The Fitness Adviser

With so many people trying to lose weight, and so much information on fat loss targeted towards those people, the skinny guy (or girl who wants to add a bit of good looking muscle) gets left out in the cold. As someone who has been skinny and had to work to put on weight and muscle, I know how frustrating it is to have trouble putting on weight. You work out, eat a tremendous amount of food, but still aren’t able to put on weight, and sometimes even lose weight.

At a certain point, you throw in the towel, blame your genes and metabolism, and forget about your dream of turning into a ripped guy. Well, it’s time to reawaken your dream of getting ripped, because it wasn’t your metabolism that was holding you back. It was just the way you were going about putting on muscle mass.

[I look at this picture and see a man's defiance against those who would see him fail. It really motivates me not to give up at whatever it is that I'm trying to succeed in.]

It’s All About The Calories

To go about putting muscle mass on a skinny build, the first thing you have to do is start putting on weight. There’s only one rule for putting on weight. That rule is taking in more calories than you expend. To do that, you’re going to have to track how many calories your currently taking in to maintain your weight, and then take in more in order to gain weight. You may also be surprised to find that you’re taking in a lot less calories than you thought.

The reason for this is that a lot of skinny people eat a lot of food when they happen to eat (causing immense jealousy in the dieting crowd), but in general don’t think too much about food and often skip meals. So the first thing you’re going to want to do is make sure that you’re getting in at least 3 meals a day. I say at least because depending on how much you want to eat per meal, you may end up deciding to eat more than 3 meals a day.

Stay Away From “Empty Calories”

The one thing that a lot of large and skinny people have in common is that they’re both lacking in vitamins and nutrients. If you want to gain muscle mass, your body is going to have to have the nutrients necessary to grow. To make that happen, you have to eat real food. While gaining weight you can cheat occassionally (like putting ice cream in your shake), but most of your calories has to come from nutrient rich food like lean meat, nuts, vegetables, fruit, whole wheat bread and milk products.

I also want to warn you that as you put on weight and muscle, you’re going to gain a bit of fat too. Don’t stress about it as there’s no way of avoiding putting on some fat as you gain weight. What you have to do is put on the muscle mass and fat, and then once you gain enough weight, get off your weight gaining diet and trim off the fat from your build.

How Many Calories You Should Be Taking In

Once you’ve already tracked how many calories you currently take in to maintain your weight, you’ll need about 500 more a day to gain a pound a week. The catch is that because of your exercise program, you’re going to have to be taking in more. Because of this, many people recommend not doing aerobic exercise while putting on muscle mass.

I disagree, and personally suggest that you continue doing your aerobic exercise alongside the weight lifting, and just adjust your diet accordingly. If Michael Phelps can eat 12,000 calories a day, then you can get in the amount of calories that you need to make up for your exercise routine.

Training To Gain Muscle Mass

The trick to training to gain muscle mass is to train your muscles to “fatigue.” The easiest way of doing this is to do an exercise for 6-10 repetitions and 3 sets. The exercises considered to give you the most “bang for your buck” are the benchpress, squat and deadlift. (You can get more on that here.)

If you feel sore the next day in the muscle group that you were targetting, then your mass building workout was successful. Once that muscle group isn’t sore, you’re ready for to work it out again. Just make sure that the first week you workout you use extremely light weight so you’ll be able to get your form right before you really start training. (This is especially important for the squats and deadlifts!)

As promised…How To Make The “Rafi Bar-Lev Super Shake”

Here are the ingredients to my super shake for putting on mass:

1) Milk

2) Two scoops of ice cream

3) 4 strawberries

4) Half a banana

5) A little whey protein

Not only will this shake help you put on weight and muscle mass, it tastes great too!

Filed under:
Fitness 101, Weight Gain by Rafi