I’m a serious pencil neck. I’m 135-140 pounds, 6’1", and thirty years old. I’ve had a 30" waist since I was a teenager.
I’d like to add some muscle mass. I know I’ll never be huge, but twenty or so pounds of muscle would look good on me.
I’ve done a bit of research on what it takes for the ectomorph to gain mass, and it looks tough. Maybe it’s the sites I’ve been reading - most of them appear to be geared toward body builders or wannabe body builders - but I don’t think I could put away 4000 or 5000 calories per day. I don’t want to stuff my face constantly and walk around feeling like I’m gonna puke all the time.
I’m also a bit scared of going to the gym, especially for a weight training regimen, so I figured I’d start at home, at least until I know I’ve committed to the program.
Here’s what I think I can live with, to start:
Diet:
[ul]
[li]Breakfast: Clif Bar, a piece of fruit, and coffee. I’m not a real big morning eater.[/li][li]Mid-morning: another piece of fruit.[/li][li]Lunch: either leftovers from dinner, or a turkey or roast beef sandwich on whole wheat with spinach, and some chips. Occasional greasy fast food or a Chipolte-style burrito.[/li][li]Dinner: grilled lean meat, broccoli or asparagus, and whole wheat pasta with a bit of olive oil.[/li][li]Post dinner: protein shake, 1 hour before workout[/li][li]Before bedtime snack: nuts, cheese, whole wheat crackers[/li][/ul]
Workout:
All high weight, low reps/sets.
[ul]
[li]Sunday: Military press[/li][li]Monday: Curls[/li][li]Tuesday: Squats[/li][li]Wednesday: Military press[/li][li]Thursday: Curls[/li][li]Saturday: Sit-ups and push ups[/li][/ul]
Obviously, I’d like to concentrate on my shoulders and biceps first, and I’d like to keep it short and high intensity. I’d have a hard time committing an hour every night to lifting.
So, before I go out and drop some cash on a set of barbells, does that look like I have any chance of success, assuming I stick with the program? Does anybody have any better suggestions?
Frankly, it sucks. There are way too few calories, and I’d be extremely surprised if you can get enough stimulus from that workout plan to induce any significant response. Working out at home also doesn’t that hot an idea until after you’re committed to working out.
This site has a lot of good information for a beginner, and a couple programs that can be done around the house. It’s marked as for women, but don’t let that turn you off.
And as much as you might not like it, if you want to gain any significant amount of quality weight, then yeah, you’re going to have to eat more than you’re comfortable with. There’s a good reason why all the bodybuilding sites throw that 4000-5000 calories per day number at you.
Are you kidding? People who consume junk food and eat at McDonalds regularly account for that many calories every day. So all you gotta do is up your junk food intake and you’re in like Flynn.
Seriously, though, if you’re trying to increase your calorie intake without making yourself SupersizeMe-puking-sick, your diet as outlined is a very healthy diet, true, but it’s basically a weight-loss and weight-maintenance diet. To add calories, you definitely need to add more complex carbohydrates (bread, pasta), and more fats. For example, make your mid-morning snack a PBJ instead of fruit.
Also, I’d try and consume the bedtime snack nuts/cheese/crackers at breakfast instead of bedtime, the reason being that heavy fats in your stomach at bedtime do not generally make for good sleeping. Carbs are much better at bedtime (tuna/pasta/mayo salad for bedtime snack, why not?) because they release L-tryptophan which induces feelings of relaxation and sleepiness. And nuts/cheese/crackers are much healthier than a Clif bar, sorry. They have trace minerals, for one thing. And a handful of peanuts has way more calories than a 100-calorie Clif Bar, which is designed for people who are focusing on cutting calories.
And a Clif Bar is, basically, junk food, sorry; it’s sugar and fat, which is the same thing that equals “cookies”. I have put the ingredients that are sugar in bolding.
Look at all the sugar. They can slap an “Organic!” label on molasses, brown rice syrup, and malt extract all they like, but it’s still just sugar. And of course, “evaporated cane juice”, whether “organic!” or not, is still just a fifty-cent way of saying “white table sugar”.
Save your money and invest in nuts and cheese and whole wheat bread; they’re better for you.
I’ve no experience lifting weights, but from what I do know (my son and husband lift weights sporadically), this part here makes me very nervous:
Point #1: It’s frighteningly easy to injure yourself majorly–and permanently–if you dive right into weightlifting on an impatient footing of, “I wanna lift heavy weights really fast”. Seriously, you can really hurt yourself beyond the ability of medical science to repair.
Point #2: Nothing good comes fast. Especially nothing physical. There’s practically no physical skill out there, from ballet, to playing the piano, to typing, to shotputting, that will come faster if you really push yourself. Indeed, the faster you go and the harder you push yourself, the more likely you are to hurt yourself and take yourself out permanently. It takes time to train the muscles, to develop the skills and the reflexes, and there’s really no way to speed it up.
Point #3: You especially can’t speed it up by lifting high weights fast, instead of low weights slow and repeatedly. Look at ballet–you don’t gain mastery of the moves by doing four brisk battement tendus really fast. You gain mastery by doing slow, careful tendus, over and over again.
Point #4: So, since you’re going to scale back your expectations, you don’t need to commit 60 minutes a day to this anyway. My husband and son will spend maybe 20 minutes at a time, tops, before they come back upstairs glowing with exertion and virtue, feeing that they’ve “done enough”. Sixty minutes is a long time to practice anything with new, unaccustomed muscles, again, whether it’s ballet, playing the piano, or lifting weights. So aim at, say, 15 minutes a day at first. You’ll be less likely to injure yourself.
Point #5: I have to say–no snark intended – that if you’re not willing to invest a certain amount of time doing this, then you must not be very interested. I, for example, am learning to play the oboe, and I realize that I must spend a certain amount of time every day practicing it. I don’t always make it, but I feel really, really guilty on the days when I don’t. I don’t say, “I want to learn the oboe, but egads, I don’t want to spend an hour a day doing it!” It takes as long as it takes to learn the skill. And it takes as long as it takes to build up muscle mass, and if you really want it, you have to be willing to work at it, for as long as it takes, not by looking at the clock and saying, “Welp, that’s my 29 minutes, I’m done…” When you’re building up muscles, you do it until they’re tired–and then you stop.
Point #6: I would strongly urge you to sign up with a gym, where you’ll be supervised so that you’re lifting properly (barbells take more than just grunting and heaving), you can get expert advice on both lifting and nutrition, and if you hurt yourself, you’ll have people there who can tell you, “Yep, you’d better see a doctor for that.” Down in your basement, you have no way of knowing, especially given your total lack of experience.
“When you’re building up muscles, you do it until they’re tired–and then you stop.” Which means that today, you can lift for 5 minutes, then tomorrow, 6 minutes, then the next day, 7 minutes… And gradually you increase the amount of time you’re able to lift weights. So you can’t put a “clock time” on it. You can block out a certain time period during which you will lift weights (or practice the oboe, or practice your tendus), but how long you actually spend at it during that block of time is totally dependent on the muscles involved. Some days they’ll be tired and sore, and you’ll be lucky to get through your basics before you have to quit. Some days you’ll be turbocharged on wheels and you won’t believe how well it’s going.
Probably better to do 2-3 sets of 8-10 on the basic exercises (squat, bench press, rowing, standing press, crunches, curls, calf raises) three days a week instead of specializing right at the outset. Spend six months on a beginner’s program. Then, after you have built some basic strength, you can go to five sets of five reps to build mass.
And don’t waste your money on protein shakes - non-fat dried skimmed milk is a third the cost and just as good. Use yogurt if milk doesn’t agree with you, or just eat two hard-boiled eggs a day.
I’m a carnivore trapped in a vegetarian’s body - or maybe it’s the other way around. I eat meat, but I tend to gravitate towards really lean foods, and my momma raised me on whole wheat bread and broccoli.
I also almost never, ever snack - I tend to wait until I’m ravenous, and then put away a huge lunch and a huge dinner - which is usually lean meat (or beans) and heavy on the greens and whole grains. For some reason, I thought I could cheat by just adding the mid-morning and pre-bedtime snacks.
I know all about practice making perfect - I’m a hack musician myself. I guess I just didn’t think about working out in the same way.
I guess I’ll have to do a bit more planning with this.
For weight gain, full-fat milk is much better than skim for a couple reasons:
[ol]
[li]It has more calories in the same volume of food.[/li][li]A lot of the vitamins in milk are fat soluble. That means they’re either not in the skim milk, or they can’t be absorbed because you’re only taking them with water.[/li][/ol]
I’m not sure where you buy your Clif bars, but where I live, they are 230 calories apiece and designed for the “endurance energy for outdoor sports” crowd, I have NEVER seen them marketed as a weightloss food.
You’re right, they’re not specifically marketed as (quote unquote) “weight loss supplements”, but they do tend to be used in the Real World like that–it’s the whole “portion control” thing. “Eat one of these as an entire meal and it’s only 240 calories”, like that. All the (quote unquote) "energy bars"out there IME tend to be used like that. Viz and to wit, the OP using a Clif bar as breakfast (although he’s not using it for weight loss). Because they give you a big blood sugar punch from the fat and sugar, they’re instantly filling, so you tend to think of them as a meal, if you’re looking for ways to get through a meal without ingesting too much actual “food”, like if you’re trying to lose weight and meals are an ordeal to keep from eating too much. It’s easier to grab an energy bar and then get out of the kitchen and away from thoughts of food.
Well, you’re on the right track–add snacks. Just add high-calorie, nutritious snacks instead of low-calorie meals. You need to do the opposite of what people trying to lose weight do; they’re encouraged to substitute fruit for something high-calorie.
Think “rolls and butter”. Cinnamon toast. Keep cold cooked pasta in the fridge and grab some, pour some spaghetti sauce out of a jar over it, heat it up in the microwave. I had to go through somewhat the same thing when I was breastfeeding each of my three kids; without deliberately adding extra calories, I just didn’t have enough to make milk. Potatoes are good, too. I kept cold boiled taters in the fridge, grab 'em, peel 'em, slice 'em, fry 'em.
My partner is 6’8" and thin as a pencil. He works out almost every day and is actually extremely strong, but his muscles are long rather than thick. He has the most amazing definition, throughout his entire body. He has no health problems, and everyone considers him the hottest guy they know. He is the hottest guy I have ***ever ***known. And he is perfectly comfortable in his body.
Yes, you can work out and improve what you’ve got, up to a point. But really … count your blessings; there are lots of people who’d love to trade bodies with you … or at least share yours.
If you’ve never worked out on a regular basis before, then it doesn’t matter what you do. Just get yourself moving, get your heartrate up, and put some resistence to your muscles. Don’t try to kill yourself but don’t go to easy on yourself, either. Twenty lbs of muscle is no joke and you’re going to have to work your ass off to get there. You’re not a fragile bunny so don’t be afraid to push through a little bit of aching and exhaustion.
Once you build yourself a little base level of fitness, this plan still sucks. Sorry. I can’t tell you exactly what to do because I don’t know you, but a few suggestions would be that you need to add a bench press, pull ups (overhand grip), drop the push ups and change the sit ups to crunches/twisting v-sits/leg-lifts.
We’re talking ~8 grams of protein per cup of milk, ~6 grams per egg, or ~50 per shake. Drink a protein shake.
What do you guys think of protein bars? Some of them, like these Pure Protein bars that my husband loves, have up to 30g of protein in them, and apparently they taste really good too. I bet one or two of those would be easier to get down than a protein shake. Plus, you could take them with you and eat them at work or in the car.
I’ll pick them up if they’re on clearance but generally they’re too expensive for me. Most of them are packed with sugar which is fine with me because I just count it in my calories but if you’re trying to avoid sugar it would be a concern. The good-tasting protein shakes are filled with sugar too, by the way. Most of them these days have splenda or equivalent but those taste like shit IMO.
– that if you’re not willing to invest a certain amount of time doing this, then you must not be very interested. I, for example, am learning to play the oboe, and I realize that I must spend a certain amount of time every day practicing it. I don’t always make it, but I feel really, really guilty on the days when I don’t. I don’t say, “I want to learn the oboe, but egads, I don’t want to spend an hour a day doing it!” It takes as long as it takes to learn the skill. And it takes as long as it takes to build up muscle mass, and if you really want it, you have to be willing to work at it, for as long as it takes, not by looking at the clock and saying, “Welp, that’s my 29 minutes, I’m done…” When you’re building up muscles, you do it until they’re tired–and then you stop.