Hardgainer

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One thing the average person doesn’t understand about hardgainers is that they have to really work at putting on weight and muscle. Most people who are bodybuilding are trying to shed pounds and fat, not put on more weight.

But the hardgainer needs to make significant changes in his or her diet and workout program to actually put on any bulk. These simple hardgainer weight gain tips will assist you in your journey to a better and healthier body.

Now if you want to gain weight and add muscle you can’t just start eating fast food and chocolate bars. I know, I was hoping for that too. There is a right way to go about it and I will explain it as easily as possible to you.

Since you are interested in building a better body I assume that you are also into building a healthier body, and to do that you must eat healthy things. To build muscle you must be consuming high quality nutrients from your food and also your supplements. Since you are a hardgainer you can cheat on this diet and eat junk, but whats the point? Just eat the best and higher quality foods and you will grow.

By higher quality foods I mean low glycemic carbohydrates and only low fat proteins and foods with high quality fats. By doing this you are optimizing your bodies ability to add weight via muscle, which is the sole reason for doing this.

As in all things in life it is best to have a plan and then to follow the plan. Being a hardgainer you have never bulked up in your life so this will probably come as a shock to you at first but stay with the plan, it is your best chance to add muscle.

Hardgainer Weight Gain No-Brainer Basics

If you follow this diet program correctly most of the weight you gain will be in the form of muscle. But some of it will be in the form of fat because the body naturally turns excess calories into fat for later usage. But be eating a low fat diet you will be minimizing your fat and maximizing your muscle gain. Seriously, do you really think that with your genetics you can become fat? I don’t think so.

Hardgainer Weight Gain Rule No. 1

You will really have to start increasing your protein intake. This may sound hard at first but it is essential for success. You will need to be consuming at least 1.5 grams of protein for each pound that you weigh. I’m talking your full body weight not your lean muscle mass.

So if you way 140 pounds you will need to be digesting 210 grams of protein per day. That sounds like a lot and it is, but you have a special metabolism that needs this much. You will have to divide this over 6 to 8 meals per day. And you will need to drink a lot of water to process this through your body.

The time between meals must be at least 90 minutes and a maximum of 3 hours. Anything over 3 hours and your metabolism will start eating into your muscle for energy. You are like a hot running furnace constantly burning calories and you have to feed the furnace to keep up with and outpace its needs.

Your best sources for protein are chicken, turkey, egg whites, tuna, shrimp and 93% lean red meats. There are others but I’m not going to go into extreme detail here. Stick with the chicken and tuna since they are cheap and easy to make.

Hardgainer Weight Gain Rule No. 2

We can’t gain weight eating only protein so we have to eat other things that our bodies require to survive. Carbohydrates are a staple of every diet and its no different here. We are going to increase our carbohydrate intake to anywhere from 1.5 to 2 grams per pound of our body weight.

We did the math above so its practically the same so I won’t cover it again. Needless to say its a lot and it is extremely essential. Carbohydrates are the energy stores for your muscles and will help you do your workouts easier and faster.

Carbohydrates are the transport mechanism of amino acids from the protein into the muscle tissue. They increase insulin levels which is the train that the amino acids rides. It is important that we are eating low glycemic complex carbohydrates so that we aren’t creating a fat train which is unhealthy and doesn’t function as well.

Some good examples that you should be eating are brown rice, oatmeal, pasta and sweet potatoes. There are more of course but these should be your staples. We will want to limit the high glycemic complex carbs for after the workout to get the energy into the muscle as fast as possible. Higher glycemic complex carbs and simple carbs will jump start the recovery process and bring energy to your muscles.

Here is an important tip. Half of your carbohydrates should be eaten between the time that the body is most receptive and post workout. You body is most receptive in the morning or first meal. Here is an example using our 140 pound person which needs between 210 and 280 grams per day.

Lets use 280 to make the math easier. If we split 280 in half we get 140 grams of carbs. We now need to split that in half for the morning and the post workout. So we will need to eat around 70 grams of carbohydrates in the morning (first meal) and 70 grams more after our workout.

Also, the morning meal carbohydrates will be complex low glycemic carbs and the post workout will be higher glycemic and simple carbs. This is all about getting energy to the muscle and rebuilding the stores of energy in our liver and blood. Without energy our muscles can not grow.

The rest of the 140 grams should be split into our meals during the day. It is best to refrain from eating complex carbohydrates after 6:30 pm, unless you are working out that late, because your insulin sensitivity goes down at night. Which means you run the risk of storing carb calories at night, which is saying you are going to be adding fat to your body.

Part of your carbohydrate diet should be made up of fibrous carbs like green beans or broccoli of about 15 to 20 grams. You should get another 15 to 20 grams of at dinnertime. This will help keep your digestive tract moving and healthy, if you know what I mean.

Hardgainer Weight Gain Rule No. 3

Most people have a belief that removing all fats from their diet will make them thin. That is NOT TRUE. There are good fats and bad fats, but your body does need fats to function. Our brain is 40% fat, so see what happens if you get no fat in your diet.

Fats are required for optimum hormone production and it therefore follows in muscle growth. Testosterone is a hormone and without enough fat in your diet your testosterone levels will fall off the charts.

But we will concentrate on the good fats like the Omega Essential fatty acids. Essential means that the body can’t produce it on its own. These fats which are in oil form are important for your recovery due to inflammation, enhanced nutrient partitioning due to their ability to neutralize enzymes necessary for fat storage and mood enhancement.

One good thing is that we won’t need to take an outrageous amount in our diet like we did with protein and carbs. Three tablespoons per day for men and 1-1/2 tablespoons for women in the form of flax seed oil will suffice. You can also get it in fish oils or extra virgin canned olive oil.

I have found the best time to take them is my last 2 meals of the day. I split them between the two meals. It helps to squelch my cravings for sweets that I get because of the reduced carbohydrates I eat at night. Remember, no carbs after 6:30 unless its a post-workout meal.

Although this article is primarily written about nutrition I will remind you that you should be cutting down on your cardio workouts. No more than 20 minutes a time and 2 times a week at most. Being a hardgainer you don’t want to burn excess calories anywhere because you will have to try to eat up the difference.

You will need to be taking hardgainer supplements which I cover in another post that you can find here. Hardgainer Supplements

Hardgainer Weight Gain Rule No. 4

This may seem like it shouldn’t be covered here also but this is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT. You need plenty of time for rest and recovery. Every day you should be getting a minimum of 7 hours sleep, 9 if you can swing it. Your muscles grow while you are sleeping and also they are recovering from the workouts.

This is where it all happens and you can’t cheat this one thing and do the others and expect to gain weight or muscle. Your hardgainer body is genetically designed to metabolize at a higher rate than most people and one way to slow that down is to sleep.

Lack of sleep messes up hormone production and energy levels and even your mood. You need to be running at peak efficiency to get your body in growing mode so get some sleep.

Using these simple hardgainer weight gain tips will help you defeat your genetics and finally get that body that you have been working so hard for. Discipline and following a plan have changed people and civilizations for centuries, you can do the same.

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Welcome to Part 2. Picking up where I left off on Part 1 variability and variance is important to keep your muscles in a state of change in order to get them to grow. The body has been designed to adjust to changes and then fall into a rhythm. This rhythm stops you from growing.

Another tool that we will use to change things up is to alternate between 3 week periods of high volume workouts with 3 week periods of higher intensity workouts. Higher intensity only means that we will be workout out with heavier weights.

This constant change stresses the body and muscle into having to grow to make up for the difference in work being done, maximizing your growth potential. Doing the same program over and over only makes you and your muscles bored, thus no growth.

One thing that I don’t think enough is made of when it comes to weight lifting is form. Form is crucial to getting stronger and not hurting yourself. Proper form will make the difference in real gains and fake gains. What I mean by that is that you say you can lift a weight but you actually are swinging the weight.

This can cause serious injury and also cheats you of your gains. What I mean by cheating you of your gains is that you are not actually letting your muscles do the actual work that it requires to lift this amount of weight, so they don’t grow into the job. Set your ego aside and lift with proper form what you can lift.

Now we need to switch channels a little bit here. We have been concentrating on build the muscle and adding mass so lets not forget about doing things that will take away our gains. One of those things is aerobic exercise.

I’m all for being cardiovascularly fit and all but if you are a hardgainer than you need to minimize the calories that you burn. Every excess calorie burned through aerobic exercise has to be made up for with food. You will already be eating more than you ever have so I suggest just cutting back on over-doing your aerobic exercise.

Walking and riding a bike are perfectly fine as long as you aren’t doing them for more than 15 to 25 minutes a couple times a week. But running hard by playing a sport like soccer or basketball can hurt your progress. If you truly want to maximize your abilities you just need to keep the aerobic exercise to a minimum.

This goes back to our nervous system’s ability to recover. The hardgainer’s nervous system needs more rest so that it can supply the muscle with energy and hormones to recover and grow. Needless caloric burns take away from the growth and health of the muscle.

If you really want to make significant gains building muscle you should be working out with primarily free weights. The reason, well there are several, but the main reason is that free weights require your muscle to work harder and the stabilizer muscles are brought into play to balance the weight.

Working out with machines cheats you of some of your work because you are working in a 2 dimensional space whereas we are a 3 dimensional being. Whenever you move or do anything in life your body is working all the muscles in a 3 dimensional space and that’s how they are designed to grow.

Now I’m not saying that you should never use a machine. Some exercises are actually better done with a machine since it does isolate the muscle being worked, but for now we will be using barbells and dumbbells. Other exercises like dips use mainly your own weight in the beginning but you are moving through 3 dimensions of space using all of your stabilizer muscles at the same time.

Now you get a bonus, a complete Hardgainer’s workout. Just Click on the highlighted words below or right click and save for future reference.

Click Here –>Hardgainer’s Sample Mass Building Training Routine

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If you are a hardgainer than you probably have one trait in common with all hardgainers. Well, actually you have the hardgainer trait also but the one I’m talking about is that you are probably weight training too much. Hardgainer Training is usually about backing it down a bit.

Being a hardgainer is frustrating so we tend to over do our workouts thinking that that will break through the barrier of our genetics. The truth of the matter is that you need to back it down a little. Three to four workouts per week is the maximum, and none lasting more than 60 minutes.

I know that you have read that you need to work your muscles to get them to grow but you can over do it and you just happen to be one of those people that can’t over do it and grow. You also have to back down your cardiovascular exercise. Burning calories is going against you so no 60 minute jogs or aerobics class. Low volume aerobic exercise for no more than 20 minutes will help you overcome your metabolism.

Your main goal here is to reduce your caloric expenditure and to increase your caloric intake. Everything that you do that burns calories is going against you and you need to seriously take this into account.

You have probably read or tried many different bodybuilding workouts by now and you have found that nothing is working for you. You now must realize that you are a hardgainer and you must do a hardgainer training workout.

Hardgainer Training Workout Principles

The 60 Minute Rule: Never workout for more than 60 minutes. You will only be wasting your time and energy if you do and you will also be hurting your chances to grow. In general your muscle building hormones like growth hormone and testesterone levels start to drop at 60 minutes.

Also your stored energy fuel is now depleted so you will start to eat away at your very own muscle tissue. Your carbohydrates that are stored in your muscle cells and liver and your glycogen, which is the spark that makes your muscles contract, is now gone. So STOP!

If you are stubborn and decide that you will continue know that you are heading down the overtraining road. This is no place to be, you get nothing out of it except ego. When you overtrain, your body doesn’t have enough of anything to recover properly, which leads to loss of strength and muscle mass.

This one is a no-brainer since it is part of most bodybuilding programs. Keep the rest between sets at a minimum. Ninety seconds is the most you should rest and this is for a very good reason. It keeps you on your toes the whole 60 minutes and it also turns your workout into a cardiovascular event.

This will maximize your output of growth hormone too, the powerful muscle building/fat burning hormone.The beauty of moving it along also enhances muscle voluminizing, which is when water goes into the muscle cells and makes you look firm and toned, you know, pumped.

You should not weight train for more than 2 days in a row. I know that you have a burning desire to get the body you always dreamed of but overtraining isn’t the secret. This is EXTREMELY important for hardgainers.

While some people have been genetically created to be able to recover easily from 6-day workout routines you are not one of them. It is common for most hardgainers to have trouble recovering and growing from 4-day workout routines.

We are all made differently and the hardgainer’s nervous system can become overloaded from two days of high intensity weight training. Nothing to be ashamed of, we are who we are. You can eat whatever you want and not gain weight, most people can’t, so it evens out.

If you do decide to go over the 4 day per week workout you must know that you are wasting your time and that your depressed nervous system will not be functioning at peak levels for you to grow muscle. Eventually your depressed nervous system will not only stop you from growing but will take away the gains that you have already made.

Another change to make in your workouts could possibly be the number of repetitions you do per set. This should be in the range between 6 to 15. The reason for these numbers is that it has been scientifically proven to maximize your growth hormone output.

This number of repetitions will give you a great pump, thus filling your muscle cells with water and nutrients that give them the ability to recover and grow bigger. The final reason is that you are not over-taxing your muscle and therefore losing control of the weight and injuring yourself.

(Note: This rule does not apply to the calves and abdominals as these muscles usually respond better to higher repetition ranges, in the order of 13-15 reps).

It is important that you make progress while you are working out. To progress means to add weight or reps every week or two. This increases the work load on your muscles which requires your body to grow to make up for it.

Realize that your progression can come in many forms, whether you are adding reps or adding weight. Just make your goal to continue to make improvements in muscle size and tone.

One thing our bodies have evolved to do is to become accustomed to routines. If you want to continue to make your muscles grow you must vary your hardgainer training workouts. Change is good and change can be as little as doing an exercise differently.

Like doing curls with dumb bells instead of with curl bar.Changing reps or order of exercises all make a difference to your muscle development. Even just changing the rest between sets works.

I’m going to stop the article here for now since it has become very long. I will post Part 2 very soon and will go into greater detail into hardgainer training.

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