The Hard Gainer Report
By Greg Sushinsky
Copyright© 2004, 2011 by Greg Sushinsky
Smashwords Edition
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Who
Is A Hard Gainer?
Hope
Preliminaries:
Health
More
Preliminaries: Medical
Metabolism
I.
NUTRITION
1.
Eating
2.
How To Gain Weight
More
Food
Muscle
Foods
3.
Maximized Eating (Calorie & Volume Dense Food)
Digestion
4.
Protein
5.
Bulking Up, Extreme Diets
Water
Supplements
Junk
Food
Other
Nutritional Approaches
II.
TRAINING
1.
Physical Base (Foundation)
2.
Hard Gainer Weight Training/Bodybuilding
3.
Whole Body Routine
Exercise
Technique (Form)
Rest
Intervals
Poundage
Selection & Increases—Safety
Warm-Ups
& Stretching
Injuries
4.
The Twice Weekly Workout
5.
Further Reductions
Layoffs/Training
Breaks
Concentrated/Limited
Routine
6.
Extremely Reduced Training
7.
One Exercise Workout (High Rep Squats-the Legendary Growth
Workout)
8.
High-Rep Deadlifts (The Super Growth Workout)
9.
One Exercise Rotation Workout
(More
About) High Rep Squats & Deadlifts
10.
Limit Training
11.
Change: “Graduating” To Other Routines
Vary
Your Training (& The Value of Conditioning)
12.
Volume: Carefully Increased Sets & Reps
Further
Modifications—Exercise Changes (Towards Complete Development)
13.
Mass-Shape Routine
Isolation-Shaping
Routine/Exercises
14.
Progressive Change (Continuous Change; Progression)
Other
Advanced Training Techniques (Greater Workout Changes)
III.
RECOVERY
1.
How To Improve Your Gains
Recovery
Strategy
Other
Physical Activity
2.
Synergy of Recovery
Sleep
& Rest
3.
How To Advance
4.
Advanced Hard Gainer Workouts
5.
Strength Training For Hard Gainers
6.
Hard Gainer Strength Workout
7.
Big Three Times Three
Revisiting
Other Workouts, Other Techniques
Limit
Training Revisited
Limited/Brief
Training
Intensity
Techniques
8.
Getting Back to Basic Training - Reconditioning the Hard
Gainer
Conditioning
Extras—Micro-Workouts
Where
You Go From Here
Ten
Growth Principles For Hard Gainers
Additional
Hard Gainer Tips
Hard
Gainer Frequently Asked Questions
A
Simple Blender Drink
About
Greg Sushinsky
NOTE: This report concerns the use of nutritional principles and vigorous exercise programs, which can potentially pose physical risks to anyone who may undertake them. No liability is assumed by the author for the use of any of the information in this report. No medical advice or information is intended or implied. You should always exercise safely and you should first consult your health professionals, physicians and/or nutritionists, before using any of the information contained in this publication.
Who is a Hard Gainer?
You are, if you are thin, skinny, underweight, have a difficult time putting on muscle or even gaining a small amount of bodyweight, or are not particularly strong--then you are most likely a hard gainer. While so many people around you are busy--or even obsessed--with trying to lose weight, you are continually trying to gain, or secretly wish you had the problem of weight to lose, or perhaps you have even given up trying to gain weight and muscle size. Maybe you feel you have tried every type of workout, every type of diet; you’ve tried to lift enormous poundages (for you) which are beyond your strength, yet still your bodybuilding results are, by your own standards, close to zero. Don’t give up, don’t despair. If you have given up, try again, but this time we will show you ways you can utilize to reach your goals, so finally you’ll have a chance to achieve your dreams of greater muscle size and strength.
HOPE
There is hope for you as a hard gainer. You need not resign yourself to an unhappy outcome that you won’t ever have a chance at improving your size and strength. You can, if you apply yourself with hard work, care and intelligence, probably realize substantial gains in muscle size and strength. While it’s true that nobody can know the eventual outcome of your size and strength potential, as this is a matter genetically conditioned, it can be seen as a challenge instead of a condemnation to have lower initial potential or more obstacles in your bodybuilding. Others in the past have succeeded, some mightily, in overcoming a seeming tremendous lack of potential, and have become hard gainers who have made good, and some, even great gains. While nobody can rightly guarantee you results, if you learn to apply what we teach you in this report, you may make surprising gains.
Preliminaries: HEALTH
Before we get underway with a discussion of the key hard gainer elements such as nutrition and training, we should mention something about health. Prior to considering how you will go about your bodybuilding, you need to ascertain your general health. Are you in good general health? Perhaps you can best assess this by asking yourself a few simple questions: Do you have ample energy, or are you easily fatigued or tired much of the time? The greater your energy, the more and harder you’ll be able to work out. Are you physically active or not?
If you’re more active, used to working out, you’ll be able to adapt to the workouts more readily than if you’ve been relatively inactive. Do you have allergies or any medical conditions? Allergies, including food allergies, may necessitate that you make certain modifications in your diet; medications may alter how you feel during or after workouts, or may affect your appetite. Have you had surgeries which might prevent you from doing certain exercises? If so, there are ways of learning to work around this by choosing other exercises. Is your work or normal daily activity physical and strenuous, or sedentary?
This, along with the earlier question about overall physical activity, is a factor in what you can do in your workouts. A sedentary job will allow you to recover more from workouts, whereas a physical one (say, construction work) will make it more difficult to do so. What are your eating habits? Do you eat nutritious foods, or lots of junk foods? This will be a significant factor in your rate of progress. The better your nutrition, the better your chance of progress. Are you a disciplined or erratic eater? Same thing here. Disciplined eaters do better; the body comes to expect a certain pattern in eating and digestion. And there might be many more ways of looking at your health profile, but this gives you an idea of how to think about it.
All these kinds of questions can assist you in determining how you are going to approach your hard gainer bodybuilding. This self-inventory can help you figure out how to best apply the information and suggestions for your hard gainer training and nutrition. Your own answers on the self-inventory questions can help identify what potential problem areas you might have, how you can hope to solve them, and what personal boundaries or limitations you may need to take note of and work within.
Your answers may also point up potentially strong points of which you weren’t previously aware. Whatever your thoughts on the self-inventory, there’s certainly no need to memorize it, nor is there even a need to dwell on your answers, but it is a tool you can use or return to so as to help you in your quest for better results.
More Preliminaries: MEDICAL
If you must maintain a special diet, for example, for medical reasons, you need to keep this in mind when you are studying the section on nutrition and trying to implement the suggestions. If you have trouble digesting certain foods (dairy products, for example), you’ll have to factor that into your dietary approach. If you have a chronic disease or disability, (digestive or otherwise) you should also work with your physician or other health professional to take this into consideration when undergoing a program of bodybuilding and nutrition as a hard gainer. One further note about medical conditions or disabilities: many people have worked around and through such situations to achieve their greatest potential still, in spite of the limitations, so this should encourage you.
METABOLISM
For bodybuilding purposes, consider a basic understanding of metabolism as the sum total of physiological processes that relate to processing food and creating energy in the body, for our purposes here ultimately culminating in building muscle and diminishing fat. One of the keys to successful bodybuilding, especially in the case of hard gainers, is to be able to match your training and nutrition to your metabolic needs. Hard gainers, as we have said, often have the kind of metabolism that burns up calories at a rapid rate, so gaining weight and muscle is often a great struggle. So one of the concepts necessary for hard gainers to understand is the attempt to bring the metabolic rate down slightly, to help gain weight and muscle size.
While people tend to have a metabolic rate which seems set in a genetic range over their lifetime, some alteration, at least temporary, is desirable for hard gainers and is possible through the application of exercise, nutrition and rest. This is a critical area for any hard gainer. So keep in mind that much of the hard gainer nutrition and training information in this report is designed with the understanding that implementing the information will automatically go along with also getting the metabolism to operate at an optimum rate for hard gainer muscle growth.
I. NUTRITION
1. EATING
This is almost certainly what you need to do more of. You simply need to find a way to ingest more good calories--nutritious food--to go with your training. Though this seems utterly simplistic, many hard gainers don’t realize this, let alone know how to do it. Sometimes, there are debates in bodybuilding about the role and importance of nutrition, whether it makes up a certain percentage of importance, whether it is primary or secondary to training in importance, whether it is all important or not important at all, but in the case of hard gainers, eating well, and often more than you currently do, is even more important than your training, as important as your training is.
Why is this so? Training stimulates or promotes muscle growth in a complex, indirect way, but ultimately only in the presence of other factors, one of which is at least adequate--and usually more than adequate--nutrients. Let’s suppose you are a 5'8" male, weighing 125 pounds. For bodybuilding purposes, if you wish to gain 20 or 30 pounds of mostly muscle, even if you work out like a demon, but are taking in fewer calories than you are expending, you will end up losing weight and perhaps even muscle mass, rather than gaining. This scenario, unfortunately, does occur with many hard gainers, who may not know where to turn, so they eventually abandon their efforts. If you’re in such a situation, don’t.
Some hard gainers understand the importance of eating consistently and eating sufficient calories, but they don’t know how to put this into practice. They often overestimate the amount of calories they are eating at the time, or fail to understand that they sometimes must dramatically increase this to get the body to respond. An example of this is if someone weighs 150 pounds, and they have determined by a common general formula (such as a rough rule that you need to take in about 10 or 12 calories per pound of bodyweight to maintain your present bodyweight) that they need in the neighborhood of 2,000 calories a day just to maintain that bodyweight, and they feel if they add minimal calories, going up to 2,050 or even 2,100, they should gain. Yet often they fail to gain weight on this calorie increase. Why?
The mathematical formulas you often read about regarding adequate calorie intake are generalizations. You may hear you only need 12 calories per pound of bodyweight to maintain your weight, or 10 calories, or some such figure. But in our example, the 150 pound hard gainer clearly needs at least 13 calories per pound (i.e., 2,000 calories divided by 150 pounds bodyweight), and might need at least 15 calories per pound of bodyweight just to maintain that 150 pounds. And, at least for some time, he will have to eat more than this amount to gain. Actually the emphasis shouldn’t be on the math, but on the eating. Yet common formulas will advise such a hard gainer if he increases his calories by only a few per day (as little as 10 or 15), he’ll gain weight and it will be all muscle, not fat. This is theory--unhelpful theory at that. It can keep hard gainers from achieving their goals and can cause them to give up.
2. How to Gain Weight
In the case of our 150 pound hard gainer, and most real-world trainees, he might have to try to eat significantly more calories than the slight amounts suggested over and above the theoretical maintenance levels. This could be something in the range of a total of 2,500 to 3,000 calories per day as opposed to the 2,000 he was eating previously, and in some cases, perhaps even as much as 4,000 (or 5,000) calories or more a day for a short period of time, to gain substantially. Why? Because the body is going to resist change, for one thing, and for another, people who respond well to smaller increments or decrements in daily calorie changes, simply have more responsive metabolisms than most hard gainers. Now this increase is not necessary initially or all at once, but it illustrates where the hard gainer may have to aim his eventual nutritional intake goals.
An important point to remember: The hard gainer in our example should not, in any event, attempt to jump from his 2,000 calories to 2,500, 3,000 or 4,000-5,000 all at once. The higher amount of calories simply illustrates the task and how, eventually, it might be worked out. Adding 50 or 100 calories at a time—gradually--is always best. The point is that the hard gainer probably needs to keep at it, to keep these small calorie increases progressive and cumulative. Weeks, months and a couple of years would be the safest, healthiest, and most effective means of doing this.
The 4,000 or more calorie figure might only be necessitated as the hard gainer becomes larger and gains weight along months or a couple of years. Or, eating regularly and boosting the calories over the baseline figure which is as low as the 2,000 by a lesser (say, several hundred additional calories) but consistent amount over months could do it. But simply eating a couple hundred calories a day extra for only a week or two likely will not. Consistently applying a gradual approach, giving your body time to adjust--this is always better in your nutritional approach.
Let’s do some more math. Keep looking at the theories out there today which have misled hard gainers. By formula, adding an extra 1,000 calories per day--admittedly a large and sometimes difficult increase for many hard gainers--would add 7,000 calories per week, which supposedly equates, according to critics, to two pounds of added bodyfat per week. (The operative theoretical math being that it takes approximately 3,500 calories to equal a pound of fat as against approximately 500-700 calories to equal a pound of muscle gain.) But what happens if a hard gainer is able to achieve the often difficult task of adding significant calories to his or her diet? They almost never gain fat, they often gain muscle instead, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. This process, again, in the human body, does not always work in such a predictable way, but it is an attempt to illustrate that hard gainers, who seldom begin getting fat on any kind of calorie increase, need to have a different approach to their eating and nutrition than do others.
So how do you go about gaining the muscle size and the bodyweight you want? Eating, as we indicated, is a huge key. For some hard gainers--extreme or severe hard gainers, the question might be, how do you even gain a pound? And this is no exaggeration--some hard gainers have not and feel they are unable to gain weight at all, and feel they cannot ever, but in most cases they can. Or at least they will be able to eventually. Adjusting the food intake is the key, and once they gain the first additional pound of bodyweight and muscle mass, they can keep applying the principles that give them the greatest chance of success.
More Food
Many nutritionists are horrified by the practice of a large increase in calories that some hard gainers undertake. Many hard gainers, on the other hand, are eager and intrigued as to how to do it. They understand or come to understand, through lack of previous success, of their need to increase their calorie intake, and they may say, “bring on the food,” but then before even getting to the eating part, are puzzled as to what to eat.