How to Put on Muscle if You are Skinny

While there is a lot of science about building muscle and reams and reams of literature on the biology of muscle and nutrition the following tips are the simplified foundations that you can use to make sure the effort you put in is rewarded with more lean muscle mass.

High Load Weightlifting

Muscles only grow when they have been stressed to a certain point. Think of it as forcing your body to adapt to new pressures. This means if you lift a light weight you do not challenge your strength at all even if you lift it one hundred times. If you lift a heavy weight about 8-10 times before you get to failure however your body knows it needs to adapt and you spark the beginnings of muscle growth.

What happens is the muscle fibers that get stressed from a heavy load develop many small tears in them that need to be repaired. The body will divert energy to this task and the repairs will come with a benefit. A layer of new muscle fiber on top of the healed tears. This is muscle growth and over time can add inches to your arms, chest, legs or whatever you train!

In a nutshell: Work out hard. Lift heavy weights.

High Calorie Diet

To put on muscle if you are skinny requires enough energy to fuel the muscle growth described above. You get this by simply eating more as calories are basically energy to do many things in your body including muscle building.

However this is not as easy as cramming your face with hamburgers every day. You need to eat the right foods to get the nutrients you need for muscle growth as well as avoiding the foods that inhibit increasing muscle mass. A basic checklist to a high calorie muscle gain diet is:

• Eat 5-6 meals a day to keep the body fueled.
  
• Eat calorie dense foods to avoid bloating
  
• Eat high protein foods
  
• Avoid processed foods
  
• Eat lots of high calorie vegetables
  
• Eat foods that promote testosterone like broccoli
  
• Eat enough calories to satisfy your energy requirements for rest and activity plus a bunch more for muscle building surplus. (hint: This is a lot more than you usually do if you are a skinny guy.)

Lots of Rest

The last piece of the puzzle to put on muscle for skinny guys is rest and recovery. This is often neglected by the urge to over train in the mistaken belief that more weight training equals more muscle.

The secret to better bodybuilding is to treat the recovery process with some respect. Your body does not build muscle when you lift weights and create the muscle fiber tears. That is like a blueprint to muscle growth. It also does not build muscle when you eat, that is just fueling the body for the final muscle growth phase.

Rest, sleep, relaxation. This is when the body has the time and energy to anabolise which is the scientific term for the part of metabolism that creates and adds mass to the body.

This means you should not be hitting the gym every day or even every second day if you are working out with a high intensity. You should also be getting a good 8 hours sleep every night because muscle building growth hormones are released when you sleep well and deeply. Keep this in mind and take full advantage of this phase of putting on muscle because you can be efficient and get great results this way.

Using these 3 basic concepts you should be able to work out how to put on muscle if you are skinny, or not for that matter. The rules can help anyone gain weight via lean muscle mass.

However if you want more detail than this including the proper techniques to lift weights, a very important pre-weight lifting regime as well as proper eating notes, meal plans and the science behind rest and recovery there is a guide that can help you.

No nonsense muscle building is a best selling downloadable guide including videos, e-book, animations and mp3s that can give you the complete information to become bigger, stronger and more confident no matter how skinny you are.

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