain fat. It can even aid in fat loss.

Fat is essential to hormone production. You know that hormone, testosterone, that makes you build muscle. Well, fat is essential to it’s creation. I’m not telling you to go out and eat a bunch of fat and you’ll end up getting steroid-like results, but make sure to include it in your diet to make sure your hormones are being produced correctly and your body is working at it’s best.

Diet Rule #3 – Eat Your Carbs

Carbs aren’t for you if you’re overweight, but as a hardgainer you aren’t overweight at all. You can handle carbs and if you are trying to bulk up you need them if you want any hope of gaining any muscle. Eating 4000 calories a day in fat and protein can be a very rough task.

Take in carbs, but only clean ones. Whole grains, vegetables, fruits, and starches will give you healthy sources of carbs that will help you get all the calories in that you need. And on top of that you are getting high quality carbs that will fuel your workouts every day.

A Hardgainer’s Guide To Build Muscle – Part 1 – Working Out

Today is going to be my first in a 5 part series covering all of the aspects that hardgainers need to keep in mind when trying to gain muscle.

If you are a hardgainer, you know it. You are skinny, weak, and have a damn hard time gaining muscle. You have had a hard time up until now when it comes to getting bigger, but this series will help get your physique on the right track.

Today’s portion of this series is going to be on the most enjoyable part of being a hardgainer, the working out part.

Finding a great program for a hardgainer is like finding real tits on a Hooters girl. It just doesn’t happen. You can search all over but you will almost never find a truly effective program that works very well for a hardgainer, but lifting rules to follow; I can give you those.

Instead of giving you an exact program to follow, I am going to give you a set of rules to follow and you can apply them to your program. If you want an exact personalized program, go over to my train with me page and I can help you out.

Hardgainer Rule #1 – Lift With All You’ve Got

As a hardgainer you’re at a disadvantage. This disadvantage is that you aren’t as big or strong as most and can’t become that without lifting as heavy and hard as possible. This isn’t much of a hardgainer rule but a rule for everybody. TO GAIN MUSCLE YOU HAVE TO LIFT HARD. Simple as that. No matter what program you are on or what you eat, if you’re not lifting as hard as you can you will NOT gain as much muscle as you have potential for. Lift your ass of.

Hardgainer Rule #2 – DO NOT Do Body Part Splits

Body part splits are great . . . for guys who AREN’T hardgainers. A body part split doesn’t gain you the most mass at a quick rate. A body part split will refine your physique. At this point you need to build your physique. Building your physique requires doing all of the bigger movements in conjunction with each other. For example, don’t give your chest, back, and shoulders each their own day, group them together and work them on the big movements with a upper lower split (I suggest a 2x per week frequency for this) which leads me to my next rule . . .

Hardgainer Rule #3 – Use Compound Exercises

Compound exercises kick ass when it comes to packing on a serious amount of mass in a short time. Compound exercises make you use multiple muscle at the same time and allow you to use the greatest amount of weight compared to isolation exercises. A larger amount of weight = a larger amount of muscle mass (math is my strong point). Compound exercises will allow you to work less exercises but still hit all of your muscles in a very efficient manner. As a hardgainer you need as much bang or your buck as you can so compound lifts should be your best friend (and your only friend) until you lose your hardgainer title.

Follow these lifting rules to the body you want and keep reading each week for the rest of this series.

Good Luck and Good Lifting

Sparky