The Skinny Guy's Guide to Building Mass Fat

[mrzool]

I signed up to this guy's website and got emails everyday on how to gain mass. I am going to post in the emails I got from him.

: : : : :

This guy did not send me # 5 for some reason maybe i deleted it, but oh well.

I hope this information helps..........

I want ALL beginners to READ every single word

Gregg Gillies
http://www.buildleanmuscle.com
Author, The Skinny Guy's Guide To Building Mass Fast -
http://www.buildleanmuscle.com/gain.html
(the complete system for building muscle, burning fat and completely transforming your body - fast!) to get more info. checkout the links above......

[mrzool]

Day 1:

Welcome to part 1 of The Skinny Guys Guide To Building Mass Fast - Eating to Gain Mass

For so many people, the only real 'weight problem' is about losing it. If you want to add weight, you won't get much sympathy from anybody. They'll just tell you how lucky you are, that you shouldn't be complaining and that they wish they had your "problem".

Well, if you're reading this, you know what a bunch of BS that is, right? I HATED being skinny. It makes sports tough and it sure doesn't do a whole lot for a guys social life, which is very important in high school and college. I was desperate to gain weight and get some more of the female attention I was looking for.

The truth is, no one will ever gain muscle without food. Dieting for muscle gain is simply a matter of eating. But that doesn't mean there isn't a lot to learn. Stuffing your face with the wrong type of food, or just eating 1 or 2 large meals a day isn't the way to gain muscle. You'll just end up with the other weight problem.

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You must eat more calories than your body burns off.

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While this rule can not be broken, it also doesn't give you license to eat just anything. You have to eat high protein, high quality, nutritious meals and have them at least 6 times a day.

If you don't and just gorge yourself whenever on whatever, almost all the weight you gain will be fat, not to mention the possible damage to your health.

High quality protein should be the center point of all your meals. Intense exercise increases demand for protein, which support muscle repair and growth. When you train with weights, you should eat a minimum of 1.5 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight. If you weight 150 pounds, try and take in at least 225 grams of protein each and every day.

For us skinny guys, our body will easily burn off any muscle we build unless we do things right and that means eating at least 6 high protein meals every single day, and more if you can do it. You should eat every 2 or 3 hours and if you have a really fast metabolism it wouldn't hurt to down a protein shake in the middle of the night if you happen to wake up to pee.

You don't have to have carbs or fat at every meal, but you must have protein. When I say protein, I am referring to high quality protein derived from animal sources. For getting bigger and stronger, the only protein you need to be concerned with are those found in whey, casein (cottage cheese), eggs, beef, poultry, and fish.

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High Protein Foods

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Whey protein
Eggs
Egg whites
Chicken breasts
Turkey Breasts
Lean Beef
Fish (tuna, salmon)
Protein bars
Egg Protein Powder
Casein
Milk (yes, milk - for us skinny guys whole milk is a wonder food when it comes to adding quality weight to our bodies)

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High Carbohydrate Food
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Potatoes
Sweet Potatoes, yams
Oatmeal, cream of wheat, cream of rice
Rice
Beans
Any green leafy vegetable
Bread
Pasta

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Healthy Fats
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Olive oil
Sunflower oil
Safflower oil
Flaxseed oil
Walnuts
Avocados

Eating the right amount of foods consistently will force your body to grow beyond what you may think possible.

[mrzool]

Day 2:

Welcome to part 2 of The Skinny Guy's Guide To Building Mass Fast - Learn The Key To Triggering Muscle Growth

A high intensity effort, other than genetics, is the most important factor in getting favorable results from your body building and weight training.

A key to your training success is high intensity muscular contractions. The higher the intensity you are able to generate, the greater the stimulation for muscle growth. To build muscle optimally and efficiently, you need to progressively and continually increase the degree of intensity that you expose your muscles to.

The higher the level of intensity you are able to generate in a workout, the shorter the workout must be. You can train hard or you can train long, but you can't do both. They are mutually exclusive endeavors. If you haven't seen that sentence before, read it again and again until it not only sinks in, but sinks in with complete understanding. Heck, even if you have read it before, go read it again.

You can train hard or you can train long, but you can't do both. That sentence should be in everything you read on the topic of resistance training programs. Its importance can't be overstated.

Let's use running as an example. You can not sprint (a maximum intensity anaerobic effort) for a mile. The longer the distance (duration), the lower the level of intensity. You can't sprint a marathon. Instead you rely on your aerobic energy system, which is an energy system used for low to moderate intensities requiring the presence of oxygen.

However, if you sprint, you'll tax your anaerobic energy system (not requiring oxygen, due to a very short time period of effort). By definition, the aerobic and anaerobic energy systems are mutually exclusive.

In our 'more is better' society, many people confuse the concept of intensity with that of duration, or volume. I'm sure you've heard people talk about how hard someone works out and then they tell you he or she works out 2 hours a day. But that's not a hard workout, that's a long workout, and the two are mutually exclusive.

Besides intensity, duration is the other component of an individual workout. While intensity is a measure of how hard you work at a given time, or the effort you give to each individual set or rep, duration is the overall length or volume of the workout itself.

Training intensity and training duration are diametrically opposed. The greater one component is, the lesser the other must be. The higher your intensity, the shorter the training session must be.

The balance between intensity, duration and frequency will be out of wack and you won't know where to go next, unless you understand these principles and how they interact with one another.

If you don't train with 100% intensity you will not know if you worked out hard enough to trigger the adaptation that leads to muscle growth. Your progress will be hit and miss, a far cry from the optimal training program that we are looking for.

In addition, if you don't train with 100% intensity, you will not be able to make accurate adjustments to your training duration and frequency in order to continually progress. Why is this? With resistance training, your intensity level is directly related to the amount of muscular fatigue that is produced. The only two levels that can be currently measured are 0% intensity and 100% intensity.

Maybe it does take less than 100% intensity to trigger the adaptive response mechanism. Maybe it takes only 90%. Again, the problem with this is that we don't know and we can't measure it.

To continually make progress, we need to find ways to increase our intensity levels, while reducing the duration of our workouts and the frequency of those workouts so our body can recover and adapt before the next workout.

In order to continue to make progress, you must find ways to increase the intensity of your exercise, while reducing both the duration of the exercise and the frequency so that your body has time to adapt to the increases stress placed upon it.

Continue to find ways to make your exercise harder and briefer so that your body will be continually forced to adapt. Work out less often so that your body can recover.

Your body does not want to change. And once it gets used to the intensity level of your workout, it will stop adapting until you generate a higher level of intensity beyond what it is used to doing.

[mrzool]

Day 3:

Welcome to part 3 of The Skinny Guys Guide To Building Mass Fast - Why Everyone Is Wrong About Reps

The popular thinking has boiled it down to the following generalizations:

Strength - 1 - 5 repetitions per set

Muscle Mass - 6 - 10 repetitions per set

Muscle Mass for slow twitch fibers - 12 - 20 or more reps per set such as thighs and calves, and for some this still includes the outdated notion of high reps for definition

There are some problems with this general thinking. First, muscles don't count reps, so these numbers could be completely different for someone who takes 10 seconds to complete one rep, compared to someone who takes 2 seconds for each rep.

A good example of this misapplication is recommendations by the late Mike Mentzer. Mike usually recommended 6 to 10 reps per set. People then got the notion that Heavy Duty was about lifting extremely heavy weights but in truth this was not the case. Mike advocated rep speeds that took about 10 seconds to complete each rep.

For 6 reps, that's 60 seconds of TUL. However, the way most people perform reps, that's only about 12 - 18 seconds. That's a huge difference, which would result in a huge difference in weight used and probably a big difference in the progress the trainee made.

This is a very important part of this concept that has gotten lost over the years. When studies were done that showed 8 - 12 repetitions was the optimal number of reps in a set for most people, the accepted cadence was 2 seconds for the raising (positive) part of the rep and 4 seconds (negative) for the lowering of the weight.

Each repetition took 6 seconds to complete for a total rep time of 48 - 72 seconds for the entire set. This is a vital fact of exercise physiology to understand if you wish to optimize your progress.

Muscles don't count reps! All they know is what's known as Time Under Tension (TUT), or Time Under Load (TUL). TUT and TUL can be used interchangeably.

While weight training to add muscle mass, muscle tension beyond a certain point, and maintained within a certain time frame (without moving into aerobic territory), causes the chemical reactions in the muscle that triggers the adaptive response. With enough rest before the next workout, this allows the muscle to over compensate and grow larger and stronger.

The amount of tension or load placed on the muscle, and the amount of time the muscle can maintain that tension are inversely proportional. Does that sound familiar? Yes, once again, to add muscle, you must work out harder, not longer.

You need to use enough tension to keep your body from using its aerobic power, but not so much tension that you don't keep the muscle under tension long enough to elicit a positive anaerobic reaction.

This is where the 8 - 12 repetition guide came from. The problem is that the repetition guide was born out of the recommended time under load, not the other way around. Eventually, the 8 - 12 reps were always prescribed, and the time under load fell by the way side.

Unfortunately, it was the time under load recommendation of 48 - 72 seconds per set that was the reason the 8 - 12 reps were effective. Next time you go to the gym to workout, pay attention to the rep speed of the vast majority of people in your gym.

You will find two things. One, almost no one counts the time under load, or rep speed. And the rep speed of the majority of trainees is about 1 second up and 1 second down. For a set of 8 - 12 reps, most of them have a time under load of about 16 - 36 seconds, at most. This is far below the effective recommendation.

The only way to accurately measure progress, and to ensure that you are keeping the muscle under adequate tension, is to use seconds to measure time under tension, and not number of repetitions.

Excluding such things as mental effort, fast twitch fibers respond best with a tension time of approximately 40 - 50 seconds. Slow twitch (more endurance oriented) respond best with a tension time of 90 - 120 seconds, while a mixture of the two does well with a time under load of approximately 50 - 90 seconds.

As you can see, most trainees today use load times well below the most effective tension times for inducing a positive response in their body. They also ignore the fact that the ideal time under tension (or number of reps), most likely varies from muscle to muscle within the same individual.

In addition, they compound the problem by trying to make up for this by adding more and more sets. All they end up doing is cutting into the muscles recovery time and never allowing it to over compensate and grow larger and stronger.

The time under tension or number of reps per set that is appropriate for you is also affected by your muscle fiber make up and your neuromuscular efficiency. In simple terms, the faster a muscle fatigues, the higher its neuromuscular efficiency (ability to contract a large number of fibers at one time), and the greater the muscle's fast twitch fiber content.

The slower the muscle fatigues, the lower it's neuromuscular efficiency, and the greater the number of slow twitch fibers.

These are vital factors when determining the appropriate number of reps, or time under tension, that is needed for a body part to induce optimal (or any) results from your training.

[mrzool]

Day 4:

Welcome to part 5 of The Skinny Guys Guide To Building Muscle Fast - Discover A Key To Strength Increases

I realized that in order to gain weight fast, I not only had to train hard on the basic exercises, but I had to rest long enough between workouts to let my body recover and grow. This was the only way I was going to gain weight fast and transform my skinny body.

You see, in my quest for ways to gain weight, I found out something very interesting that you don't hear about very often.

It seems that your body's potential for strength increases far outweighs your body's potential to recover, roughly in the neighborhood of 300% for strength, but only 50% for the body's ability to recover (granted this varies from individual - some may be able to increase their starting strength 400 or 500% or more, while others top off closer to 200%).

But the ratio remains intact. Thus, as you grow stronger, you need to reduce your training volume and frequency in order to gain weight and muscle. The stronger you are, the more time your body needs to recover from the stress of training.

Bench pressing 300 pounds puts a much greater stress on your body than bench pressing 50 pounds does. Your body needs more time to recover from that greater stress. Allowing your body to repair itself and overcompensate by growing muscle is the only way to gain weight fast.

You can't gain weight and muscle if you don't allow time for your body to heal and adapt to your training.

Even people who acknowledge the validity of this point, still advocate more and more volume and frequency for advanced trainees when this is the exact opposite of what needs to be done to gain weight and muscle.

Sure, when you begin, you will initially increase your volume as your body adapts and gets used to weight training. But then you will hit a point where your body's strength increases outpace its ability to recover from those increases and you will need to reduce your training frequency so that your body can recover from it's newfound strength.

If you want to gain weight fast, you can't follow the typical routines in the magazines, or the one's recommended to you at the gym. Most likely, those giving out advice have never had to deal with the problem you have gaining weight and muscle.

As you strength steadily increases and you are able to generate more intensity at each workout, you need to give your body more time to recover so that it can not only repair the muscle you've damaged, but it can adapt by increasing the size of your muscles so that it can handle your next workout.

[mrzool]

Day 5:

Welcome to part 6 of The Skinny Guys Guide To Building Mass Fast - How To Pack On Pounds Fast.

Squat - Yes, squat. If you are at all serious about gaining weight you will begin squatting as is your life depended on it. Your ability to gain weight sure does.

Squats are the absolute king of weight gain exercises, bar none. If you hate to squat you can do one of two things - you can forget about gaining lots of muscle, or you can learn to love the results you get from squatting so that you learn to love the squat itself.

And the best way to make squats work for you and work fast is to do them in 20 rep breathing style. What does this mean? In short, it means be prepared to do the hardest work you've ever done in your lifting career. Progress comes with a price and that price is hard work on the squat.

You need to use all the weight you can handle and then add some more. Since the squat is the toughest weight lifting exercise you can do physically, it's also the toughest mentally.

Your mind gives in on the squat well before your body does. If you want to gain lots of muscle, you need to put an end to that. Everything you have has to go into your squatting program.

Hard work on the squat is the single most important thing you can do to ensure your bodybuilding success. Forget about the latest greatest high tech routine or the newest supplement fad. The key component to any program you do is hard work. Hard work will take you much further than your choice of exercises, sets or reps.

The key to the success of rapid weight gain by squatting is the amount of work you put into it. After your warm ups, load the bar to a weight you normally do 10 reps with. Now, do 20 reps. No, I'm not kidding. Like I said before, the squat is the most mental exercise there is. I've never seen anyone, when properly prepared mentally, fail to get 20 reps with their 10 rep weight.

Don't get me wrong, it's not easy and you may be taking 10 deep breaths and a half a minute between each rep toward the end, but you will do it, if you are mentally strong.

By rep 10, your mind will be ready to rack the weight like you've always done. But who controls your mind? You do. So tell it not this time, take 3 deep breaths and get that 11th rep. Now you're in a world of your own. Nothing matters but the next rep. Your success or failure at this point is solely determined by the power of your mind. If your mind gives up, your body will pack it in. You're done.

The last few reps will have every part of you screaming to call it quits. Block it out! Whatever it takes to get the next rep - 10 deep breaths, a promise to yourself, a make believe deal that if you complete number 20, you get a date with Carmen Garcia. I use counting tricks to help me along. I'll count 1 through 10 on the first 10 reps, then 1 through 5 on the next 5, then backwards from 5 to 1 on the next 5. Whatever helps you complete all 20 reps.

When you're finished, stagger over to a bench. If you can walk, you didn't work hard enough. Flop over the bench and do a set of light pullovers, 20 reps, with no more than 25 pounds. Get a good stretch.

Do this twice a week for 6 weeks. Each time add 5 pounds to the bar from your previous workout. That's 12 workouts and a 60 pound increase in your squat weight. You can do this. And you will grow. Fast. Remind yourself each time you workout, you only have X more workouts to go. Think about it, it's just 12 sets over 6 weeks. You can do that, right? Of course you can, if you want to gain weight as badly as you say you do.

If you don't get your squat up to over 300 pounds on this program eventually, you aren't going to get the muscle gains that you want.

The rest of the routine looks as follows:
3 - Chin Ups 2 x 8 - 12
4 - Dips 2 x 8 - 12
5 - Military Press 2 x 8 - 12