Let’s not waste any time: what exactly is the quickest way to gain weight? To put it simply, just eat more than your body can metabolize and you’ll gain weight. If you’re naturally thin then chances are you have a fast metabolic rate (or metabolism), meaning you’ll have to eat a lot of calories every day in order for weight gain to occur. But wait a minute, we don’t want to gain just any weight, we want to put on muscle baby! It’s that muscle mass that the chicks dig, so that’s what we’re aiming for.

So how do we get our bodies to store those extra calories we consume as muscle and not body fat? I know what you’re thinking: “I’ve just got to get to the gym, lift those weights, pump iron like all the big guys do”. Well, you’d be right, but that’s not the whole story.

The problem is your situation is different from those ‘muscle men’ you probably idolize. Their genetics are different from yours: their natural hormonal balance makes them prone to being muscular from the start, and their metabolisms are typically slower than yours. Because of these complications you need to employ a much more specific strategy than the one which works for them.

Try this: train your muscles to hypertrophy with relatively short sets of 8-10 reps per muscle group. We’re talking about a full body workout here. Then get a lot of rest in the following two days, exerting yourself as little as possible, and eating large, frequent, balanced meals. Remember, muscle growth occurs after you train and not during. It’s almost always the post-workout strategy which hard gainers get wrong, ruining their plans to gain weight for good. You won’t have this problem though, as you’ll reach hypertrophy while expending the smallest amount of energy, and you’ll follow-up your workouts properly to boot.