How to Pack on Mass Fast for Skinny Guys (or Hard Gainers)
You’ve been training for some time, eating all the ‘bodybuilding food’, and on paper, it seems like you’re doing everything right. But you just can’t seem to put on any size despite all the hard work, and get frustrated. You look at yourself in the mirror daily and feel like you’re just destined to be skinny forever, or in other words, a hard gainer.
I’ve come across many people who once thought they were hard gainers. No matter how much they ate or trained, they just can’t seem to put on any weight onto their skinny frame. Although there are studies that show that body types are not pseudoscience, it is still definitely possible for hard gainers to put on significant muscle mass as long as they are eating and training right. And after these hard gainers realized their mistakes and optimized their training and nutrition, they started to add pounds of muscle to their frame after consistency and patience.
I am pretty sure most of you hard gainers can do the same too. And in this article, I’ll be going through the things skinny guys should be doing to put on muscle mass in the most efficient way possible. Let’s dive in.
5 Science-Based Diet Tips to Lose Weight without Feeling Hungry
If you’re aiming to lose weight, it is no doubt that having the right nutrition strategy is the most important factor. Many think that it is simply eating less, since we know that in order to lose weight, you should be eating less calories than you burn. However, the problem with this simplistic model is that it fails to account for how the different types of food that you eat can affect both the amount of calories in and the amount of calories out.
If you feel like you are eating so little that you’re constantly hungry, your nutrition strategy might just be the wrong one. In fact, studies have shown that the biggest reason why people fail their diet is because of high hunger levels.
What you should do instead is to focus on the types of food you’re eating and how you’re eating them, which can make a huge difference to your hunger levels. And in this article, we will use a science-based approach to look at some ways you should be eating to lose weight without feeling hungry. Let’s dive in.
5 Ways to Make Weight Loss Less Stressful
Losing weight , like any other goal that you choose to work towards, can be stressful. On the surface, weight loss can be as simple as “Calories in, Calories out” and “Exercise more, Eat less”. But because of stress, it can be much more complicated than that.
A little stress can be good - it motivates you, pushes you, and keeps you on your toes. But if you are too stressed out, you lose your healthy habits, you sleep less, you skip workouts, and you eat highly palatable food for comfort. Your energy gets depleted which could have been used for self-control. Hormones are also induced which tells your body to store body fat. This creates a downward spiral that makes weight loss harder than it already is. In fact, stress has shown to have strong links with obesity.
If you’re experiencing the above symptoms due to stress, you should know that weight loss isn't meant to be like that. Here are some ways you can make weight loss less stressful and more manageable.
Best Science-Based Workout Split to Maximize Muscle Gains
One of the biggest decisions you have to make when you start hitting the gym is choosing which workout split to do. Or to put it simply, what exercises to do on different workout days of the week. For example, when I first started to gym, I used what was very popular in fitness magazines, and what my friends recommend - the “Bro Split”, meaning to do each muscle group once a week (Monday is International Chest Day!). I definitely build a significant amount of muscle over years of training, but the more important question is whether I would have progressed faster if I had used a better workout split.
After years of lifting and research, I would say that there’s a high chance that using a different workout split would have accelerated my muscle growth. Finding a workout split is also a useful way to formulate a training plan and stick to it - an essential step to optimizing results. You wouldn’t want to walk into a gym finding the first empty machine and start pumping out reps would you?
In this article, we will take a look at the different options and which one is best suited for you. Let’s dive in.
Step-by-Step Tips on how to Break a Weight Loss Plateau
When you first start your weight loss journey, everything is smooth-sailing. You see your scale weight dropping consistently for days as you start exercising and going on a diet. You’re happy that everything is working, and look forward to achieving your dream body soon.
But one fateful morning, as you step on the scale, you realize that your weight isn’t falling like it used to. You get stressed up, but brush it off as a one-time event. However, the following morning, the same thing happens - same weight, or worse, heavier than the previous morning! The weight that was previously falling off consistently seems to be sticking onto you for its dear life now. This continues for a week and you get demoralized and feel like you’re just not meant to be lean. You then search the internet for answers, and get things like “carb cycling”, “intermittent fasting” or “starvation mode”, but get even more confused.
This is something you’ve probably experienced before. And if you have not, you can actually count on this to happen sometime.
Well, I’m here to tell you that you’re actually not in a weight loss plateau. But if you’re really in one, breaking it is actually much simpler than you think. And in this article, we will check out what weight loss plateau really is, and what you can do about it.
6 Small Lifestyle Habits to Lose Weight without Trying too Hard
Many times, losing weight can feel daunting. It seems like making huge changes in your life like meal prepping and spending hours in the gym is the only way to achieve your goals. Fortunately, that is not how sustainable weight loss works. Making such a drastic change can help you lose weight fast, but it will not be lasting. What we should aim to achieve here is to lose weight and keep it off.
And how do we achieve that? Through making small changes to your existing lifestyle! As you incorporate minor adjustments day by day, you’ll soon begin to see how they can add up to something very significant. The more these adjustments are repeated, the stronger and more automatic the habit will be, and you’ll be more likely to stick to them.
We have seen how powerful a habit can be in my previous article. Now we will specifically look at small habits we can make to achieve sustainable weight loss. Let’s dive right in.
Top 8 Training Myths Debunked by Studies
Discerning legit and reliable information on effective training is harder than it seems these days. It is already difficult enough to keep up with a workout regime. Yet the sheer number of misinformation from different sources is making things worse. Gyms, social media and internet “gurus” throw around fad theories which can get in the way of maximizing our workouts. These theories not only lack evidence, they also prevent us from making the most out of the little time we have.
On the other hand, fundamental truths often get lost in the pool of these myths. While some of these myths are harmless, others will make your gains suffer. The worst case? You’re waiting for an injury to happen.
It’s time to call out these bro-science and bullshit once and for all. Here we will identify the top 8 training myths and using evidence, we will put them to rest.
Top 8 Nutrition Myths Debunked
With the internet at the tip of our fingertips today, you would think that nutrition myths are less prevalent as compared to the past. A quick google and you will be able to find the scientific debunks to old wives’ tales.
Unfortunately, quite the opposite is true. Due to the endless streams of information and how broad the industry is, the internet is rife with stacks of misinformation, trends and fads, making it increasingly hard to find reliable information. This is fueled by marketing tactics from advertisements and social media that prey on desperate, lazy people who want short cuts to success.
Even studies can be junk science if they are not reviewed properly. For example, researcher Johannes Bohannon fooled many using a flawed study on how chocolate can help weight loss. Such potentially huge headliners often get published by journalists without verification, due to their hasty search for viral hits.
Here I will be identifying some of the biggest nutrition myths. I will also be looking at why these beliefs should be put to rest based on evidence.
How to Stop the Unhealthy Diet Mentality of “All-or-Nothing”
Picture this: You’ve been extremely strict with your diet and eating ‘healthy’ all week by cycling the same types of food from Monday to Friday - Steamed chicken breast, brown rice, boiled eggs, and broccoli. You go all out tracking your food, chasing every grain of rice that falls off the food scale. You stay away from all kinds of snacks and desserts across the weekdays, just to follow the guidelines you have set for yourself.
And then comes the weekend. By then, you’ve been so sick of eating the same foods over and over again, and enough of being overly stressed about your food restrictions. Your willpower snaps, and you give yourself the license in indulge in whatever you want. You stuff yourself with desserts and drinks, eating way beyond what you usually do. The worst thing is that you feel terribly guilty after, hating yourself for the lack of control, and promise yourself you would restrict yourself for the whole week as a form of punishment.
Does that sound like you? If it is, it can be very tiring, right? Well, the good news is, this vicious cycle of restrict, indulge and guilt should not be the way you diet! In fact, the biggest reason why people fail their diet plans is because they are too restrictive, as seen in this study.
In this article, we will look at some of the common unhealthy “All-or-Nothing” mentalities and how to curb them. Let’s dive in.
The Optimal Training Volume to Build the Most Muscle (Tons of Research!)
One of the most common questions among lifters is figuring out exactly how much volume or how many sets one should do in a workout.
On one hand, some say that doing a few sets close to failure is sufficient for muscle growth and doing too much can cause injury, overtraining, and excess fatigue. On the other, others say that the more volume, the more gains. Which is right and which is wrong?
The short answer is that there is no one-size-fits-all answer as different training frequency may work better for others. The long answer? Here we will look at some evidences to find out how many sets of workout you should do to optimally build muscle.