Hard Gainers - Get Your Priorities Straight

Why did I say all of those nasty things in my previous entry, knowing that some of you will either have accepted your status as "hard gainers" or are taking stock of your small bones, short muscles and miserable results in the gym? Was it simply to be cruel? No! Not at all. I am a hard gainer myself. I said those things to wake you up to your situation and now we'll work on getting you to stop fruitlessly following the lead of those who are much more gifted for weight training than you. If you recognize your plight you can finally start to do something about it.

Hard gainers must accept that they cannot train as brutally as more gifted people. They cannot tolerate as many sets and/or exercises, and they absolutely must not waste their precious recovery resources on silly, inappropriate exercises. Hard gainers must, more than anybody else, focus on simply getting stronger for reps on a few basic movements that recruit the major muscles of the body. Squats, deadlifts, bench or incline presses, rows, overhead presses, pullups, and dips - gaining strength on these exercises is the only thing that matters for hard gainers. Hard gainers achieve that by training these exercises practically exclusively, briefly and for no more than three total hours in the gym each week. The diet must contain plenty of hearty foods - protein, carbohydrates and fats (and natural cholesterol for testosterone production) and each night should see at least eight hours of restful sleep. No, this is not what you see prescribed by drug-built bodybuilders in the supplement catalogues (aka "bodybuilding" magazines), but this is the only route to success for the drug-free hard gainer. Hard gainers MUST IGNORE everything else if they wish to succeed.

If you are a hard gainer look at it this way, do you think you will ever have a massive chest and powerful arms if you can barely bench press your own body weight? No, you will not. Likewise, do you think you will ever build a big bench press by doing silly flyes with 30 pound dumbbells? No, you will not. Likewise, think you'll get a big back if you can barely chin yourself? If so, you need to wake up. Think you'll have big, powerful legs if you're too lazy to squat? Think leg extensions with a few plates will do it for you? If so, I'm sorry, you're going to be very disappointed.

Let me be clear, if you can barely bench press your own body weight, your legs wobble if you try to squat much more than that and you can't chin yourself more than a few jerky times, then you might be able to have a lean athletic "looking" body, but you will never be what people consider "big" and strong". There isn't a strong man alive who is that weak, there isn't a big man alive who isn't that strong, and there isn't a strong man alive who got that way by lifting little dumbbells or using silly machines. If you think otherwise then you have your head up your ass and you need to pull it out.

Hard gainers wake up. Some people simply are not gifted for building muscle and strength. Those people have the deck stacked against them from the start and they have to take special measures in order to get anywhere - not follow the bullshit written by the drug-addicts in the muscle comics.

If you are a hard gainer and want to build a respectable physique (or strength) then get your priorities straight - get strong for reps on squats, deadlifts, bench or incline presses, rows, overhead presses, pullups, and dips.

"There's no such thing as a hard gainer."

Sorry, this guy doesn't have the 'gifts' - small joints, short muscle bellies (at least in the biceps), low starting muscle mass, etc. Sure, he can build up his physique/strength, but competing with the "big boys" will be a tough battle for him.

Recently, on discussion boards I monitor, some people have been proclaiming that there's no such thing as a hard gainer. According to them, the term "hard gainer" was invented and used by bodybuilding magazines to sell supplements to people who think they aren't gaining as quickly as everybody else. Sounds like sound logic. Here's one of the posts, grammatical errors included...

"there's no such thing as a hardgainer, its just summat the bloodsucking fiends from various companies thought up, to make people who aint getting the benefits they want from the gym quick enough, part with the hard earned cash for a "new solution" for all you hardgainers!

here's a solution, eat loads, because them muscles have to be repaired somehow!!

i do believe its easier for some people to gain muscle than others, but its hard to gain muscle for everybody, not just the skinny guy! its just he has to swallow his pride and start the weights low and keep at it, of course its frustrating and demoralising at first, but if you keep at it and eat enough food you'll gain without these magic muscle gain for hardgainers theorys!

it just had to be said!!!"

I actually don't really disagree with this guy. It is easier for some people to gain muscle than others, and the supplement companies will say or do just about anything to get your money. But, anybody with even the slightest experience training other individuals will know, quite assuredly, that some people gain much faster than others. On the flipside, some gain much slower. There has been some confirmation of this in the scientific literature, where at least one published study has found that body build does indeed influence the rate at which the body adapts to weight training - with individuals of heavy build gaining much faster than those of slighter builds (L.M. Van Etten, F.T. Verstappen, K.R. Westerterp, “Effect of Body Build on Weighttraining-induced Adaptations in Body Composition and Muscular Strength”, Med Sci Sports Exerc, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 515-21, 1994.). However, after 20 years involvement in the "Iron Game" I don't need research to tell me what I've seen countless times in flesh and blood - even if training, diet and lifestyle is the same, people will gain at drastically different rates.

Some people have much less potential for building muscle mass and strength than others. Those types tend to have shorter than average muscle belly lengths, small bone structures and 'delicate' joints, and/or testosterone levels on the low side of average. They don't necessarily have to be skinny, they can be fat as well - with the curse of being a fat hard gainer one of the hardest of all to overcome. These people simply cannot tolerate high training loads, possibly combined with high training frequencies, to nearly the same degree as more gifted trainees. They are, perhaps, "slow gainers" as much as "hard gainers". Yes, they usually have to eat very well to gain any muscle at all. Yes, they have to train and rest nearly perfectly to make even miniscule progress. But no, in the end, no matter what they do, they will never compete with the genetically gifted of the physical culture and lifting worlds. Sorry, that's just reality and it doesn't matter if you like it or accept it or not - you will never change it.

The name "WeighTrainer"

For those who are interested in why the name "WeighTrainer" is spelled wrong, and not "Weight Trainer" or "WeightTrainer"...

The original host of the website placed a 12-letter limit (no spaces) on domain names which could be used in the http address. "WeightTrainer" has 13 letters, so I took out one "t". Personally, I think it's a stupid name, but I couldn't think of anything else that encompassed all fields of weight training - bodybuilding, powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting, strength training, etc.

Entry to Blogging

I avoided starting a blog for years now because, quite frankly, I saw them as private soapboxes for people whose opinions are often better kept to themselves. However, based on the suggestion of a Strength and Size Forum member I've come to see that a blog makes sense. The fact is that over the past 15 years I've participated in a lot of valuable internet forum discussions that have gotten lost because they weren't catalogued and archived. Also, there's plenty of useful training/diet information that is much better suited to a blog entry than a website article. A blog also lets readers comment on what's posted, participate in the discussion and stay up-to-date with what's going on in the "WeighTrainer world".

Hopefully this is the start of something productive.