Road to Muscle Gain: What Ectomorphs Should Do

Sculpting the body is a steep climb if you are an ectomorph. It’s a hard battle that requires tremendous effort and focus to reach your target goal. First and foremost you have to build muscle before refining it. But it’s no easy task and definitely a long road ahead. You need to eat a lot, train with heavy weights and concentrate working out on compound exercises. Training is different compared to others as you should alternate both bulking and cutting phase.

To get muscle gains you should:

Eat more.

Ectomorphs have high metabolism so they burn calories faster. It’s their advantage to endomorphs however bodybuilding is a top factor that limits them. To bulk up, eat often, around 5-6 meals spread evenly throughout the day. Eat a lot of calories and protein. Thin people tend to fail to eat enough protein in their diet thus their gains are slow. Incorporate wide variety of meals rich in protein such as meats, eggs, fish, poultry supplemented with protein powder. For every meal, you should include huge protein percentage, taking up at least a third of your plate. As you eat on breakfast, lunch and dinner, strive to add 2-3 more snacks in between. Luckily for people in this category, they can eat anything such as pizza.

Don’t skip meals.

Remember that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Eat more on breakfast with big chunk of protein on the side. If you think that breakfast is a bowl of oatmeal or pastry with coffee or oj then you’re getting it all wrong if you want to have gains. Add some snacks after 2 hours from breakfast. Going hungry for too long and skipping a meal will put your body in catabolic state, which the body eats up your muscle gains to feed vital organs.

Resistance Training to Bulk Up.

Diet is just half of the process to build muscle. When you eat more, you need to burn them as it will only lead to fat storage if not converted to fuel your energy. Train heavily in correct manner. Include strength training to stimulate more of your appetite so you can eat more calories and protein. Strength training gives your body to segregate nutrients, placing them into muscles and not fat when you ingest protein and carbs.

However not every strength training regimen is able to facilitate nutrients segregation and muscle building. High muscular tension is needed wherein in we select the proper weights and exercises that put tension on certain muscles to grow. As what everyone says, all exercises can work on muscle, but not all can build muscle. There are some exercises that are great in creating tension in muscles. The key is to do heavy compound and multiple compound movements.

Both compound movements and multiple compound movements build mass over entire muscle. Examples of compound movements are deadlifts, pull-ups, squats and dips.

Multiple compound movements meanwhile are 2 or more movements strung together. These are Olympic lifts and their variations that include clean and jerk and clean and press.

Both of these movements are better at stressing muscles compared to isolation movements. The more you work on your muscle, the more weight that is lifted, the more testosterone your body produced and more testosterone means more muscle. Three of the exercises that stimulates body hyperthrophy are full barbell back squat, deadlift and clean and press.

Rest to Recover from Muscle Fatigue.

Gaining muscle is not just eat and workout. You need proper rest also. The goal when you’re on a workout plan is to be able to recover from your previous workout sessions so you can go back in full strength. The more sessions you can do and recover from, the more muscle growth periods you will create. More mass, more gains.

Hardgainers tend to have less than average recovery ability but this vary in every individual. If you can come back to the gym stronger after rest from previous session and don’t feel tired, your overall workload is within right range. This involves 3-5 workouts per week to most individuals, hitting 1-2 times on each muscle per week.

Which Body Type are You?

Setting up your goal is a vital factor in transforming to a healthier and fitter you. However, your goals should be realistic enough to achieve it. By doing so, you need to know which body type you belong to because let’s face it, we are all unique, we all have different genes and each of them reacts differently. An example is fat loss. Doing the same workouts and having similar time frame with your friend, you may find it hard to lose weight while your friend was able to cut hers with ease.

Knowing your body type will help you set realistic goals so you won’t get disheartened if ever you see no results yet. And you can alter your physical appearance by finding the right regimen that will fit your structure.

There are three human body types, the ectomorph, endomorph and mesomorph. American psychologist William Sheldon popularized these categories and became widely accepted through the years.

Ectomorph. This body type is thin, lean and long and has low fat storage. They can eat everything in huge servings and still look the same, even if they want to gain more mass. People who fall in this category are also known as “hardgainers”. They may be able to put on weight but still look skinner. Hardgainers would stay lean even if they went to the gym for long hours.

If you’re an ectomorph, it doesn’t mean that you’re forever weak and thin looking. You can still achieve that muscular physique and get stronger. You can be as fit as those you envy in the gym, but it would just take you longer if you want to gain muscle weight. You got to train harder than the others and eat like you’ve never eaten before.

Endomorph. The curvy, big and often pear-shaped with a high tendency to gain body fat faster. People in this category have wider waists, hips, thick ribcage, shorter limbs, large bone structures and can easily store fat instead of building muscle. They have hard time playing weight loss and often struggle in gaining muscles without accompanying body fat.

Endomorph can be healthy also and be as strong and capable as the other two categories. They may even have some advantage in strength due to their additional muscle mass. However, if the ectomorph or hardgainers struggle to bulk up, endomorph struggle to lean out and lose body fat. It will require total disciple in diet and hard work in your exercise to get top form.

Mesomorph. Muscular, well-built physique that are envied by the majority. They are called “lucky ones” as they can easily and quickly add muscle but not store fat. They tend to have medium bone structure, wide shoulders, solid torso, narrow waist, round muscular bellies, thin joints and have low fat storage. Their high metabolism and responsive muscle cells give them the best of both worlds which unfortunately for the ectomorph and endomorph don’t have.

You probably might see or know somebody in the gym who does his/her workouts not as hard as you do and still get stronger and bigger. Yes, these are the lucky ones!


Side Note:

Although there are existing three classifications, it’s important to know that they’re not in totally pure form. In reality we have some parts of each of those in our structure. There some bodies that efficiently burn calories, some are less efficient and store more energy as fat, some can build muscle with ease, some don’t have same capability.

To boil it down, some are just lucky enough to have great genes to win easily on the game of fitness while some don’t that they have to play it harder and have difficult time.

Genes may play a big role but despite our genetics, we can still determine our body shape through our lifestyle choices, on how hard we train, the foods we eat and the amount of sleep we have.

It may be an uphill climb, but changing the way we look, our body physique, metabolism and muscle fibers, we need the right training. Changing our body composition meanwhile requires the right diet or food intake.