4 Insider Tips For Hard Gainers Struggling To Build Muscle

When I was around the age of 16, I weighed a whopping 115 pounds—with my shoes on.

For a while I was okay with it.

I was okay with playing video games and eating hot pockets all day, coasting through school…

But eventually, when puberty kicked in, and those hormones started rushing through my bloodstream, something started to change.

I don’t know if it was the countless women that seemed to flock towards men with muscles, or if it was the allure of having more social status, but something deep inside of me pushed me to start working out.

I bought a gym membership at my local Gold’s, bought all the supplements the buff salesman recommended to me, and started hitting the gym immediately.

It was only a matter of time until I actually got jacked, right?

Wrong.

After 6 months, hundreds of dollars wasted, and countless hours spent in the gym, I was EXACTLY the same weight.

“What the hell?” I thought.

I did everything the conventional health experts recommended!

I ate the healthy foods, I took the correct supplements, I worked out EXACTLY like they said to.

Why couldn’t I gain any weight?

It wasn’t until YEARS later that I discovered where I went wrong.

See, most gym advice out there is geared towards two types of people: fatties trying to lose weight, and average people trying to bulk up.

Well, I hate to break it to you, but if you’re a hard gainer, that “advice” isn’t going to work for you.

If you’re a skinny guy who’s currently struggling to put on weight, you NEED to ignore 90% of what the “health experts,” are telling you.

How I Gained 30 Pounds of Muscle in Just 3 Months

I remember when I bought my first bodybuilding program.

Every single word of advice in that $97 eBook was marketing gold.

The sales page was designed to convert cold traffic at a 20% ratio, the customer support was professional, and the cover was absolutely KILLER.

Everything looked great, but there was one problem.

It was complete and utter bullshit.

The guy who wrote that eBook wasn’t even jacked.

He was a brilliant marketer, yes, but he wasn’t jacked.

He never showed his face, and just paid male fitness models to pose for his eBook cover.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but in retrospect it should have been VERY obvious.

This is what 90% of the fitness industry is comprised of:

Marketing geniuses who slap together a few Bodybuilding.com articles into a passable guide, and then outsource everything from designing the cover, to coding the sales page, to creating the video.

And while the “advice” in these mass-produced, generic eBooks may work for the average Joe, they won’t work for hard gainers, because they’re NOT actually written for hard gainers.

I’ll NEVER forget what my previous mentor said to me, years ago.

He told me that you should find someone who’s where you want to be, and fucking listen to them.

It seems so obvious, but very few people actually do it.

If you want to build muscle as a skinny guy, you should to listen to someone who’s been there and come out on the other side.

You have to take advice from someone who’s gone from weighing a measly 115 pounds to a jacked 185 at 6% body-fat.

You have to find someone who’s gone the journey that you’re trying to travel, and who can show you the way.

That’s what I plan to do.

Using the following tips, in addition to the gold mine of information that I reveal in Badass Bodybuilding, I was able to put on an ungodly amount of muscle in record time.

1. Ignore Conventional “Dieting” Advice

Go to your doctor some time and ask him what foods you should eat to be healthy.

I’d bet money that he’ll recommend you eat a diet comprised mainly of vegetables, fruits, and lean meats.

And while these are great to eat, there’s something that he’s leaving out; something absolutely critical.

If you want to bulk up as a hard gainer, you NEED to eat buckets of carbohydrates.

You need to eat at LEAST 300 grams of carbohydrates every single day.

Carbohydrates are demonized by the mainstream health industry, because most people aren’t hard gainers.

If you’re trying to lose weight, cutting out the carbs and following a paleo diet is great, but if you’re a skinny guy trying to build muscle, then you absolutely NEED those carbs.

Carbohydrates spike a hormone known as insulin, which is a “storage hormone.”

In other words, when you eat starches like sweet potatoes, brown rice, and oatmeal, it releases a cascade of chemicals in your body, signalling for it to put on weight.

This is obviously bad if you’re fat, but if you’re currently scrawny?

It’s a dream come true.

I recommend you do what’s known as carb-loading.

I discuss this in depth in Badass Bodybuilding, but the idea is that you strategically time your carbohydrate rich meals in order to maximize muscle gain AND minimize fat gain.

As a hard gainer, you should aim to have 100-150 carbohydrates before your workout, and 100-200 right after.

Aim to consume slow digesting, complex carbohydrates, such as the following:

Sweet Potatoes
Oatmeal
Whole Wheat Pasta/Bread
Quinoa
Brown Rice

Some have speculated that you should avoid grains, but the data isn’t out on that one yet.

You’ll have to see for yourself how you feel after consuming gluten.

Personally, I recommend you bulk cook a week’s worth of quinoa and store it in a container for later.

Quinoa is the only non-meat based food that is a complete protein, plus it’s got tons of fiber, vitamins, and complex, slow-digesting carbohydrates to help you build muscle ASAP.

2. 90% of Routines Won’t Work For You

I remember my first personalized workout routine.

After paying $100’s in fees for a personal trainer, he told me that he’d designed a custom-tailored, perfect fit routine just for me.

It must’ve worked great, right?

Wrong.

Most personal trainers, “gurus,” and fitness “experts,” don’t know shit about how to build muscle when you’re a skinny guy.

Asking that dude who’s been jacked since age 14 how to build muscle… is like asking a trust fund baby how to make money online.

If you want to know how to get jacked as a hard gainer, you NEED to ASK a hard gainer who’s actually done it himself.

Most people make one of two mistakes—they either do the typical starting strength type routine, or they follow some ridiculous split.

While these have their merits, and you’ll certainly gain some muscle as a hard gainer from these routines, they aren’t VERY optimal.

It took me YEARS to figure this out, but hard gainers respond best to a combination of strength and hypertrophy training.

If they focus too much on hypertrophy, they plateau very easily and NEVER gain any muscle.

If they focus too much on strength training, however, they don’t get any bigger… after a certain point (just stronger).

3. Smoothies Are Your Best Friend

The single greatest discovery I made as a hard gainer was using protein shakes to add an extra 1,000-2,000 calories into my daily diet, because it’s a pain in the ass to eat 1,000 calories worth of brown rice, lean steak, grilled vegetables, and sweet potatoes.

It takes 15 minutes to cook the rice, another 10 for the steak, 10 for the veggies, and 10 to microwave the sweet potatoes, then another 20 minutes to eat, and 10 minutes to clean up.

Having to make 3-4 meals like this every single day is WAY too much time.

With shakes, though?

You can make a delicious 1,000 calorie protein shake jam-packed with protein, healthy fats, and complex carbs, in just a matter of 2 minutes.

In fact, when I first started to understand the power of personalized protein shakes, my muscle gains automatically exploded through the roof.

MONSTER MASS SHAKE (1740 CALORIES)

1 1/2 cups of whole milk
4 scoops of chocolate mutant mass
1 banana
1/2 cup dry oats
2 tbsp almond butter

When you throw all of these ingredients in a blender and mix them together, an aroma not unlike a chocolate milkshake will tantalize your taste buds.

This smooth, frothy, and creamy shake has a whopping 78 grams of protein, 49 grams of healthy fats, and 255 grams of carbohydrates.

Even the most stubborn of hard gainers will put on weight if he has one of these suckers a day.

CHOCOLATE HONEY HULK (765 CALORIES)

1 cup almond milk
2 scoops chocolate whey protein
1 tbsp raw honey
1 banana
2 tbsp peanut butter (almond butter if you’re allergic)
2 tbsp cacao powder

What can I say?

I absolutely love chocolate shakes—and it shouldn’t be hard to see why.

This one has a modest 765 calories, with a high protein to carb ratio.

It’s great first thing in the morning or right before bed, to prime your body with muscle-building nutrients meant to take your gains to the next level.

If you want to get extra serious with the shakes, you can add supplements such as creatine to them, but I’ll save that for the next tip…

4. Use The RIGHT Supplements

Upon buying a membership to your local gym, you will be bombarded with offers from sleazy salesmen promising you some unrealistic gains from ridiculously overpriced supplements.

Let me tell you RIGHT NOW: you do NOT need 90% of the supplements that they will recommend to you.

Will they help?

Yeah, sure—some of them might.

But is an extra 5% increase in your muscle gain worth $149 a month?

Of course not.

As a hard gainer, focus on sticking with the basics: creatine, a mass gainer, and a pre-workout.

You really should just KEEP IT that simple.

Want More? Check Out Badass Bodybuilding

If you want to put on POUNDS of solid muscle faster than you ever thought possible, then consider checking out my flagship eBook.

In Badass Bodybuilding, I cover damn near EVERYTHING that you need to know about packing on slabs of muscle, from what workout routine to follow, to what supplements to use, to recovery tactics, dieting advice, and more.

This “Bodybuilding Bible” has a whopping 26 chapters and over 150 pages PACKED with insider secrets and tips from YEARS of experience in the fitness industry!

Here’s some of the benefits that you’ll get when you decide to purchase my DEFINITIVE guide to bodybuilding:

How to pack on POUNDS of muscle, that will have your friends and family SHOCKED at your rapid transformation!
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Experience the RUSH of having primal strength, and more power than you ever imagined!
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Discover the “Badass Bodybuilding” workout routine, that will make your body grow before your very eyes!

I know that YOU are a Man who TAKES ACTION…

So when you ACT NOW, you’ll receive 150+ pages of all-killer no-filler advice, LOADED with knowledge from nearly a decade of experience and over $10,000 spent and WASTED on bullshit.

I want to be clear, though—this won’t be easy.

This isn’t some late night infomercial promising you that you can look like Arnold Schwarzenegger in “5 minutes a day,” or some other nonsense like that.

Getting the physique of a Greek god will take a LOT of hard work, discipline, and focus… but if you’re willing to put in the work, the reward is yours.

So if you want to take it to the next level, and get that aesthetic, ripped physique that’ll get you laid in record time, act RIGHT NOW and go check it out!

Until next time.

Your man,

-Elijah “The Realist”