9 Mistakes Skinny People Make Trying to Get Bigger

Originally posted at: http://www.nerdfitness.com/

I’ve been trying to get bigger for as long as I can remember.

It started when I was 17, days after being cut from the basketball team. What began as a simple quest to pack on a bit of muscle and feel a bit better about myself eventually evolved into a love of health and fitness (and ultimately, Nerd Fitness!).

We receive a few emails every day from skinny men (and some women) who are trying to get bigger. As a former very skinny guy, I’ve made all the mistakes one can make over the past twelve years.

In the past 18 months, after a decade of making inconsistent progress, I’ve cracked the code, and figured out how to finally gain some muscle. I’m still not big by many people’s standards, but I’m the Incredible Hulk compared to where I used to be.

Make sure you’re not making these mistakes!

1. Not Eating Enough

If you’re not getting bigger, you are not eating enough.

This one solution will account for 95% of most skinny men and women who are looking to get bigger. When I started lifting, I spent 5-6 days a week in the gym following a bodybuilder workout routine from various fitness magazines.

Over the next six years (end of high school and all of college), I put on maybe five pounds total, even though it felt as though I was eating a lot.

Turns out, I was eating 500-1000 less calories per day than I needed to stimulate muscle growth.

It wasn’t until after college that I finally cracked the code, simplified my workouts, and doubled the amount of calories I consumed and I was able to put on about 15 pounds in 30 days. This is back in 2006:

I didn’t put the weight on a healthy or sustainable way, but after six years of struggle, this experience solidified the connection between diet and getting bigger. It finally made sense.

If you don’t eat enough calories, you won’t get any bigger.

If you aren’t getting bigger, you probably aren’t eating enough calories.

If you’re trying to gain, the moral of the story is: when in doubt, eat.

2. Setting unrealistic expectations

We live in a world of instant gratification.

Just as people have unrealistic expectations thanks to marketing when it comes to weight loss (“Lose 30 pounds in 30 days!”), people also have unrealistic expectations when it comes to NATURALLY building muscle as well (Scientists don’t want you to learn this trick to pack on 40 pounds of muscle!”). These ads are designed to sell supplements, not get you bigger quickly.

We cover this extensively in our “how fast can I naturally build muscle?” article.

The short version is: In optimal conditions, you’ll most likely only be able to put on 1-2 pounds of muscle per month (or less). Now, this doesn’t mean you can’t make tremendous strength gains — just not overall muscle mass.

What this means: stop setting your getting big goals by the week or month. It’s time to think in terms of months and years.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Muscle isn’t built in a matter of days or weeks. It’s going to take time, and it’s going to take patience. But you can get there!

3. Not having a solid plan

You need a plan. A plan that is balanced, and provides you with big movements that stimulate growth all over your body.

If you just wander into the gym without a strategy, you’re going to struggle to get bigger. It’s better to pick a basic plan and stick with it for months and months and months, than jump around from week to week chasing the newest shiny object.

Here’s the easiest way to put it: get freaking strong at the following movements, eat enough, and you will get bigger:

• Squats
• Deadlifts
• Overhead Presses
• Rows
• Pull-ups (weighted)
• Dips (weighted)

What plan to follow?

• Many people start with Stronglifts 5×5 or Starting Strength, which are both great programs.
• I started with Stronglifts, then moved into more of a hybrid program (similar to the workouts featured in the Nerd Fitness Academy.
• If you’re not ready for barbell workouts, start with bodyweight. 

Which one of them? Honestly, any of them will work – you just need to start, and stick with it for months at a time, focusing on getting stronger with each movement.

4. Not doing enough

If you are trying to get bigger, you might not be doing enough in the gym or in the park to stimulate muscle growth.

No matter what, you need to be doing heavier weight, or doing more repetitions in order to challenge your body, breakdown muscle fiber, and force your body to rebuild stronger.

Yes, you can get bigger doing just bodyweight exercises – take one look at BarStarzz on Instagram or gymnasts – these dudes have built their muscle through years of intense bodyweight training. However, you must be scaling these exercises constantly to make them increasingly more difficult, which many people struggle to do.

Just doing more regular push ups, bodyweight squats and pull ups is a good way to get conditioned, but after a certain point, it most likely won’t produce muscle growth without increasing the challenge. Once you can do more than 10-15 reps of an exercise in a single set, you need to increase the challenge.

I detail this during my “stay in shape while traveling” post, in which I packed on a few lbs of muscle while ONLY doing bodyweight exercises.

I started by doing just pull ups and dips. Now I’m up to doing pull ups with 60 pounds on a weight belt, and dips with 70 pounds on a weight belt.

I used to just do ring pull ups, now it’s muscle ups and gymnastic complexes like this and this. So, YES it can be done! You just need a solid plan that allows you to consistently push your muscles further.

5. Going too quickly and getting injured

In the age of instant gratification, we always want more, now now now.

Over the past decade, I followed a terrible cycle:

• Try to get bigger. Eat lots of food, and put on some weight.
• Ramp up my workouts too quickly.
• Sustain some sort of injury from trying to do too much.
• Take a month off to recover.
• Start back at square one.
• Repeat the process.

Have patience.

Start out with easy weight, and get a teeny tiny bit better every single day.

Even though I have some back issues, I’ve crawled my way to a higher deadlift the past 18 weeks.

Back when I started deadlifting again, I kept thinking “I can do more! I can go heavier!” – but I patiently forced myself to go just a tiny bit further than the week prior.

As Lee Haney says, “Exercise to stimulate, not to annihilate.”

6. Not following a sustainable strategy

Just like losing a bunch of weight by running on a treadmill and starving oneself is not sustainable in the long term, neither is making yourself miserable for a month just to pack on some size. As soon as you go back to “normal” you’ll lose all of your gains!

For me, I’ve found that eating the same meals every single day, getting enough sleep, and training four days a week for about an hour each time is sustainable for me. As a result, I’ve been able to make consistent progress for the past 18 months, and my new “normal” is progress and strength improvements!

If you can’t work out six days a week for the next year, DON’T!

Start with twice a week, doing a basic program, and dump the extra time you would have spent training into eating more or getting more sleep. If you can train three days a week, that should be MORE than enough to make you bigger. Remember, if you’re not getting bigger, you’re not eating enough!

It might take you 6+ months longer than if you went all-in and did nothing but eat and lift all day every day, but you’ll actually KEEP the progress you’ve made rather than giving it all back.

7. Not making it a priority

After telling myself “I want to get big and strong,” I realized that for much of the past decade, it wasn’t really a priority.

I put work, messing around on the internet, video games, and going out and drinking before my training. Over the past 18 months, I made it a point to see what I could accomplish if I made getting bigger and stronger a priority.

I ate extra meals even when I wasn’t hungry. I rearranged my work schedule so I could get all my training sessions in. I hacked my productivity so I could get more done in less time. I said “no” more often to staying out really late and drinking. I made fitness a priority.

Is this truly a priority for you?

8. Sweating the small stuff

Bicep curls! Forearm curls! Calf raises! Should I target all three heads of the triceps muscle? I see the big guy over there doing 8 types of bicep exercises – should I do what he’s doing? Does chest day need to be bench, incline bench, decline bench, cable chest flys, dumbbell flys?

Should I do 6 sets of 8 reps or 5 sets of 5 reps?

Forget all of that stuff!

If you want to get bigger, focus on getting stronger in one of the few big, basic movements. Once you have a solid foundation, then we can start targeting specific isolated muscle groups like the bodybuilders do.

Back to the basics (noticing a theme here?):

• Squats
• Deadlifts
• Bench Press
• Overhead Presses
• Barbell rows
• Pull-ups (weighted)
• Dips (weighted)

“But where’s my bicep curls, tricep extensions, ab work, etc.!?!?!”

ALL of those muscles get worked incredibly well with the above exercises, so don’t worry about isolating. Instead, just get strong. When you can lift heavy things or complete intense bodyweight exercises, your body needs to adapt.

Let your body worry about getting bigger.

9. Not recovering enough

I used to pride myself on not needing a lot of sleep. I also used to be dumb, apparently. Since putting a focus on getting bigger and stronger, I’ve had to considerably up my sleep time.

When you strength train, your muscles break down and need to rebuilt over the next 24-48 hours. Sleep is a key part of this process. Without it, your body can’t recover, and you can’t grow.

So make sleep a priority! 

Here’s how to not suck at sleeping.

My last 18 months

I’m really proud of what I’ve been able to pull off over the past 18 months, and I’m excited to see what the next 18 months bring.

Here are two recent photos to highlight how I’ve transformed over just the past six months.

• Photo on the left: October 1st, 2014. 171 pounds
• Photo on the right: May 1st. 194 pounds

The best part is that it was all done in a healthy, sustainable, natural way:

Do you have any questions for me? Have you had success as a skinny dude or lady and made great progress? Have you struggled your whole life with being skinny and still can’t seem to crack the code?

Let me know how I can help!

-Steve (former skinny guy, future Captain America)

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Filed under: Fitness