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.