How To Build Big Muscle – 5 Steps To Beat Your Skinny Genetics And Build Big Muscles

If you’re a skinny guy hardgainer who’s looking at how to build big muscle and gain weight fast, then you’d be forgiven for thinking that there is a conspiracy out to prevent you from achieving your goal. Unfortunately, most of what we see in the press is not good advice for the hardgainer and ectomorph and can actually cause you to spend a lot of wasted time, money and energy following it.

Below are my top 5 steps to beating your skinny genetics and knowing how to get big muscle fast.

Nutrition
Proper is the real secret to beating your skinny genetics and knowing how to build big muscle fast. It’s also where most hardgainers fail in their efforts.

Imagine your body is a car. The bigger and more powerful the car, the more gas it needs. A Ferrari needs more juice than a Fiat, right? Well, the same is true when it comes to building big muscles.

Increase your calorie intake to at least 3,500 calories per day, and split over 6 meals. This will ensure a constant supply of energy and muscle building nutrients flowing through your body and avoid your fast metabolism burning it all too quickly and effectively starving your muscles.

Make sure the calories are high quality healthy calories…pizzas and greasy burgers don’t count. You wouldn’t put cheap poor quality gas in your pride and joy would you? So don’t do the same to your body.

Weight Training 3-4 Times Per Week
To complement your high quality nutrition, you’ll need to follow a good weight training routine 3 to 4 times per week. This routine should be designed for the skinny hardgainer and ectomorph, with a focus on heavy weights and low reps.

Progressive overload is the term used to describe the technique that is best for skinny guys who want to know how to build big muscle fast. It basically means that you are consistently trying to “overload” the muscles gradually so that they are constantly stimulated every time you step into the gym. This has been proven to show the fastest and most consistent muscle gains of any technique and should be followed by hardgainers and ectomorphs.

By using progressive overload, you will avoid the “plateau trap” that many skinny guys fall into where they see initial gains in the first few weeks and then a slow down. By constant overload you break through the plateau and just keep on building big muscle.

Compound Exercises
Your weight training routine should be focused around a core group of compound exercises rather than isolation exercises.

Compound exercises like Squats, Deadlifts, Bench Press and Bent Over Rows work more muscle groups and muscle fibres than isolation exercises, and the benefits of this are numerous:

- you are able to lift heavier weights
- you multiply your efforts
- you spend less time in the gym
- you get better overall development
- more muscle used means more testosterone released which enables you to build big muscle faster.

So, make sure your skinny guy workout is biased more towards compound exercises if you want to know how to build big muscle fast.

Reduce Your Cardio
While cardio is excellent for improved fitness and certainly should be used as a fat loss tool, particularly if you want to get ripped, it is generally believed that too much cardio can hamper your ability to build big muscle fast.

Why?

Well, first you are forcing your body to burn more calories and these calories would be better used to grow your muscle. The hardgainer’s naturally high metabolic rate is the issue here, so we need to minimize the effects of this as much as possible during the “bulking stage”. Cardio should certainly be used later when you reach the “cutting stage” and are looking to get ripped.

Secondly, too much cardio can cause you to fatigue your muscles too much causing you to under-perform in your weight training workouts. This will stand in the way of your quest of how to build big muscle.

Harness Your Natural Hormones
When the word “hormones” is mentioned in bodybuilding circles, most folks inevitably think of needles, pills, and all the unnatural ways that people use to increase muscle size.

I don’t like all of that stuff, and think it is unhealthy and unnecessary. By knowing how your body works and produces it’s own natural hormones, you can learn how to harness them to build big muscle naturally.

One important case is the case of sleep. When we reach deep sleep our bodies produce higher levels of an anabolic Natural Growth Hormone which is key in building big muscles quickly. By depriving yourself of sleep you stand in the way of this natural process and prevent your muscles from growing as they should.

Likewise, too little sleep, or too much stress causes your body to produce higher levels of Cortisol which is a catabolic hormone and draws essential nutrients away from your muscles causing their growth to stunt or even shrink.

So, you see it is possible to manipulate the bodies natural hormone levels and use them to your advantage in your quest of how to build big muscle.