 In this episode of Mind Pump the World's Top, Fitness Health and Entertainment Podcasts, we tackle a subject that we think doesn't get enough attention. We talk about the hard gainer, the ectomorph, the person who is skinny fat, the person who has a difficult time building strength and muscle. Maybe that's you. Maybe you follow the same routine as your workout partner, your friends, you do everything right or at least you think you do everything right. Nothing happens. You don't gain any muscle. It's hard for you to gain any muscle mass. Even when you eat more food, nothing seems to happen. So in this episode, we tackle the four biggest workout mistakes that hard gainers make with their training and then we give you the solutions for all of those. Now if you want more information, because in this episode it's all focused on training, if you want more information on things like nutrition, sleep, supplements, lifestyle, if you want to hear more about my personal experience, training hundreds and hundreds of hard gainers and myself, I'm also a hard gainer. I'm giving a free class. It's actually a hard gainer class. So I'm going to sit there and break everything down that you need to know to get your body to finally build muscle and strength. I mean, I tackle all of it. Every single thing you need to know from diet, sleep, supplements, lifestyle, mindset, of course, training. In fact, in the class, I give you a full-on workout that you can follow that's more effective than the one you're probably following now. It's totally free. It's a free class. It's a webinar. If you want to sign up for it, there's limited space, go to hardgainerwebinar.com. Also, this episode is brought to you by our sponsor ForSigmatic. ForSigmatic has some of the best natural supplements available to enhance your cognitive ability, your health, your performance. Now, they specialize in mushroom extracts. Now, mushrooms have some incredible medicinal and performance-enhancing properties. In fact, mushrooms are widely used in some of the oldest forms of medicine, like Chinese medicine or Ayurvedic medicine. Now, here's the problem with other mushroom-based supplements. They extract the compounds really only one way. Typically, they'll grind up a dried mushroom and there you go. Now, ForSigmatic uses a dual extraction process. So the product is potent and effective. One of my favorite products that they have is their ForSigmatic Focus Power Shots that include lion's mane. This is a mushroom that's been shown to improve cognitive function. Some people call it a neutropic. It's got some caffeine in it, a little bit of vitamin B12. They also have some immune support shots and some adaptogen beauty shots to improve the look of your skin and the health of your skin. Anyhow, if you go to ForSigmatic's website and use our code, you'll get 15% off any of their products. Here's where you go. ForSigmatic.com, that's F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com forward slash mind pump. Use the code mind pump and get 15% off any of their products. Also before the episode starts, I want to remind everybody that MAPS STRONG is 50% off all month long. MAPS STRONG is a workout program designed to help you build muscle and strength and it's inspired by strongman training. So it includes traditional exercises and some fun non-traditional strongman type exercises. You don't need a ton of equipment to do this program. It's a regular home gym, will suffice, barbells, dumbbells, a squat rack, adjustable bench, and you're pretty much set to follow MAPS STRONG. Again, it's 50% off. Here's how you get the half off discount. Go to MAPS STRONG.com and use the code STRONG50. That's S-T-R-O-N-G-5-0, no space for the discount. A lot of stuff has been going out via the web from Mind Pump and Sal, in particular, about hard gainers. I've been getting a lot of DMs, I've been getting messages related to topics around this and you just wrote a really good blog that I think we should talk about. What's interesting about that topic, so a hard gainer, first off let's define that for people. A hard gainer is somebody that really struggles to put on muscle mass or weight. Building muscle is tough for everybody, by the way, so I want to be clear. It's not like if you don't gain 10 pounds of muscle a month, you're a hard gainer. But a hard gainer is somebody that seems to put on muscle much slower than the people around them. They eat more food than the people around them, they don't gain weight. It's just a struggle. Naturally, very skinny or maybe even skinny fat. The problem with this is that you don't have a lot of representation in the fitness space because the fitness space, it's a market, and it responds to market demands. Most people are interested in losing weight. Most people have a weight loss problem or they need to lose weight. Most of the information that's out there is written about that or people talk about that. If you're somebody that's sitting around saying, look, I don't have an issue with that, it means the opposite. I can't add muscle mass to my frame or I can't add curves to my body. It's hard for me to do it. I follow the programs that the people around me follow. I work out partners. I seem to eat more than the people around me. Nothing is happening or it's happening at an insanely slow pace like what's going on. Well, that's a hard gainer. Back in the day, they classified. I forgot who did this. I believe it was a psychologist who created categories of somatotypes for humans. They've been largely discredited because people don't fit neatly into the categories that this person created. It'd be nice if they did. It'd make life a lot easier. I will say this. People who are true hard gainers, they tend to fit in the ectomorph category. If you look up what an ectomorph is and if it resonates with you, then that might be you. The question is, do you need to train differently? Are the things you need to focus on a little bit differently? I'd say yes. Generally speaking, yes. Ultimately, there's individual differences between people that are most important. Generally speaking, if this is you, there are some things that you want to focus on. Here's the interesting thing about this, too, Adam. This was something that I thought we would hear mostly from guys, skinny guys or hard gainer guys. I'm getting a lot of messages from women a ton who are saying, yeah, we're saying, I'm not gaining the muscle I want. I'm not gaining the curve that I want. My legs or my glutes or my delts just don't seem to be responding. I'm not getting stronger. They seem to also be very interested in this topic. This is not just a male topic at all. I think in the past it was targeted towards men. When you hear that term, hard gainer, right away, you think of the skinny 17-year-old boy who's been lifting weights for four or five years, which I identify with and couldn't build muscle and struggled. But you're right. A girl who is trying to shape or build her butt and struggles with that falls in this exact category. The formula, the recipe for her success is exactly the same as the 17-year-old boy and the same pitfalls are very similar too. The things that we'll address as far as the four mistakes that they tend to make are exactly the same. Even though it's a different sex, the same struggles apply. The whole semantotypes thing that you're talking about, really the only reason why it was discredited is because it was originally set around just bone structure. If your bone structure was like this, then you're this semantotype and why it's been discredited is because there's so many other variables that make up why somebody is really, really lean. So somebody who has a smaller bone structure like myself, yeah, it can be harder to build muscle simply because of my frame, but it's also because of my behaviors that tend to go with that too. I happen to also be somebody who's active and moving around. I didn't eat a lot, especially when I was younger, so there's other reasons why that is. My name is true on the opposite end of the spectrum when you talk about like an endomorph who has a larger bone structure, tends to also eat more, maybe has a little more sedentary comparison. So there's other variables and that's, I think, why it was discredited when there's a lot of truth to it. There's a lot of, we can typically look at a client and look at their behaviors, look at their bone structure and I can put you in one of those categories that you probably identify most with. So I think there's still a lot of truth to it. More of the other challenges around this revolve around the training advice that people tend to get when it comes to building muscle, the people who tend to get the most attention or the most muscular, strong, built people, which is not necessarily bad except for the fact that these people tend to not have a lot of experience training hard gainers. They train themselves and they are often in a different category. If you see a bodybuilder work out or somebody who's got this really impressive stand out type of physique, they tend to not be the hard gainers. They tend to be people who respond very easily and so their bodies just respond differently. So their advice is usually targeted to people like them. But if you're a true hard gainer, some of that advice doesn't really work for you. I remember doing this myself. Working out at a young age, I would say I was definitely in this hard gainer category. And I remember reading the advice I would get out of bodybuilding magazines and books and publications around this topic. Knowing what I know now, looking back, I can say with 100% certainty that information was not for someone like me. The information that I read was for somebody whose body responded pretty well or maybe just even average, whereas my body responded maybe below average. So what I want to focus on in this episode really revolves around the training mistakes, like the big ways that hard gainers or people have a tough time packing on muscle and strength, the ways that they tend to screw up and what they can do instead of the common mistakes. Well, the first thing that comes to mind for me or that I remember is chasing the pump. I remember seeing the before and afters. I think you've talked about on the show before, like the Ultimate Orange and when that was popular. And that was at the Super Pump 250 and how they would show the before and afters. And it's hard because you read the magazines, they recommend all the super sets, the compound sets and these exercises that would increase the amount of blood flow in the muscles. You get this massive pump and you see yourself and then you look at yourself in the mirror and you gain inches instantly. Like almost immediately. Right, right after your workout. Because of all this fluid that's pumped in there and so it's hard to not think that that isn't helping you grow, which it does play somewhat of a role. But you can get trapped in chasing that because that for many, many years, I trained that way because of the visual effect that it gave me instantly versus thinking like more of a long-term building muscle and I got trapped in the chasing. That's 100% correct because if you're somebody that's insecure about your body, you're not building muscle and then you do an exercise and you get a really good pump, it's going to feed that, right? You're going to look in the mirror and be like, oh my gosh, I look bigger, even if it's for 30 minutes and then it goes away. Oh my gosh, I want that every time I work out. Let me do that every time I work out. Plus you feel it, you feel that that that bigness. I would think too, from a female perspective, like doing a lot of reps, they really get connected to those muscles they're trying to shape and to define. And so psychologically, it just feels like they're on pace to really show off the spot and grow muscles. Well, that's the other point to the chasing pump that's a fallacy is because you feel this burning sensation and you feel it working so much because you're doing so many reps and so much blood and lactic acid is being pumped through the muscle that you're going like, oh my God, I'm really working this. I'm honing in on this. Yeah, I'm really working this muscle and I'm glad you brought up the female side of this because I see this all the time in the gym where obviously I know the girl is doing all these butt exercises and she's going like circuit. Jump squats, body weight lunges, keeping the booty band on the entire time. All these moves and they're just done consecutively with no real rest. And they're getting a burn and they're getting a pump. Yes, and they feel it. And so it's hard to communicate this message to somebody who's like, I mean, I feel it though. I feel it in my butt and I can see it too in the mirror. I can see it get all pumped up. Well, here's the bottom line and I'm going to simplify it a little bit, but this is totally true. Muscles really basically do one thing. They contract, they create force. Bigger muscles contract harder. Okay. Now, there's a lot of other factors. There's technique that's involved in strength. There's a central nervous system that contributes to that. But when we just look at the muscle, a bigger muscle contracts harder. So at the end of the day, ultimately at the end of the day, strength is what you should aim for. Yeah. Strength. That's the base. Getting stronger consistently, done properly with good nutrition, will always ultimately result in more muscle, especially for the natural hard gainer, for the skinny person who's not taking steroids. Almost every, if you just focus on strength and get stronger, muscle is going to follow. This is not true with the pump. Now the pump can contribute to muscle growth, but the signal for muscle growth from the pump is much smaller. It's still important, but it's much, much smaller. And you can really train and get great pumps all the time and build no muscle. And I've seen this happen time and time again. Not true with strength. If you add 50 pounds to your squat and 20 pounds to your bench press and 20 pounds to your barbell row, you're going to get bigger. If you get a better pump. It has to. Your body has to overcome the successive amount of load. Now the, you know, places more demand on these muscles. The demand itself is, you know, it's really teaching and it's telling the body that, hey, we need to now build, you know, an excess amount of tissue to, you know, overcome this, this amount of demand that you're placing on it. So I want to, I want to address the mental hurdle that you'll go through with this also, though, is, and I remember, I remember when I started to piece this together, like, oh, I need to do more heavier lifting and I should be building strength. And then what happens is you train those workouts and you don't feel the pump and the burn the same way. And then you get discouraged. It's hard for you to stay in that phase and to stick with the program and go like, okay, I, I know that I need to build strength. I know that I need to build muscle. You know, I heard on my pump, I trust the advice that I'm getting. So you start following it and you get four or five, maybe, you know, six workouts deep into str, a strength training type of protocol. And you're just not seeing the same pump visually as you were when you were doing all these superset high rep exercises. You're not feeling the burn the same way that you were. And it's hard to, to break through that mental hurdle of, am I actually building that muscle as much as I was before? And I remember going back, I would do a little bit of it and then I would always revert back to the thing that I felt or saw the difference immediately. And it's, it's a definite challenge for you to break through. Here's what you can expect, okay, when you're building strength. Typically, this is what it looks like. You'll get a little stronger, get a little stronger, get a little stronger, get a little stronger, boom, muscle size. Then you do it again, get a little stronger. It's usually like that. It usually doesn't look like this. Climbing a ladder. Yeah, it's not like stronger and muscle. It typically is like, I'll add five pounds. I'll add 10 pounds, I'll have 15 pounds. And then boom, I notice more muscle. This is true for clients as well. Nothing else consistently builds muscle than building strength. Nothing. Now, other things can build muscle. They're just not nearly as consistent. I've done workouts where my strength didn't necessarily go up, but I looked a little bit more muscular. I looked like I built maybe some more muscle in the mirror or whatever. But with strength, it was always consistent. If I got stronger, I built more muscle. If all you focused on was getting stronger, especially, especially for those of you who are intermediate, beginner, intermediate, or beginner advanced hard gainer lifters, if all you focused on was getting stronger, you'd be way ahead of the game. And not even worried about the pump. That happens sometimes and it'll happen on its own, but don't even necessarily worry about that. Don't chase that. Focus on getting stronger. And here's the cool thing about it. It's a very objective metric. Here's the problem with getting a pump and looking in the mirror. Am I bigger? Am I not? Sometimes your weight fluctuates. You're holding more water. You're holding less water. Maybe I'm more hydrated. The lighting is better. Maybe more of a pump this time than last time. Am I really gaining weight? Muscle, all the scale looks like I gained weight, but is it really lean body mass? When you're stronger, you're stronger. There is no denying it. You add 10 pounds to a lift. You are stronger and that results in more muscle. And that's why that's the most important thing. That's what you should be chasing over everything else. Well, speaking to the beginner novice lifter, the other thing that comes to mind when I think about the challenge or struggle that I had as a hard gainer, is the overuse of machines. And I think there's two main reasons why I gravitate to that. One, easy for, again, getting the pump. I would superset exercise. I'd bring a pair of dumbbells right over to a preacher curl machine. I'd do some preacher curls, go right into hammers. I would do things that would get this massive pump and using the machines. It was a very easy tool to do that. And then the other reason was because I was more nervous to do the movements that I found challenging or difficult or didn't think maybe I knew how to do them very well and I didn't want to look silly in the gym. So I gravitated towards all the machines where I could look at the side and see the picture of the image of where I should feel it and it's got me in this strict form so you can't really mess it up very much. And so I think that also is what's killing a lot of people that are trying to build size, shape the body, is they gravitate towards the machine exercises because they're easier. And machines just don't build as much muscle. Look, if I ran a study with 100 participants and took 50 of all hard gainers and took 50 participants and all I had them do was barbell squat, deadlift, bench press, barbell row, overhead press, five exercises, you could pick 50 machine exercises for the other group. And we just went forward with that. I would win. My group would win every single time. Barbell exercises and dumbbell exercises are just more effective at adding muscle, especially if you're a beginner or intermediate lifter, especially for those. Also, the strength gains that you get with free weights translate to more muscle when the weight is controlled for. So what I mean before that is if you add even a compound machine exercise, even one that's considered better than other machines, let's say a leg press, right? A leg press, machine exercise, I would put it near the top of muscle-building machines, but it's still a machine, right? Add 20 pounds to your leg press. Compare that to someone adding 20 pounds to their squat. Who's going to build more muscle? The person with the squat every single time. Somebody who adds 20 pounds to their cable row, compare them to somebody who adds 20 pounds to a barbell row, or a bench press versus a machine press, or a standing overhead press versus a machine overhead press. Go down the list, free weights just build more muscle. There's a few reasons for this. One requires more control, balance, and stability. The second one is machines are fixed. Your body has to follow the machine versus the other way around. Free weights follow your body. It's a much louder signal. I mean, yeah, like you said, you have to stabilize with so many more muscles in order to just keep your body in a certain position as you're going through the movement. And so you have that isometric component where there's three different factors to this, right? Where you have your concentric, where we're trying to move the weight. And then we're also trying to stabilize the weight with the isometric part of it. And also decelerating it in the eccentric part. So your muscles are fully expressing its potential while also involving a lot more muscles throughout your body. So it's just a really large signal to account for, which provides that level of growth versus taking a lot of those components out and making it a bit easier. It's also the learning curve. Because it's such a challenge, these compound lifts are so challenging to get good at, that also means that there's lots of room for you to improve, grow, and see adaptation from. If you choose things that are really simple, the body adapts to it really quickly. If you choose things that are more challenging for you to figure out. A lot of room. A lot of room. And that's a good thing. So I know there's a lot of people that hear you list off all those compound lifts and they're like, yeah, but what if I can't do those? What if I can't perform a squatter? What if I don't know how to deadlift? It's not going to build as much muscle for me. That's wrong. It's part of the process of learning how to do it. That in itself is going to build a lot of muscle. And then when you finally learn how to do it pretty well, then there's a whole bunch more muscle that you're going to build from that. I remember, so we started Mind Pump about five years ago. And when we started, Adam was towards the tail end of his competitive professional career as a professional physique competitor. So that's like one level under bodybuilder. He was obviously very muscular. He had a pro card and experienced, been training himself and clients for almost two decades. Very experienced, knew what he was doing. So leading up to this, Adam's back exercises involved lots of cables and some dumbbell stuff and some barbell stuff and pull-ups and that kind of stuff. Not bad exercises, all very good. Wasn't doing heavy deadlifts a lot. Had done them, but never really pushed the deadlifts. Well, we start the podcast and we start having these great conversations. One of the things I love about Adam and Justin is I can learn so much from them and they're also opening to learning things from each other and from me. And what I mean by learn is trying different things out. That's a good point, let me try that. And at the point, at that time, I was deadlifting very, very heavy and I remember we would have these conversations on the podcast and I would challenge Adam and say, hey, you're a pro, why don't you start deadlifting? We'd have a lot of fun and kick it around. And so Adam loves that kind of stuff, loves the challenge, decided he was gonna deadlift and see how strong he could get. The goal was to get strong at deadlifting. The goal was not to develop a better physique for pro competition, that's the truth. What happened to your back when you did that? The most impressive transformation I made in that year compared to the 15 years of lifting. And that's why too, I think I get fired up when I see the fitness professionals that try and challenge deadlifts as a back exercise because it is a hip hinge movement and it's primarily legs and hips that are getting worked but a lot of development happens in the back from heavy deadlifting. And it was simply something that I just didn't do. You know, if I deadlifted, I rarely ever deadlifted something that I couldn't do 10 reps with. It was intermittently put into my routine because I understood the value of it but it was like, I'm a bodybuilder, I'm not really trying to be the strongest deadlifter. So it wasn't a focus. And Sal, you're right, I had already achieved my pro card. I was already at a place where I built a physique to prove that I could hang with the top in that class. So I wasn't really trying to go after deadlifting because I thought I would shape my back better or look more impressive. It was really more about how strong could I get and could I catch up to where you were deadlifting. As a byproduct, what ended up happening was I built the most impressive back that I've had in my entire career and it was literally in a year's time. And I remember telling you guys this, I mentioned this on the podcast a few times if you've listened for a long time. I stopped doing a lot of the fundamental exercises that I'd done forever because I wasn't concerned about it. Again, competing career was pretty much on the tail end. I wasn't really worried about that. All I wanted to do was get stronger. Could I catch Sal in his deadlift if I really focused on it? And that's what I was thinking about. And what ended up happening was I stopped doing a lot of cable rows and any sort of machine exercises for my back. And when I came back to all those after a year of just mainly deadlifting, I was stronger in all of those lifts on top of having the most impressive back that I'd ever had. I remember when I was 15, I was at a family function and we were playing volleyball. And I remember I fell and twisted my leg and dislocated my kneecap. So I had this kneecap injury. Luckily, nothing was torn, but I was injured in my leg. I had to wear a brace. And then part of the rehab was strengthening exercises with a physical therapist. And I remember when I was done with that, I just wasn't satisfied with how stable my knee was. And at the time I was really getting into resistance training. So I went to the gym and I knew nothing about squats. I knew there was that was an exercise, but at the time reading the magazines, I thought, oh, if I want to build my legs, I'm going to do leg presses and hack squats. So that's what I saw in the magazines. And so I did. Now, when it comes to my physique, you know, I'll say I'm somewhat of a hard gainer, but if there's one part of my body that responds, well, it's my legs. My legs grow the easiest out of anything else. So I did leg presses and hack squats and I did get them stronger and build more muscle. I remember being really, you know, satisfied with my gains or whatever. Well, anyway, one day I'm working out and there's a group of power lifters doing squats, these big massive dudes. And I was looking up to them like, wow, one day I hope I can be strong like them or whatever. Anyway, I started talking to one of the guys and they see how hard I was working. He said, why don't you squat? Why are you doing a hack squat and leg press? I'm like, well, you know, I'm not a power lifter. I just want to get bigger legs. And they laughed and they said, you should be squatting. And I did my first real barbell squat workout with them. And I was convinced after that, that I'm going to stop doing all these other machines and just barbell squat. Now this is no, this is no exaggeration. That summer I gained 13 pounds of lean body mass, mostly my lower body from doing barbell squats and deadlifts. My legs, I got stretch marks on my legs from how quickly they responded to an exercise. And it was just as intense. My workout before was intense. I had good programming. The difference was I went from machines to free weights. Free weights are just more effective. Now, if you're super advanced, you've got great connections to your muscles, you want to add volume and you want to get fancy, throw some machines in there, nothing wrong with that whatsoever. But if you're a hard gainer, especially if you're a beginner to intermediate, or you've been working out for a long time and your body still isn't responding, so you're advanced in terms of experience, but maybe not advanced in terms of results, stick to free weights, get basic with them, and then combine what we just talked about. Get stronger at free weight exercises. Watch what happens. The muscle will come when you do those two things. So the other thing I think of when you say that is, and I remember having these epiphanies when we were training, where you started to do something, it was like, oh my God, and then you had this summer or this year where you put on this mask. This brings me to the third mistake made with training, and that is falling in love with a way of training. And many times that is like a rep range or a specific. Oh, you just marry it. Yeah, you see the change. Somebody got through to you, whether it be a bunch of buff power lifters who said something or an article you read or a study that you came across or a friend who got you to try something different. You do it, you see the most gains you've ever seen before, and now you're married to that and you're now stuck into that. So I was really bad about phasing my workouts. And moving out of rep ranges, I would learn something new, I would program it, I would see the change results, and then I'd be like, oh my God, that was the answer. You have to stay with us. Yeah, this is it. This is where I was, I wasn't doing this before. Now I'm doing this and now my body is responding. So then I would get stuck in it for years of kind of following the same type of routine because I saw so many gains. And then again, I would be at this massive plateau for months or even years. Yeah, this happened to me. There was an article in Flex Magazine about, it was like the top advanced principles for gaining mass or something like that. I don't know what year it was, probably mid late 90s on the cover of the magazine. I can remember the cover of the magazine. Mike Madarazzo was on there with his huge arms as a bodybuilder in those days. He passed away, but he had just these incredibly incredible arms. And in there, one of the main principles it said was, do low reps to build mass. And they said, six reps, no more than eight reps to build mass. And so that was it. That's all I did. All I did was I never went above seven or eight reps. And it worked in the beginning, but then after a while, your body plateaus, things kind of stopped working. It's very frustrating trying to figure out what's going on. At this point, I'm a late teens or whatever. I'm buying different supplements. Maybe that's the key. Maybe I'm not taking the right supplement. Then I read an article by a bodybuilder who's physique. I really admire. I think his name was Frank Hillebrand. He also passed away, by the way. Anyway, he wrote an article about how he got great gains from training in the 15 rep range. And he made a really good case for it. And I thought, what have I got to lose? I'm going to try doing higher reps. Let's see what happens. And I remember that day, I remember I went to my workout. I cut the weight way down because there's no way I could do 15 reps with what I was doing six and seven reps with. And I did that for about a week and gained muscle. And then I did what Adam said, which was, this is the way. This is all I'm going to do now. And it worked great for about five, six weeks. Slow down, stop working. But like a stubborn, you know, I was a very hardworking kid and also very stubborn. So I'm like, well, I'm just going to stick to this. And it stopped working. And then I switched back to low reps later on, got the results again. It actually took me a long time to realize that I should phase my rep ranges. Here's what studies show, by the way. Okay. When they compare rep ranges, people always like to pull up studies and say, well, this study shows that 8 to 12 built a little bit more muscle. Oh, wait a minute. This study says that 15 reps builds just as much muscle if you go to failure. Oh, this one shows that low reps builds muscle, whatever. So you get all these arguments about which rep range builds muscle. But they're missing one constant, consistent point in all these studies. The most important point. All of those rep ranges build muscle. All of them. All of them build muscle. Every single one of those rep ranges, I would say between one and 30 builds muscle. And every one of them can result in a hard plateau and the lack of results. Yes. If you stay in it too long. Yes. All of them build muscle. None of them always build muscle. No, it was funny because the 8 to 12 rep range was like the golden goose. Like this is, you know, the study that I remember seeing a million times and like, if it's hypertrophy, if I'm trying to build muscle, like that's where I have to live. And so I that literally is programmed in my brain from school and from, you know, all these classes I took because, you know, we're just going off the information that we had at the time, which was like very thin. Like, you know, in terms of like kinesiology and in our study of the human body, it's really progressed, you know, quite some bit over time, but it was pretty weak back in the day. And so that was like, I lived in that rep range to try and build muscle. And what took me out of that was finally introducing, you know, other methods like going in a power phase, like, you know, going in a low rep range, like, you know, like it really took that to get me out of where I was totally stalled, didn't realize, like I was just spinning my wheels. So the key and the answer to this is seeking out what's most novel. You want to, and whatever that is. And then get good at it. Get good at it, right? You want to spend enough time in it that you do get good. The body adapts, it learns. So you now add more load. And you can then go, oh, let's find something new and novel again and move out of that rep range. And that took, man, it took me many times before, I would say it wasn't until like seven, eight years of like, because like you, I had a similar story, Sal, where, you know, we were, and I remember being, remember vividly conversations with my workout partner and I, you know, we literally thought, you know, if you did 15 to 20 reps, that's like girly stuff. That was girly. You know, the girls do 15 to 20 reps with lightweight. That's for toning. Yeah, exactly. That was my thought process. And I'll never forget, you know, finally coming up, there was this, there was this one trainer in the gym that we worked out that had just had this incredible physique. He looked like he competed for sure. We were in our early 20s. And I remember walking up to him and asking him. And obviously he was a good trainer because when we asked him, you know, what, what are you doing or what do you do? I think we were actually asking about arms at the time. You know, what did you do to get your arms so impressive and stuff? And instead of just giving us an answer of exercises or do this or do that, he asked us, you go, what are you doing? And I said, well, you know, we, and we kind of laid out our workout program. And at that time it was heavy. Never, never did anything over six reps at that time. And he goes, oh man, you need to do some light, you know, 15, 20 reps, do some super set it. And we're like, what? That's what all the chicks are doing. He's like, no, you, and I remember doing that. And our, and I got stronger and built more muscle over that summer than I ever had before. But then again, getting stuck there for years before somebody else told me, oh, I need to move over. And then, and then it finally like clicked about the third time that I had done that where I had moved in and out and realized like, oh wow, okay. What I need to do is I can't stay in this rep range for very long. And what's tough, and you mentioned it or alluded to it is all the different studies. This is gets where gets where everybody gets. It's really confusing and very nuanced for somebody who's trying to learn this like, yeah, but I heard this, this trainer's touting this study and this train over here is touting this study and which one's true? Well, the answer is they all have truth to them. And the most important thing is that you learn to stay in one of those phases for about three to six weeks to get good enough at that rep range and then move on out of it. But never allow yourself to be there much longer than about six weeks because once you hit that six week mark it really starts to fall off. And that's why when you look at if you unpack all of the programming on all maps programs that's one of the staple philosophies that we've built around. We never allow someone to stay in a phase longer than three to four weeks. And the reason why three to four and we don't stretch it to six is because we know that at that point most people will see the best results before they phase out. It doesn't mean that somebody couldn't stretch it one more week or two more weeks and see great results. We just have found that that's enough time for the body to start to adapt to that rep range that they have already seen good results from them. And then when we move them to another phase they're going to start this if the body will recognize that as novel and respond. One of the best ways to get around a plateau is to avoid plateauing completely. So staying in a rep phase until you plateau that's more difficult to back out of than switching before the plateau even happens. So this is why I tend to recommend people three to four weeks in a rep range and then move out. Even if you're ahead of it. Yeah even if you're like oh but I'm still getting great gains move out of it. You don't want to get to the point where you're like hard plateau nothing's happening. Now I'm going to switch because sometimes that requires a couple weeks of like stepping back with the intensity allowing the body to catch up a little bit. So about three to four weeks in a rep range is good. And each rep range has its own value. It requires a little bit of a different skill. You know a set of 15 reps and squats. Very different feel and different concentration than a set of four reps with the squat. So there's a lot that your body's learning. There's a lot of central nervous system adaptation that you get from each of them. One might give you a little bit more strength endurance and stamina. The other one's maybe more power and grinding strength. All of them. Here's the key though. All of them build muscle. So you should train in all of them. And the best way to do it is focus on one rep range for a few weeks. Move to another one rather than switching rep ranges all over the place because it never really when you do it that way by the way it never really gives you time to solidify the technique the feel of the movements by practicing just that rep range for at least a few weeks if you're if you're moving them all over if you're really really advanced and you know your body really well then you can move through different rep ranges throughout the whole week. It's just hard to measure that one. It is. It's hard to measure because you're just throwing everything at it at the body and that's another one of the studies that gets touted all the time. Like and that's where the whole remember the muscle confusion you know kick. I mean I was on that kick for a long time too. My philosophy for several years was you know I never duplicate a workout. You know I'm every workout is so novel and so unique I'm constantly keep the body constantly confusing it. You know every workout has every rep range in it. Every every workout has different exercises and you know that was enough to like I would consider myself I was a very fit person at that time and if that was just your goal is to be good at doing lots of different exercises and and just overall fitness health that's fine but when you are looking to shape sculpt change body composition there's a much more methodical way to go at it and it's more important then to stick to a rep range focus on that in your entire workout so you can measure and you can see and then you can change out of it and what you'll see and this is where it's important because there is such an individual variance because everybody is unique there is going to be somebody who just every time they go to a phase one and maps out a ball their body just responds and the opposite is true every time they go to phase three that person their body just responds and so you want to make sure that you you lean into that a little more so and like that's why I tell people too like the programs are moldable so if I have somebody who responds extremely well to the higher rep range we might spend four or five weeks in that rep range because of how great their body is responding and we may only do three or four weeks in a strength phase you don't know this until you are consistent with tracking and you stick with a type of rep range or types of exercises so you can measure that for yourself you'll be much better at programming your own program when you do it this way versus just mixing them up right now the last mistake that hard gainers make this one is the I'd say one of the last things for me to figure out because it required me to question you know what had become common knowledge in the the muscle building world and now common knowledge refers to things that are so accepted as truth that nobody even questions them it's just it's so it's so much common knowledge that you don't even consider questioning that you question everything else but that and that's the following that body part split routines are just not effective especially for hard gainers they're just not as effective for building muscle now when I first started looking at this there wasn't a single modern muscle building guru or fitness expert that recommended anything other than body part splits it was all body part splits all muscle building routines were breaking the body up into body parts and you know Monday you do chest and shoulders and Tuesday you do back and biceps or whatever they were all like that nobody was talking about working out full body you know three days a week nobody recommended that for muscle building and so I didn't even consider it and so I followed split routines forever forever forever until one day you know I don't know exactly what sparked my interest I think it was I was on a forum and somebody had talked about a book called dinosaur training and you know how much muscle they built on it or whatever and the principles and I bought the book and I was really enthralled with it because it was old and it was old techniques and advice and I thought wow you know what I wonder if there's some old like wisdom that I can learn I remember I remember having experience like this about martial arts too I remember being in in grappling and I remember going to to the Louvre Museum in Paris and I saw these sculptures and there was this one like 3000 year old sculpture and there were two wrestlers and one of them was doing a move that looked like one I had learned like the week before I remember thinking like I wonder if there's some I mean there's some ancient wisdom here stuff that might apply to my grappling well I kind of applied that to building muscle I thought I wonder if these like the old the old timers the guys who lifted weights and built muscle before steroids were around before supplements were around then it started to make sense to me wait a minute they might know more than the guys today because they didn't have those things all they had to rely on was exercise technique and a diet maybe they have better information especially for your average person especially for the average person that wasn't getting talked to at all like all these programs that were out there all these pdfs and we're just shot down from these bodybuilders who have built this incredible physique but it was at their level their volume their intensity and it was basically almost it was a part where like the person that bought the program felt like you know they could never achieve that that level of workout and that became like the thing that was like can I withstand this workout and it was almost like a bragging rights of even being able to get through it well they didn't have anything in common with me you know I'm looking at Doreen Yates' routine or Ronnie Coleman or other body they have they have nothing their bodies have nothing in common with mine from a muscle building perspective plus on anabolic steroids and all that other stuff so I went back and did some research and what I found was incredible first off these men and women were extremely impressive you know you have guys like first off the way they looked John Grimmick look up a picture of John Grimmick or Steve Reeves or Bill Pearl back in the day these guys were muscular you know looking incredibly muscular looking individuals okay and again this was before widespread use of anabolic steroids then you look at some of the strength feats that they would do like Eugene Sandow right he would you know one arm bent press 300 pounds above his head I thought okay let's see how they worked out so I started doing some research I got some of their workout routines and noticed one thing in common with all of them they all trained the whole body none of them did a body part split type routine none of them did a routine where today I'm just working my shoulders it was always all full body and I thought you know I used to think that that was just how you train when you first started and that wasn't really good for muscle building but let me give this a shot and I'll never forget you know at this point I had a lot of experience working out and at this point you know if I did a workout I could tell pretty quickly if it was gonna work for me and I remember that very first week doing a full body routine three days a week and watching the weight go up on my exercises each time that week and I thought this is this is crazy well I think it just detoured from that because of the way that the gym was structured with all these machines and all these different sections like devoted to specific body parts and so you know people started to try and organize these programs around like going from machine to machine and and you know body part splits makes sense for that environment but it's still like if you go through for your average person it's just not as effective as compound lifts and working the body the total body and doing three days a week I don't think it's that so much as it is you know what your what none of us are touching on right now that I think is so important to this conversation was something that we they didn't have back in the 50s and going way back to like old-timey like strength is they didn't have all this research and control and controlled studies that they were that they were very that they weren't influenced by those they weren't influenced by that all they had was talking to each other looking at results what actually works right and let me tell you and this is this is another area this is a beef that I have with you know trainers that tout studies so much is what we know is if you take a group of people and they are running a body part split and you take a full body routine and both groups for six months follow that and they both hit the body parts the same amount of times they both hit buys three times a week tries three times a week legs three times a week what you'll find is that it's even it pretty much is even it'll be similar it's it'll be very similar it's splitting hairs and so why that there's there's a problem with that is it doesn't take into count behaviors and that was something that took me a long time over years of training clients to recognize and myself and I because I ran body part splits for a very long time if you run a body part split and you actually do it to hit two or three hit the a muscle two or three times in a week you've got to be running a six to seven day week routine in order to do that okay so in order to do that I've got to be training consistently six to seven times a week which was fine I love going to the gym but like life happens even for a gym rat like myself and one week would be four times you know and maybe I missed one week and what ends up happening in a body part split is that week that the some muscles suffer and what always ended up for me suffering were the muscles that I didn't like working very much the ones that needed the attention the most to build my body and to be more symmetrical I always gravitated towards the things I liked doing if I fell off or missed a day or I had to restart my routine my body part split I always gravitated right back to my favorite day back in the gym to help myself get momentum back in the gym again and what ended up happening was that once one or two or three parts of my body was not getting the same attention as some of the other ones where in a full body routine that doesn't happen if even if you missed a day or two in the gym you're hitting full body so they're always equally getting touched all the time and that was a factor that these studies don't play in that is just normal behavior with 90% of the population if you're a steroid bodybuilder and it is your job to show up on when I was competing I didn't infer almost three and a half four years I didn't miss a workout it was my job to show up on stage and look better than what I did last time and I took it like a job that's not most people most people have another job they have a life they have other things and life happens and when life happens you might have a week where you don't get you don't get those consistent workouts in and guess what when you do a full body routine you make sure you address everything the body doesn't ever get neglected it's easier be consistent three days a week than it is five or six days a week right that's a big point here's now here's the other thing okay so yes a full body routines tend to result a more frequency of hitting the body parts first off why is that important for the hard gainer we know we can measure the muscle building signal roughly by measuring something called muscle protein synthesis muscle protein synthesis when it spikes when it goes up it means your body's adding new tissue and we can see this after you work out muscle protein synthesis levels go up and then maybe you know 48 hours later they tend to drop down now my hunch and we don't have any studies to prove this yet but my hunch is that a hard gainer's muscle protein synthesis levels spike and then drop faster than the average person they need to hit a body part more frequently than somebody who has average or above average muscle building genetics someone who's not a hard gainer so the hard gainer probably needs to hit their body more frequently doesn't necessarily they need they need more volume for the week they just need to hit their body more frequently during the week to maintain that elevated signal and a full body workout encourages this because three full body workouts is three you're hitting each body part three times a week so there's that part but there's this other part that I like to talk about when you lift weights when you work a body part most of the muscle the vast majority of the muscle building signal goes to the muscle that's being worked so if I work my bicep my bicep is largely going to get the strength in muscle gains but there's a little bit of carryover it's the whole body we've seen this in studies they've actually done studies where people will train just their right arm and yes the right arm gains most of the muscle but the left arm gains a little bit too we have I have tons of experience with clients where will work on their legs their squat will go up and mysteriously their overhead press or their bench press will also go up there's also although there is a localized the cute muscle building signal that happens to the muscle you're working I believe there's a systemic overall anabolic signal that gets sent to the whole body which one is going to send the biggest general systemic muscle building signal a chest and shoulder workout or a whole body workout right a whole body workouts going to send a very loud full body hey we need to get stronger and build more muscle and this is what I noticed with full body routines I've done splits where I hit my whole body three days a week I've done that I've done the five day and six day splits where I do that I still build more muscle doing a three day a week routine and I think it has to do with the big loud full body signal that we send here's the other thing when you're working your full body you don't really have time or space for exercises that are not as effective as the effective exercise like if I work my legs three times during the week I'm less likely to do things like leg extensions and leg curls I'm more likely to throw in because I'm only doing maybe five or six sets for legs I'm more likely to do barbell squats front squats you know you know maybe a maybe a good morning or remaining deadlift I'm going to do the more effective exercises more frequently than the less effective exercises versus when I'm doing a body part split and I'm doing all 15 sets in one workout for my legs yeah I'll do squats but then I'm going to throw in some leg extensions and some sissy squats and some leg curls all this other stuff because there's no way you're going to be able to do the most effective exercises or at least not an effective way for 15 sets but I can do that for five or six sets so when you look when I would look at clients who would follow body part splits versus clients who would follow full body workouts when I would just compare the frequency of the most effective exercises that they did even if the sets and everything else was controlled I noticed that my full body clients were doing more bench presses more overhead presses more barbell rows more squats more deadlifts and my other clients doing the splits were doing more machines and cables and isolation exercises and there's an extra benefit to that we talked earlier about one of the things is exercise selection and doing the exercises that are more valuable now you're getting to practice those compound exercises that have that larger learning curve right so if you're working towards exercises that have a larger learning curve have more room for adaptation more room for building more muscle and you're practicing them more frequently it's obviously going to build more muscle yeah yeah I'll tell you one more study I've told us a few times on the podcast but you know Doug our producer I first met Doug because he was a client he actually came and was referred to me by his chiropractor he had some back issues and wanted to train with me now Doug came to me fully believing he was a hard gainer in fact I believe that was the word that he used when I asked him when I'd asked him questions he said yeah I have a tough time gaining muscle I'll gain body fat but I won't gain muscle and I asked him about his exercise history Doug was not a novice or a beginner at all he'd been lifting weights on and off but relatively consistently for a very long time since he was in his 20s at the very at the latest and he followed and Doug is the kind of person if you know Doug he's smart he likes the research and read he was far more educated than the average new client that I had he followed body part splits he did body for life that was the Bill Phillips routine back in the day he did all the flex magazine and muscle and fitness magazine routines he understood all the exercises for chest and back and shoulders and bites he was a hard gainer with a lot of experience who'd been working out for a long time with body part split routines so he came to me told me I'm a hard gainer but I will gain body fat easily I've done all this exercise in the past oh by the way he was I believe in his mid to late 40s at this time so past the whatever you call a muscle building prime and we sat down and I luckily am convincing and I convinced him that he needed to lift weights twice a week you know you know Doug I know you've been working out four or five days a week doing all these body part splits or whatever you're going to train me two days a week and we're going to work the whole body and I'm just going to get you strong we're just going to focus on getting you strong dead lifts squats bench presses you know all this oh I thought those exercises are bad for my back remember Doug came to me with a bad back they're not bad for your back we're going to work on mobility slowly build up your strength and in fact you're going to reach a point where your back will no longer become an issue because those exercises are phenomenal when done properly for your back here's what happened Doug got in the best shape of his life his strength went through the roof to the point where after training him for about a year we laughed at the fact that he called himself a hard gainer here was a guy that weighed 150 pounds who was deadlifting 400 pounds in his late 40s with a he remember he came to me with a bad back two days a week full body routine I didn't move Doug to a three day a week full body routine until about a year over a year of consistent two day a week training making phenomenal gains that whole time no joke I'm not exaggerating ladies and gentlemen if you're a hard gainer and you're having a tough time building muscle the vast majority of you will build the most muscle you've ever built with a two to three day a week full body routine focusing on compound lifts just getting stronger of course with a good diet it'll really blow you away and look we put our money where our mouth is if you have our maps programs what we're talking about is displayed in all of our programs we rely very little on machines in our programs even our advanced bodybuilder routines they're still a majority free weights this has actually been great for us with all these gyms shut downs a lot of people with home gyms can still follow our routines if you look at the programs you'll see the phasing of the reps you'll see the focus on strength all the things that we're talking about are present in all of our programs because they just plain work and here's the thing I have never met a hard gainer that couldn't put muscle on their body without following the muscle building principles that we talked about this episode and other ones including that have to do with diet I've never met one that didn't build a an impressive amount of muscle just by following those things so there is hope you're not stuck I promise you look mine pump is recorded on video as well as audio so come join us on youtube mine pump podcast you can also find all of us on instagram you can find Justin at mine pump Justin you can find me at mine pump sal and adam at mine pump adam