subject: How to Build Muscle Quickly - Tips For The Skinny Guy [print this page] How to Build Muscle Quickly - Tips For The Skinny Guy
If you're a skinny guy and if you are not 100 percent sure how much muscle you can actually build or if you are not sure if you can actually build any muscle at all, well, you can put your doubts aside. Skinny guys such as yourself can and will gain muscle mass if they do things right.
There are three key areas that you need to focus on if you're trying to gain lean muscle mass.
The first one is calories. To be able to gain muscle mass, you need to eat more calories than your body burns. All day long your body is burning calories and in order to build lean muscle you need to give your body all the nutrients it needs to build new muscle tissue.
So how much calories are we talking about here?
Well, a good formula to use is by multiplying your bodyweight by twenty (20). That's how much calories you should be getting everyday in order to start making muscle gains. But this is not an exact formula, this is more of a trial and error process. What I advise you to do is to try it out for at least a week then weigh yourself. And if you didn't gain weight, then add another 200 calories to your daily intake and check again in a week.
If you keep doing this, you will eventually hit that magic number of daily calories that makes you gain weight.
Additionally, you would want to eat 6 meals per day rather than 3. The reason for this is simple. Your body needs a constant supply of nutrients throughout the day to keep your body in an anabolic state (i.e., the muscle building state). Our stomach typically goes empty in 2 and a half hours after we eat, and when our stomach is empty our body will get no fuel to build new muscle tissue. So you have to eat more frequently to provide your body with a constant fuel supply.
The second key area is weights. To gain muscle mass, you must lift heavy weights and you must focus on compound exercises, such as squats, deadlifts, bench presses, rows, chin ups, dips, overhead presses, stiff-legged deadlifts, and lunges. These exercises are going to stimulate the most muscles in your body and get you growing the fastest. Just make sure that you don't over train yourself. To avoid over training, keep your workouts under 60 minutes. At the 45-minute mark, our body releases a muscle-wasting hormone called cortisol which causes your body to break down muscle fibers to use as energy. To prevent this from happening, you need to get out of the gym on time and get food into your stomach immediately.
The third key area is rest. You need to get enough rest to allow your muscles to grow. This is the time when your muscle actually get repaired and grow. Not getting enough rest will not only wreak havoc on your hormones, but your body is not going to have enough down time to actually build new muscle tissue. So make sure that you get adequate sleep at night (8 hours at least). And if you feel you need more rest, by all means take it. Just don't use this as an excuse to not go to the gym for several days straight.
