"Everybody who's ever picked up a weight thinks he's a hardgainer."

There is a nasty little term that a lot of weight trainers use – "hardgainer." What is a hardgainer and how should a hardgainer train to promote maximum muscle mass?

I say "nasty" because every kid who lifts and doesn't gain 50 pounds right away thinks he's a hardgainer.

A hardgainer is someone who truly cannot gain weight. I know, I 've "been there, done that." A hardgainer is typically of the somatotype (body type) ectomorph, a lean body type that has little body fat and is very scrawny (not much in the way of muscle). Usually on the tall side. Long limbs. Angular facial features.

But you can be an endomorph and still be a hardgainer. I'd characterize a hardgainer not by how he looks but by how he responds to a "typical" bodybuilding training system.

Here's what I mean by typical:

• 4-day split routine, either push/pull or upper/lower body
• 5 or 6 meals a day, supplemented by protein powder or weight gainer
• Relatively active lifestyle (plays sports and/or supplements weight workouts with cardio like running or cycling)

The above is a typical bodybuilding training system (generically described, of course) that many beginning bodybuilders and weight trainers advance to after several months of steady progress in a basic program (note that I don't even consider calling somebody a hardgainer if they're just starting out – it's too soon to tell).

A hardgainer will have very little to no response from the above training system. In fact, he might even lose weight. This is highly discouraging, of course. Typically, a trainer afflicted with such a response will respond with a "more is better, right?" approach: He'll move to 6 days a week of training and double up on the weight gainer.

The Right Approach to Hardgainer Bodybuilding

In fact, working out more frequently and adding in more weight gainer couldn't be a worse approach to jumpstarting muscle mass gains for the hardgainer. Hardgainer bodybuilding requires a different approach. In fact, you could consider it an entirely different mindset.

Hardgainers should:

• Train less frequently
• Use fewer sets
• Eat quality food
• Rest more often
• Cut out all extraneous activity
• Curtail all ab training and cardio until sufficient muscle mass gains have been made
• Relax at all times (except when training when you really want to push yourself)

A while back, I wrote a series called Building Muscle in 30 Minutes a Day. In it, I described a simple way of building quality lean muscle mass in only 30 minutes a day. The aim of the series was to show anybody how to build a quality physique on limited time.

What I really wrote in that series was a hardgainer bodybuilding routine!

It was an adaptation of a book I wrote a few years ago called Hardgainer Manifesto, which was the system I used to gain over 60 pounds in less than a year after spending over 20 years training with little success. It was something I "stumbled" across after studying weight training, bodybuilding, nutrition, and "hardgainer systems" for decades.

I was the typical "scrawny (but scrappy) kid" – the kid who got sand kicked in his face like the old Charles Atlas comic strip ads. I tried everything under the sun and found nothing worked. So I made my own system. That's the short story.

The long story is that it took a lot of time to figure out. Suffice it to say that you could save yourself a lot of time and frustration by picking up a copy. Or read the series Building Muscle in 30 Minutes a Day. Either way, you'll come to a "hardgainer bodybuilding" solution that works better than anything else out there for a fraction of the time and price.

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