Exercising as a skinny person

In My Humble Opinion
1

I used to drink several liters of sugary soda for years and that destroyed my appetite, so I was skinny my entire life and I’d like to finally change that, but I’m not sure how to do it.

I quit drinking soda, but my appetite is still pretty low for months after and I struggle to reach a caloric surplus. Would it make more sense to start exercising now and have that raise my appetite or would my appetite still be the same, but with me wasting more calories and making things worse? I don’t want to use more calories than I can eat, since I am already at the lowest acceptable BMI number.

Second problem is that I don’t really know how much to exercise and when it’s enough. For example I can do 15 or 20 pushups now, maybe 10 reps in 2 sets or something and then I can’t anymore. However a few hours later I’ll be able to do at least another 10, then if I rest for a few hours, I’ll be able to do another 10 or so.

Basically I can do 50 or more in an entire day this way, but only 20 in a short period of time, so am I supposed to just do those 20 reps and stop for the entire day and then maybe raise that to 25 once I am able to,etc. or would it make more sense to exercise throughout the entire day and rest the following day?

2

What is your goal?

3

We’ve done the numbers here numerous times and exercise does not burn the calories like we think it would. It’s more about tone, energy and cardio than anything.

4

I don’t know much about the appetite part if your question. It seems an unusual problem to have. But everyone, skinny or not, should exercise.

For strength building like pushups you need to do the exercise AND give your muscles time to recover. So do your exercises in a session of 30 to 45 minutes of different moves like pushups and weights. Then wait a few days before you work those muscles again strenuously.

There is s thread ‘Why don’t you lift write?’ that has a lot of good info from people who know what they are talking about, unlike me :blush:

5

There are liquid nutritional supplements that will make it easier for you to consume more calories.

For muscular gain, quality protein is essential, and your intake should be about 1 gram per pound of body weight. Maybe consider going to a nutrition supplement store and find a protein supplement.

(But if you do end up buying one of those extreme calorie weight gainers, I’d divide up your portion into a few “meals” - your body won’t be able to make use of all of those calories at one time, so a lot would just get stored as fat).
…
As for the exercise part, take a look at some YouTube videos on body weight exercises. Or, you can join a gym (they’re pretty cheap) and get access to weights and machines. Pretty much any stimulus that your body isn’t used to will lead to muscular adaptation.

6

As they saying goes, “you don’t gain muscle from exercise - you gain muscle recovering from exercise.” If you’re sore after your push-ups, wait a day or so for your muscles to recover, then workout again. Lather, rinse, repeat. You can Google “hypertrophy” to learn about the process.

7

If I do for example 20 pushups or however much I can and then can’t do another one no matter how hard I try, would that be considered soreness? Because in a few hours later I will be able to do more of them, so in other words, even if I go to the max, I will still be able to do more exercises after a few hours of rest in the same day, so did I even go to the max in the first place…or did I train hard only once I have no strength even after 2, 3 hours pass?

8

No. The soreness people are talking about is called delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) and you feel it the day after your workout (and sometimes really feel it two days later). For people who work out often, this is usually a telltale sign that they worked out hard. It’s usually considered an indicator of progress.

This is different from the lactic acid that you may feel in your muscles while doing an exercise.

Muscles grow as an adaptation to stress. If you impart the same stress (i.e. exercise type or volume) each time, your muscles have no need to adapt further and so won’t continue to grow. You can do the same number of pushups a few hours later because that’s what you’ve trained your body to do.

So you need to either change up your routine (e.g. dips are another body weight exercise for the chest and triceps) or make the same exercises you’re doing harder (e.g. do them with a super slow tempo, or with your feet elevated). There are plenty of body weight exercises and other at-home routines that you can use, but the reason most people looking to grow their muscles go to a gym is because progressive resistance training is usually a more direct route than just doing exercises relying on your body weight (since your body weight doesn’t change as easily as grabbing more weight does).

9

Excellent!

Yes.

I am gathering that your goal is to gain some muscle mass and to be healthier for the long term.

Strength training twice a week. Aerobic in between. Never two intense exercise days in a row and every strength training day is an intense day. Recovery is just as important as the exercise.

Strength training is complete body. Three to five sets each exercise. For increasing mass primarily (hypertrophy) start keeping a difficulty or weight amount that you can do 8 to 12 reps with good form and doing more would start to lose form. Every rep a perfect rep. Short rests generally advised but unclear to me how that really matters. Many many options for how to do that. Free weights (barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells…), machines, body weight … Progressively increase the difficulty as you get stronger, and you will. That progression is possible with body weight programs and of course with weights both. Don’t do significant free weight lifting without a qualified trainer teaching you proper form. If you tweak something then stop.

Classic advice also includes aiming roughly a gram of protein per pound each day and of course a calorie surplus. The same classic advise includes getting 30ish grams of that in with some carbs pretty much right after the workout or divided before and after.

Protein powders and drinks make that easier for you to achieve.

Have a snack before bed, preferably one with protein and healthy fats. Peanut butter, whole fat yogurt, whatever.

FWIW being lightweight right now may make you a great candidate for some body weight progression programming that moves into some gymnastics inspired stuff. Rings are cheap and with less mass you might be doing some scarily impressive feats before you know it! Levers, muscle ups, planches, pistol squats … it’s you thin ones that can, with some dedication and practice, even get to those human flags things!

10

Some pretty good advice so far and not much I would disagree with. A couple notes about protein: 1. The 1gm per 1lb of bodyweight is the common advice but by no means is that the minimum or absolutely essential. And much more than that is probably way too much. I’ve seen a lot of newer advice giving a range as low as 0.8, some that goes by LBM (which, granted is pretty close to BW for a skinny person) rather than weight. And this is for people who lift weights (which we all hope you will). Most people really don’t need much more protein. 2. Also, your protein needs are higher for losing fat/cutting than bulking/gaining muscle. Because it’s muscle sparing, and most people who lose weight lose a lot of lean tissue. Upping protein plus strength training is the formula for not losing muscle in a deficit. If you are bulking you can usually get away with a lot more carbs and you probably won’t need to add a lot of extra protein. However, the lack of appetite thing in your case is a consideration. FWIW, in my experience exercise does cause an appetite spike and for me that’s probably the main reason exercise will never really work for weightloss- any caloric burn is more than made up for by stimulation of appetite and increased consumption. And I see this a lot while witnessing people who do a lot of cardio because they think they are being healthy and on the path to weight loss, then they binge eat. For me personally, exercise = walking (I walk A LOT, possibly too much but it’s part of my dayjob) + lifting, and my appetite is always sort of even. Of course, exercise is for health beyond body composition, but if I were chronically skinny with a low appetite I’d put most of my intensity into lifting. If you are used to drinking a lot of soda, you could get around 35-40 grams of protein in a shake for the same calories and similar volume as a typical soda.

11

you should consider yourself lucky … I drink soda like water and I’m told that if I was serious about losing weight I could lose about 40 percent of what I need to from just not drinking soda …and my appetite is horrendously normal …

12

I was a 140 lb. weakling with not much appetite when I started working out in my latish 20’s. I wanted to look, feel and be stronger.

After working out a bunch and not seeing much progress, I realized eating is the hard part in this. I started to eat like a (omnivorous) horse, while still training hard, and the muscle and the strength increases started coming. I didn’t only eat much more, and especially much more often than I used to, I also cleaned up my diet.

Another cornerstone that I feel is absolutely imperative is progressive training. This simply means you cannot stay with your usual range, if you want to change something about yourself. This is where most bodyweight exercises, like pushups, fail. To anyone but a beginner, they are too easy, not initiating a beneficial adaptive response time and time again.

I purchased a bunch of dumbell bars and weight plates of many sizes, a pullup bar and some other basic equipment, educated myself and went to town with it.

Keeping stats was very beneficial to adopting and keeping track of change, or lack thereof. It’s easy to forget how far you’ve come if you don’t have the numbers. It’s also easy to push yourself when you can tell you have been in a rut for a while.

Even though recent research stresses that intensity is key, not the weight or rep range, a tried and true template for getting stronger and more muscular is doing exercises where you can only do around 5 to 12 reps in a set before momentary failure. When you can do much more than 10, it’s time to be progressive and increase the resistance so your reps go down, for now.

A side benefit of heavy enough exercise is that it’s much more fun to lift heavy stuff some and then go for a post-workout drink than churn out endless reps of too-easy exercises.

Now at 46, I’m around 200 lbs., with some belly fat but plenty of muscle. I’m objectively strong, and look it, and I’m in way better shape overall than I would be if I didn’t take up strength training 20 years back.

I never had a trainer or a coach, I studied things myself, which included reading well-regarded books on the strength game. I do think the free online resources for starting out were better 20 years ago than they are now.

13

So a mea culpa as one of those who threw out that number. You are completely correct and really the maxing out of benefit, with huge error bars, is 0.7g/pound of body weight/d (1.6g/kg/d).

The big citation for that originates in this meta analysis:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318368028_A_systematic_review_meta-analysis_and_meta-regression_of_the_effect_of_protein_supplementation_on_resistance_training-induced_gains_in_muscle_mass_and_strength_in_healthy_adults

But looking at the figure it is based on, figure 5, it is a graph with lots of noise and it isn’t like there is a huge drop off just below some threshold. They state that given the confidence intervals range from “from 1.03 to 2.20, it may be prudent to recommend ~2.2 g protein/kg/d for those seeking to maximise resistance training-induced gains in FFM.” (Fat free mass) Yeah that’s the 1g/lb/d but that is top of confidence interval and less than half might do as well! Bigger take away though is that the resistance exercise itself is the big impact. How much protein and when matters less. Supplements are fine and may make it easier for some, like our OP perhaps, but decent meals that avoid the hyper processed foods and have quality protein sources are likely enough.

You’ve clearly never tried to work through body weight exercise progressions! Let’s see you do wall supported hand stand push ups, one arm push ups, planches (not planks… a very different thing), pistol squats, and muscle ups (and moving into other rings moves, the levers and prolonged el holds, and say they are too easy for anyone other than a beginner!

14

Please note the key word ‘most’. The OP centered around doing bunches of pushups - this is where I gleaned my cues. I was also an expert pushupper and chinner when I weighed 140 lbs. What I wasn’t was strong, in any meaningful way.

Not true. I’ve done plenty of bodyweight progressions, including handstand pushups, one arm pushups, pistols etc. I’m under no illusion that actual gymnastics moves weren’t difficult or effective. Few people have access to / ability to / risk assesment green light to high ring work, though. I have rings on my pullup bar, but they obviously don’t afford muscle ups etc.

What the bodyweight regime really lacks, though, is subtle enough a progression. In many cases and times, adding 5 % of resistance to an exercise is just the right dosage to keep the gains coming without risking injury. This is easy and foolproof to dial in with weights. Not so easy with bodyweight exercises.

Going from pushups to one-arm push ups, for instance, is a jarring change that taxes joints and ligaments quite a bit. Been there. I have used weighted pushups to good effect, though, incorporating some iron to a bodyweight exercise. Weighted pullups and weighted dips are a staple of mine, in fact. Hybrid training of sorts.

As Henry Rollins noted, iron doesn’t lie. 100kg is 100kg. When for instance you deadlift double your bodyweight for the first time, you are strong by age-old, quasi-universal standards. With bodyweight work, your own bodyweight is a huge variable, up to and including the water in your stomach and the stool in your gut.

I’ve seen plenty of skinny guys who can make an impressive set of chins but crumble when faced with carrying heavy stuff in the real world. I want to be strong, not just crafty at certain physical tasks. Goals vary, though, as they should.

15

Plenty of good points made … and I have failed to complete those progressions often precisely because of the lack of, as you say, subtle enough steps! But the bits to those points were plenty enough of progressive challenges … and fun! (And not giving up! Back at it. Almost there with one arm push up - one each arm wide space foot placement and not quite full down; a bit more to get to full unassisted pistol squat. Maybe by end of summer if I stick with my programming… or not … :slightly_smiling_face:)

So for our OP next step is maybe, twice a week, just doing several sets of good form push ups, along with of a pulling exercise, and adding in of squats, with modest rest periods between sets. Once there can do decline push ups. Add anything as a weight for goblet squats or farmer’s carry … Weights are great but a good, nay great, progressive program can also be had without investing in their purchase or in a gym membership.