Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “hardgainer”
Why Reverse Periodization is Best for Bodybuilders Volume is King for Size Gains An effective training program must follow two key principles to have any chance of success. These are the principles of specificity and progressive overload. Long story short, workouts should be hard and they should get harder. The problem? Many lifters, especially those who mainly want to build …
Break the Rules, Get the Gains My contribution to this compilation article for T-Nation… Training in an unbalanced or non-symmetrical fashion works great for me. You often hear that you have to balance the ratio of pushing to pulling and upper body to lower body to achieve a balanced physique. I disagree. This advice is good for a beginner, but …
Exercise selection is a key element in getting the most from your training. First you must train in a manner specific to your goals. Then you must make sure it gets harder over time. That means you adhering to the principles of progressive overload. After that you can begin to fine tune things. Once you have established your …
If you have read my stuff then, you’ve probably heard about progressive overload. Progressive overload is fundamental to you seeing results from your training. It is one of the basic principles of sport science/athletic performance training. It is also pretty simple… It has two components: Your training should represent an overload It should be progressive …
I was always skinny growing up. I was so scrawny that during the warm-up before a rugby match, on a windy day one of my coaches actually said, “Quick! Someone hold Tom down before he blows away!” You’re probably thinking, ‘yeah but loads of kids are skinny until they hit puberty then they fill out.” True, but the sad fact …
Do you slam a post-workout (PWO) shake within seconds of finishing the final rep of your session OR rush off to eat meal ASAP? Nutrient Timing/PWO shakes certainly divides opinion. Some people fixate on them to the detriment of other ‘bigger’ factors. They think that nailing a post-workout shake is the key to their gains. Others think they are of no …
To maximise muscle growth in a given muscle you need to stimulate and fatigue a wide spectrum of muscle fibres. To achieve this you need to challenge it across its entire contractile range. Picking the big compound lifts is a good starting point, but leaves a little bit of untapped growth potential. You see, doing a full range of motion …
You have been misled. I have been in-part to blame for this deception. Sorry! You see, research has established that training volume is a key driver of hypertrophy. A dose response relationship has been discovered between training volume and hypertrophy. This has led many experts, and little old me, to shout from the rooftops of the benefits of high training …
In previous articles on this blog and on other sites I have discussed the benefits of training volume for hypertrophy. In summary, more is better so long as you do not exceed your capacity to recover. The distribution of this volume is also important. Simply doing a tonne of volume on one day is not going to be as effective …
Ever heard the phrase, “a little bit of knowledge can be dangerous”? This phrase applies to training for hypertrophy. In my experience, many people develop a certain degree of understanding about training for muscle gain. Then, inexplicably they start doing all sorts of things which violate the principles they had learnt. I have done exactly the same thing. I wasted …