Best Weight Lifting Routine for Hardgainers

Sep 30, 2024 mindpump

If you’re a hardgainer, I would first recommend that you check out my article on how to properly eat to add muscle. You can have the perfect workout, but if you aren’t eating in a caloric surplus, with the right macronutrients to allow muscle growth, you will find yourself plateauing. Today, we’ll be going over what the routine in the gym should look like.

While a hardgainer may need to eat more calories than the average person, their workouts will still look the same. You want a program that optimizes sending a muscle building signal, progressively overloads the exercises so that you continually get stronger, and allows for enough volume to elicit growth.

Full Body

Personally, I’m a fan of the full body approach. This addresses the first point I made. Whenever we exercise a muscle we send a muscle building signal. That signal remains elevated for 24-48 hours then comes back down to baseline. Knowing this, we then want to make sure as soon as it comes down that we elevate it back up so our body is continually primed to be building muscle. While more advanced or enhanced trainees can get away with body part splits, it’s not ideal for your average lifter. It’s putting all your volume for one muscle on one day, causing you to use less weights by the time you get to your last two exercises. Let’s instead spread out the volume over three days so we can hit those exercises fresher, maximize that signal, and allow more weight to be moved.

Progressive Overload

We want to make sure you’re either doing one more rep or five more pounds than the week before. This ensures you are continually challenging the muscle in a way to promote growth. Technique is a priority, so do not increase the weight at the expense of shortening your range of motion. Make sure you’re using a full range of motion and, in particular, are controlling the eccentric, or lowering portion of the movement (i.e. when you are bringing the bar to your chest in a bench press).

We also want to focus on mostly compound movements, as those will hit the most muscles efficiently. We can still throw in more isolated movements, but the compounds should be the staple.

Volume

If you are a novice starting out, you want to make sure you’re providing 8-10 sets per muscle, per week. This allows for the proper amount of volume to elicit growth along with progressive overload. If you are an intermediate, you may need 12-15 sets.

Recovery

By going three days a week, you are allowing enough time for recovery so you can come back and hit your full body days fresh. After 6-8 weeks of lifting, make sure to take a one-week deload where you either take a break from lifting, or cut the sets and weight in half. This allows your body to recover from the volume and intensity buildup of those last eight weeks.

The Workout

This is just a sample workout. There are many ways you can construct this, and if you want a full workout plan, I suggest checking out the Mind Pump MAPS Anabolic program.

Frequency: 2-3x a week (keep 1-2 days of rest in between to recover)

Length: 4-week cycle

Sets & Reps: 2-4 sets with 3-8 reps per exercise (rest up to 3 minutes between sets)

Exercises:

Day 1 –

Barbell Squats 4×5

Bench Press 4×5

Weight/Assisted Pull-ups 3×5

Shrugs 3×3-6

Barbell Curls 2×6-8

EZ Bar Skull Crushers 2×6-8

Day 2 –