While I’m not naturally “ripped” with 6 pack abs, I have been naturally skinny my entire life. When I stopped growing “up” I reached 5′11″. Freshman year of college I was 5′11″ 140 pounds. I filled out a little over the next 5 years and have spent my ENTIRE adult life (from age 22-32) at 155 pounds. I’d get a little fatter and a little stronger in the winter up to 170, then do a bunch of cardio to lose the fat, wind up loosing any muscle too and end up RIGHT BACK at 155. It was a vicious circle I did for YEARS! This isn’t horribly skinny. But this is despite lifting weights on and off since I was 15! What the hell? How come I couldn’t grow AND KEEP any damn muscle?? Sure I made little bits of progress to 170, but then right back down to 155. Year after year after year, NO longterm progress. It was maddening.
I never wanted to be “huge”. I don’t want to be 225 all roided-out looking. Not for me. But I just didn’t feel very manly at 155. I didn’t like it. I wanted to be a lean, muscly 175. Just 20 pounds. Is that so much to ask? Apparantly YES it was! fuck me. Naturally big guys don’t understand the skinny guy’s plight. They don’t understand how FRUSTRATING it is! Especially when the advice you get is “Try harder” “lift more”. I AM trying hard! ??? What kind of nonsense advice is that? You think I’m lying down on the bench press and actively deciding to only push at 70% instead of as hard as I can?? That’s absurd. I couldn’t do that if I tried. How can you NOT push at 100% when you’re lying on a bench and it’s you -VS- the weight. Man’s natural competetive drive MAKES you give it 100%. You think I WANT to get 8 reps on this set when I got 9 the last time I was in the gym? You think I want to say, “Ok, well flat bench isn’t working anymore. I can’t make ANY progress…. fuck. I guess we’ll switch to Decline. Or incline. Or flys. Or…. shit what difference does it make…” That’s the skinny guy’s plight in the gym. And it SUCKS.
I feel you fellow skinny guys. Because I was there. I did that shit for TEN YEARS. I went to the gym the whole time from age 22-32, and still stayed right around 155. What else could I do? NOT go to the gym? I knew that wouldn’t work, and I’d probably lose my college “fill out” and slip back to 140. I certainly didn’t want that. So I kept going week after week, month after month, year after year. And I never got anywhere.
I’m 34 years old now and I’m 185 pounds! I FINALLY figured it out. Let me just say here that I’m not trying to sell you anything. I just want to share my story to help out the other skinny guys. This is my “giving back.” That’s it. You shouldn’t have to spend 10 YEARS making no progress like I did. …but if you listen to the “experts” you will. So listen to me damnit! Haaahaaa. 
THE key turning point in my life and my fitness goals was finding a rare nugget of truth in a SEA of Misinformation on lifting and adding muscle. And it’s THIS Article by Daymon Hayhow:
:: Bio Logic Labs ::
Skinny guys, I’m telling you, take a 5 minute break and read that article. It will literally change your life. You’ll be able to actually make progress and grow and KEEP muscle.
Did you read the damn article? Come back after you’ve read it. It will take 5 minutes. Ok good. I was / am 100% the “weight set point” guy he talks about in that article. No matter WHAT I did, I could NOT grow! I couldn’t get my body to move past 155. And I lifted HARD. Didn’t matter. I had heard “eat more” before. “Yeah no shit”, I thought. “I AM eating!” And I thought I was. But something about that article made it sink in this time. It’s not “eat more”. It’s force feed yourself. It’s eat until you are STUFFED. I wasn’t doing that.
In July of 2006, after reading this article I took a leap of faith, didn’t worry at all about getting fat and did what he said. I ATE. I ate clean at first, brown rice, chicken, veggies, and then when I’d get full I’d switch to junk, fast food, hamburgers, pizza. Whatever I could stomach to get calories up. I tried to stay away from sugar as much as possible, but I did have ice cream about once a week. No sugar soda. Sugar is SUCH poison that even when I’m trying to keep calories up, I stay away from it. It’s just so bad for your body. I don’t want to give myself type II diabetes after all.
I had protein with every meal. NOT insane amounts, I just made sure there was some in every meal. Chicken and rice. Oatmeal and a 1 scoop protein shake with 24 grams. You don’t need obscene amounts of protein, you just need to make sure there is a measurable amount with every meal. The miniscule amount of protein in pepporoni on a pizza doesn’t cut it. But pizza and a 24 gram protein shake does cut it. Clean first, then junk. It’s really HARD to overeat like this on all clean, natural foods. (which is great news if you’re just trying to maintain your weight!)
I lifted hard but BRIEF. I’d hit each body part ONCE a week. That means if I did chest on Monday, I wouldn’t do it again, for a whole WEEK until the following Monday. This was hard for me to wrap my head around because for years naturally big guys told me to lift MORE. You know WHY they say that? Because for them, it works! They are the “hungry fat” guys in that article. They HAVE TO do that to grow. Naturally skinny guys will FAIL miserably if we train frequently. When I think of all the time I wasted doing bench press EVERY M-W-F and not making any progress….. Who knew I had to do it LESS to grow muscle?! I started out with multiple exercises per body part on some bodyparts, but over time it all came down to ONE excercise, 3 sets per bodypart, per week. And THAT is what worked! That’s what gave me the most progress. For example, I started out doing 4 different exercises for chest every Monday. Decline, Incline, flat bench and flys, 3 sets around 10 reps for each. But I couldn’t make progress that way. EVEN eating the way I was! I had to whittle it down to ONE exercise. Just incline, or just decline. Didn’t matter what, just ONE thing. And when I did that… BAM, progress every week.
It was SO difficult for me to believe and accept that the answer was NOT to lift more, but actually to lift LESS. Lift less and EAT MORE. I was spending less time in the gym than I ever had before and making MORE progress than ever. I was consistent. I went every week, 3 times a week to hit all my bodyparts. But I was spending LESS time in the gym overall. Once I got it all whittled down to ONE exercise per bodypart, per week…. oh man. It was amazing. Gains came fast and easy. Every single time I went to the gym I added more reps or more weight. It was beautiful. This is what lifting was suppossed to be like! These are the gains I failed to achieve in TEN YEARS of my adult life. Lifting weights was actually working!
I kept a meticulous journal of body weight and workouts. I struggled in the beginning when I was doing too many exercises per bodypart. But once I got it all squared away and whittled down this is what happened.
All you naturally BIG guys, this is going to mean nothing to you. This is for my skinny peeps!
May 2006 153 pounds
July 2006 158 pounds
Sept 2006 162 pounds
Nov 2006 171 pounds
Jan 2007 171 pounds (2 months of stuffing myself and no gain!)
Mar 2007 183 pounds Heaviest in my LIFE! Woo-hoo!
Apr 2007 186 pounds
May 2007 187 pounds!
I was ECSTATIC! Guys who don’t have this damned skinny gene just can’t possibly understand. I was BEYOND happy. I hadn’t been able to achieve progress like this in my whole life! And now at 32 years old I could FINALLY do it. Amazing. I was the strongest I’d ever been in nearly all my lifts. I was recovering from a shoulder injury in 2005 so my bench wasn’t at an all time high, but everything else was. I had ARMS! I had biceps where I didn’t before. My FOREARMS were bigger. I’d never seen that before. I had NICE big traps for a change. I also got FAT. Not obese, but I did have a big ol beer belly I’d never had before. This is where the leap of FAITH came in. Daymon said it would be easy to lose that fat and hold the muscle. Time would tell….
From May 2007 - Nov 2008, I cleaned up my diet, took out as much of the bad junk food as willpower would allow (hey we all live in the real world after all!) I stopped force feeding and just ate until I was full. I did almost NO CARDIO and dropped tons of fat. In August 2008, I even quit drinking booze for good! I was a HEAVY drinker, so that eliminated several thousand empty calories per week. I got back down to 171.
I did NOT get stronger and stronger in everything like Daymon suggested while I “leaned out” and hold my bodyweight at 185. That didn’t happen. BUT I did hold my strength in everything. I dropped 16 pounds but kept the same numbers in all my lifts. I dropped all the fat basically and kept the muscle! And that was just fine by me. Every year I had been trapped in a vicious cycle, a lean 155 in the summer, a fat 170 in the winter, and then right back down to a lean 155 the next summer.
This time I FINALLY did it. I added muscle AND fat up to 185. Then I took the fat off, KEPT the muscle and settled in at 170. I was now a LEAN 170, at about the same bodyfat I was previously at 155. So when all was said and done I added 15 POUNDS of muscle. That’s un-be-freakin-lievable for a guy with the skinny gene. Unheard of. I couldn’t do it my entire adult life prior to this.
Notice, this didn’t happen overnight. It took me a YEAR of force-feeding to bulk up and add 35 pounds. And then another year and a half to get the 17 pounds of fat off! But the fat-shedding was not miserable at all.
The key change this time on the way DOWN, was that I did it through diet. I DID NOT DO CARDIO! I didn’t do zero cardio; I went surfing once or twice a week. But I didn’t schedule an hour of cardio a day in some horribly flawed plan to loose fat. Cardio is freaking kryptonite to the naturally skinny guy. DON’T DO IT. Don’t try to use cardio to lose the fat you put on. It WON’T work. You’ll lose all the fat AND all the muscle and be trapped in the horrible vicious circle I was trapped in for 10 years!
What I DID do on the way down was continue my same workouts, continue to go to the gym. Continue one exercise per bodypart, once a week and lift JUST LIKE I was lifting to bulk. But…. and this is the mentally hard part. You really don’t make any progress. You just continue with the same reps and the same weights while your body slowly drops fat. Be strong! Stick to it. It’s this lifting that causes you to KEEP the muscle you have. Just think of it as maintenance.
The dieting part on the way down is easy. Cut out all the processed foods and stick to natural ones. That’s it! You don’t have to count or cut calories, you don’t have to fear fat and go ultra-low fat. You just prepare, good whole natural foods and eat until you are full. When it’s all natural foods, not processed crap, you’d be surprised how well your body naturally adjusts your apetite to eat a reasonable amount. It’s not fat in food that makes people fat, it’s PROCESSED foods! All you really have to do is switch to natural foods. I never went hungry. When you get somewhere around 10% bodyfat, then you have to really diet, cut calories and use CKDs and tricky stuff. But to get down to 10% you just have to eat the right foods. I only went down to about 14% or so, so I never got into the tricky territory.
Like I said though, it took me 18 months to drop those 17 pounds of fat. About a pound a month. Why so long? Simple. I was a heavy, heavy drinker. Literally 1000+ empty calories from beer every week. Once I got that out of my life, it was easy. The fact that I was able to hold my lifts in the gym AND slowly drop fat even while drinking heavily is a testament to how well eating mainly whole, natural foods works.
So now what? I’ve already started BACK up. No, not to go back to 185 then 170 and be trapped in a new vicious circle. This time I’m going all the way to 200 pounds! I was happy with the weight when I got down to 171, but not the bodyfat. I was probably around 14%. I’d like to be around 7-9%. To be that lean I’d probably wiegh about 160. So if I want to weigh at least 170 and be 7-9% bodyfat, I need to pack on some more muscle with another bulk cycle, and then come back down. Same plan, lift minimally and EAT. Get big and fat, then lift and DIET to lose the fat. NO CARDIO. I want to settle in at a LEAN 170 with around 7-9% bodyfat. I’m ok if it ends up being a little more than 170, but I really don’t want to drop under 170. And then that’s it! For the first time in my LIFE I’ll actually be able to focus on just MAINTAINING my weight instead of CONSTANTLY being in either a bulk or cut cycle. I’ll post a “part 2″ when this next phase is complete.
