I've never really written much for folks who find it hard to gain weight. My younger brother had this problem and I always thought of it as a gift. No matter what he ate, he always looked lean. I mean he was always shredded to the point of making the rest of the family feel chunky.
Needless to say, I never had much pity for anyone that could eat pretty much what ever they wanted and not get fat. To me that was a blessing.
Recently, I had an old friend get in touch with me and another friend start training at my gym. Both of them are tall and extremely thin for their height. As I listened to what they ate and how hard they trained, I realized that there could be some changes that would allow them to slowly gain the weight they desired and needed.
In order to understand the fallacy of the "hard gainer" mentality, one must return to basics. Every time I am approached by these folks, I ask them some simple questions related to basic strength training.
1. What are you doing for training?
2. How much sleep and rest do you get?
3. How much and what are you eating?
Inevitably, one or more of these fundamental parts of their foundation is missing. Eating tends to be the bane of hard gainers. For some reason they always believe that they eat much more than they do. Once someone told me that they literally doubled their caloric intake. When I asked how many calories they increased, they didn't have an answer. All they knew is that they were "eating all the time". This is typical and only when a food journal is kept by the hard gainer does he/she finally realize that the caloric intake is too low. One 6 foot tall associate of mine was training with me for almost six weeks without making gains. I thought this was odd because he was new to lifting. Newbies generally gain very quickly due to the novelty of the training. Experienced athletes make gains much more slowly. When I questioned him as to his diet, he replied with the usual comments a hard gainer would make. When I finally got him to document what he ate, he wasn't even hitting 1600 calories half way through the day. He was supposed to be taking in over 4500 calories per day. Once he adjusted, his gains became noticeable almost overnight.
The other thing that is usually ill perceived by hard gainers is exactly how much exercise they get on any given day. About ten years ago another associate of mine was taking in 5000 calories per day of clean food and getting 8 hours of sleep per night. We couldn't figure out what was going on until I saw him playing basketball one night. He had been playing basket ball six nights per week and training with us four nights per week. On top of all of this, he worked laying concrete block. When we factored all of his activities against his diet, he was in the hole by over 1000 calories per day and he needed an extra nap to recoup. Since there weren't enough hours in a day to do all of that, he had to make a choice as to what was most important to him. Was he going to drop some activities or try to fit in the calories and rest?
In the end, it is SCIENTIFIC METHOD that should be the cure to your problems gaining weight. Check your current state, create a plan, and alter the plan if it goes off course.
Calories in minus calories out should give you a positive number. If not, you are going in the opposite direction. If you can't be bothered to keep a food journal with everything you eat when you can easily download an app to your phone that virtually does it by itself, then maybe you don't REALLY want to gain so bad after all. So remember that hard work in the wrong direction can be worse than not doing anything at all. Take the time to figure out what is holding you back and calculate your way out of it. Then you can hit the gym with all of the enthusiasm you want without courting failure.
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