Best Muscle Gain Workouts For Skinny Guys (Ultimate Guide)

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Last updated on September 5, 2022

Skinny guys need compound exercises such as deadlifts and squats. But the problem is, most skinny guys have a hard time gaining muscle no matter how much they exercise. For a skinny guy to gain weight, you need to eat more calories than your body is burning. But, unless he wants to end up as skinny fat, that food needs to be made up of health eating options. Also, he needs to follow muscle gain workouts for skinny guys.

If you think you eat a lot but you are still not gaining weight, you need to eat more. The moment your calorie intake is more than your calorie expenditure, you will gain weight. The caloric surplus you get when you eat more food facilitates weight gain workouts and helps you gain muscles.

Can Skinny Guys Eat Anything Without Adding Weight?

 

Hardgainers and ectomorphs believe they can eat dense foods without adding weight. The super skinny guys believe that they can go around eating junk food without ever adding weight. Some skinny guys want to get bigger and stronger but believe they cannot get bigger because they either have worms or they are not able to digest the food they eat. The reason why skinny guys eat everything they like and do not get big is that they do not eat a lot. Also, it could be useful to consume additional supplements such as vegan or whey protein, depending on a persons preferences.

 

Tracking Calories Should Be Part of Training

 

Even if you get an online coach to help you with overhead presses and shoulder press and you lift more substantial, you will still not gain weight without surplus calories. To ensure you are taking more calories than your body is burning, track your daily caloric intake and expenditure. You can feed the food you eat into an app such as myfitnesspal. If you are always overestimating what you eat, you will end up eating less, and this will keep you skinny for a long time.

Some people have a problem gaining lean muscles because they have a high metabolism, others are more active, while others naturally have small body frames (ectomorphs).

 

Food as Part of your Workout

 

For skinny guys, eating is the most challenging part of their strength and muscle gain routine. While you only need to exercise three times a week for 30 minutes each session, you need to eat at least four times a day for seven days a week.

The road to gaining muscle starts with you coming up with a plan; set apart workout days and hours, and then plan your weekly diet regimen. This means that you do not wake up one day and open the fridge to find it empty. By choosing a diet regimen and sticking to it, you will gain weight.

It is easy to stick to a workout routine – do the same exercises every session. Usually, you will create a workout routine that exercises all your muscles and then stick to it. You can have the same routine for meals. Choose a variety of foods to make one meal and then take that meal four or five times a day. While you will be eating the same meal every day, the meal will have a variety to make it healthy. If you think this is boring, you can switch a few items in your meal and continue enjoying it.

When you eat the same food items every day, your grocery shopping becomes more effortless. You will only need to estimate how much you need to eat every day and multiply that by seven. Always ensure that you have a meal when you leave the house.

 

Workouts for Skinny Guys

 

If you are eating enough calories, you will have enough energy to maintain normal body activities, life weights, and still, have enough left to build muscles. You need to lift weights to trigger your body to start building lean muscle mass. If you fail to lift weights after eating, or you do not lift weights as you should, all the food you eat is converted to fat and stored under your skin. This occurs when people eat more than they are burning; the extra food is stored around their belly. Because you want to build muscle fiber and not get chubby, you have to lift weights.

 

Free Weights

 

Free weights are great for skinny guys. When lifting, you have to balance the weights yourself, unlike when you are using a machine. They are also safer because you have control of the movements of the bar.

 

Compound Workouts

There are many exercise options for each body part. Some rely heavily on synergists and stabilizers. Most of these are compound movements such as bench press, seated rows and squats. Others rely only moderately on synergists and stabilizers. These are more focused exercises like triceps kick- backs and leg extensions.

Compound movements duplicate the ways that you use muscles in everyday life. Think about it – when was the last time you did a motion resembling a triceps kick-back outside of the gym? In contrast, every time you push open a door, or help a neighbor to move a couch or refrigerator, what you are doing looks a whole lot like a bench press. Every time you lift a heavy box from the floor, the motion resembles a squat. And if you have to put that box on a top shelf, you are essentially doing a military press.

The kind of functional strength trained from major body exercises like the Bulgarian split squat and the closegrip chinup is much more important in terms of health and effectiveness in day-to-day physical activity than the limited, specific strength trained from isolation exercises.

Compound workouts are a combination of exercises including the bench press, squats, deadlifts, presses and rows. The advantage of these exercises is that they work several muscles and they allow you to lift heavier weights. When done correctly, these exercises will trigger maximum muscle growth on your body. These 5 exercises should form the basis of your beginner workout program.

 

Lift More Weights Each Time

 

Lifting more weights each time, also called progressive overload, forces your body to gain more strength and create muscles. Muscles are created as the body tries to adapt to lift heavier weights. As such, if you progressively add weights, you will build more muscles. Lifting the same weight all the time will see you maintaining the same weight or even gaining fat. To continue making progress, start by doing 8 reps with a given weight. As your workouts progress push to add reps until you get to 12. Then add 2.5 pounds to the bar and drop back to eight reps.

Proper Workout Form

If you want to build size, you need to work all your muscles to facilitate proper muscle development. If you only do half squats, you will only get half gain. When you lift weights correctly, you avoid injuries and you lift heavier weights, gain more strength and more muscle mass.

Proper Exercise Order

The muscle or muscle group primarily responsible for a movement is called the prime mover. Muscles assisting the prime mover are called synergists. Muscles holding the body in position so the prime mover and synergists can act are called stabilizers.

When you do a bench press, for example, where the pectorals are the prime mover, certain muscles hold your shoulders in place and keep you from rolling off the bench. These include the back muscles, the rear delts and the abdominals. These muscles are not responsible for lifting the bar, but they are definitely involved in the exercise. The back muscles, the rear delts and the abs act as stabilizers. Other muscles – the anterior deltoid and triceps – directly aid the pectorals to press the bar. These muscles are functioning as synergists.

Every muscle can act as prime mover, synergist or stabilizer depending on the movement. In determining the order of the exercises in your muscle building workout, you need to follow this principle:

If a muscle is going to be called on to function as a synergist at some point in your workout, you shouldn’t work it as a prime mover first.

If you do, the muscle, tired from working as prime mover, makes an ineffective synergist. As an example, you wouldn’t want to work triceps before pecs, because tired triceps would severely limit your efforts in the bench press.

This may seem obvious, but it is amazing how many people ignore this basic tenet in the in their muscle building workout plan. They work their arms and shoulders before hitting their chest and back. As a result, their larger muscle groups never get a decent workout.

A far smarter way to arrange your workout plan is to work from the center of the body outward. By doing so, you will be working your chest, back and thighs first before moving to your shoulders, arms, triceps, calves and hamstrings. Your synergists become prime movers later in your routine. This yields another benefit. These muscles, now acting as prime movers, are already fatigued from functioning as synergists, so they don’t need to be pushed as hard to get a good workout. result; greater gains with less effort!

Take Four Days a Week to Rest

Your muscles need to rest and recover from workouts. If you exercise your muscles every day, they will not grow but will instead waste. You only need to exercise your full body three days per week and then rest the rest of the week.

Where more exercise will not help, more calories will. Apps such as myfitnesspal will help you keep track of your progress and track your calorie intake. This will help you gain pounds of muscle fast naturally. The trick is, when you work out, ensure you work out all your muscles.

To conclude on skinny guy to building muscle

As you have read weight training with a meal plan that focuses on healthy eating will help you to build muscle. Most beginners would focus on doing arms workouts regularly rather than doing a total body workout (e.g. shoulder exercises, chest exercises, leg exercises ) focused on compound exercises. This will ensure you upper body and lower body muscle groups are used and following these workout tips achieve your results faster.

For those where a home workout is the only option to putting on muscle. Our training tips are to focus on a bodyweight workout to help you in gaining mass, whilst get a total body workout, and help you to lose fat, build muscles and get defined.

Following these workout tips as part of your training program together with a mass building diet, including a taking protein after each workout, will help you to grow bigger.

Steve Theunissen has qualified from the International Sports Sciences Association (ISSA) and is a certified Personal Trainer and Nutritionist. He has over 30 years experience in fitness and nutrition and currently working with famous fitness professionals. He is currently living in New Zealand with is wife and daughter.

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