Table of Contents
Introduction
Are you extremely skinny and looking to gain some muscle mass sitting at the comfort of your home? If yes, then we have some useful tips for you.
Feel free to read through them before beginning your muscle-building journey!
1.Work Out Four Days Per Week
Any expert talking about how to gain muscle for skinny guys, while being stuck at home, would recommend intense workouts.
It’s important to know that if you are an average guy with regular genetics and a regular lifestyle, you will eventually get great results by working out four times every week.
For some, exercising three times per week will still result in solid progress. This stands true particularly for people who are exceedingly busy and are constantly stressed out due to extreme work pressure.
Unfortunately, training more than four times a week won’t be significantly beneficial for you skinny guys looking to pack on muscle. Working out more than four times per week is typically more benefitical for those that are looking to lose weight.
If your goal is gaining weight and building muscle, getting enough recovery time holds the key for you.
2.Compound Exercises
Your workout must be based on various compound exercises. Some examples include dips, squats, deadlifts, rows, presses, and chin-ups.
One common feature of all these exercises is that each of them allows amazing loading potential, which makes your training highly effective.
The compound exercises you pick should meet the criteria below:
- Complement your mechanics
- Should not be painful
- Ensure that you feel your muscle all the time
If 80 percent of your training sessions comprise of these exercises, while your other workouts include isolation exercises such as lateral raises, curls, ab workouts, etc., you will reach your goal of gaining muscle mass pretty quickly.
3.Progressive Overloading
Most skinny men tend to remain skinny as they never really try to increase their strength. They only look to add bulk and eventually fail.
It’s important to understand that the human body doesn’t like the idea of building muscle. That’s because our body is not efficient enough to build muscle.
The efficiency is even lower for naturally skinny individuals. That’s the reason why, if you’re naturally skinny, you need to force your muscles to get stronger by overloading them.
This overloading can be done either by increasing weight or by doing extra repetitions using the same weight you were using earlier.
For instance, an individual who started by squatting 200 lbs 10 times, will automatically gain significant muscle mass if they work their way to squatting 300 lbs 10 times.
The transition would take place sometime in between. The increase in the number of repetitions (or weight) should be gradual.
4.Take Care of Your Form
This is extremely important. Nothing will happen to your body if you increase weight or number of repetitions, but end up losing your depth.
You will make no progression if your knee starts bending at an angle of 20-degree instead of remaining parallel to the ground when doing squats.
Some guys tend to think that if they rush things, they will get results more quickly. So, they often keep adding weight without getting used to the weights they are already lifting.
They forget that if they lose their form, they will never reach their goal. The muscles will not receive any overload. Even worse, incorrect form often leaves people severely injured!
In short, overloading should always be done in perfect form.
5.Train Every Muscle Group at Least Twice Per Week
Guys who are really skinny and weak should ideally not look to train different body parts on different days. Instead, they should train all their body parts three to four times every week.
Training all the muscle groups regularly will also help you get used to high-intensity exercises. Think about splitting the workouts only when you develop reasonable strength. You will need around a year to reach that phase.
If you’re a skinny guy who has managed to develop a certain level of strength by working out regularly for a year, you can decide to work on your lower body and upper body on different days.
This will allow you to train all your muscles at least twice every week. The results thus received will sustain for life.
6.Protein-Rich Meals
If you are a non-vegetarian, the ideal sources in your diet include lean cuts of red meat, chicken breasts, soy, beans, salmon, eggs, low-fat milk, and so on.
The rule of thumb goes like this: your daily diet must include the same quantity of protein in grams as your body weighs in pounds. For example, if you weigh 150 lbs, you should strive to consume 150g of protein every day.
However, skinny guys wanting to add some muscle mass should have some extra protein than what the rule suggests. Ideally, it should be 1.1 to 1.25g of protein for each pound of their body weight.
7.Choose Carbs Wisely
Although some people you talk to would demean carbohydrates’ ability to promote muscle-building, the reality is that carbs too, play a crucial role in building muscle. You cannot expect to gain muscle mass just by eating those protein bars throughout the day.
One thing you must keep in mind when choosing carbs is that you should only go for complex carbohydrates that cannot be digested fast.
These are carbs that are less likely to get converted into fat. In addition, they will also help you remain full for a prolonged period.
Some carbs you should add to your daily diet include kale, quinoa, whole grain bread, oats, brown rice, berries, and veggies.
Stay away from carbs that are sugary and fast digesting. They will only make getting a muscular physique more difficult for you. Examples of items you should eliminate from your diet include potato chips, cakes, white bread, candy, sugary beverages, etc.
8.Healthy Fats
It’s true that if you are skinny you can afford to eat more fat than an overweight individual when looking to gain muscle mass.
However, make sure that the fats you are consuming are healthy. Avoid having processed food and fried food as they will not be doing your body any favors!
Add food items like salmon, nuts, seeds, avocado, olive oil, and peanut butter in your diet as a source of fat. Eggs and fish are two other healthy fat sources for skinny individuals looking to add muscle.
9.Effective Supplements
Supplementation can certainly be helpful for skinny guys looking to gain muscle mass. What’s surprising is that most people tend to forget this particular piece of advice when setting up muscle-building strategies.
Look for a high-quality muscle gainer. They can come in the form of shakes or pills and contain healthy fats, carbs, and proteins. Adding one such supplement to your daily diet would make the process of muscle building much simpler for you.
When looking for supplements, ensure that they don’t contain any steroids or harsh chemicals. Consuming such products would do more harm to you than good.
10.Drink Plenty of Water
Water is essential both for losing and gaining weight. If you’re skinny and looking to pack on some muscle, make sure you’re drinking enough water!
When you exercise, your muscles encounter external resistance and contract. This contraction of muscles forces the water in your blood to enter the targeted muscle cells as well as their surrounding areas. This results in swelling of the muscles.
If you fail to consume enough water and keep working out, your body will shuttle the water absorbed by your muscle cells into your bloodstream for preserving circulation and maintaining normal blood pressure. This will make it impossible for you to maintain a muscle pump.
According to experts, if you want to get the best results from your work out you must drink at least 600 ml of water before exercising.
Then, after working out for an hour, replenish your body by drinking 1200 ml of water. This will keep you duly hydrated all through the day and allow you to sport those pumped muscles you love.
Drinking an adequate amount of water is also mandatory for having the required energy for working out. If you are not properly hydrated when exercising, the glycogen present in the muscles will deplete quickly.
This, in turn, would stop your central nervous system from functioning properly. You will not feel motivated and your performance during a workout will drop significantly.
Conclusion
The above tips will surely help you add more muscle mass and get rid of your skinny appearance quickly. Just stay consistent, and you’ll look like a stud in no time!
Other than following these tips, you can seek guidance from a professional trainer and nutritionist. They can certainly help you understand your body better and get you one step closer to achieving your health and fitness goals!
