What is the Best Weight Training Routine For a Hardgainer?

What is the Best Weight Training Routine For a Hardgainer?

Nov 1, 2024 mindpump

For hardgainers who struggle to put on muscle mass, it takes a more focused effort to dial in the training to make sure you get the most out of your routine. If you keep the right principles in mind, you will be set up for success and find yourself breaking through any plateau you may have.

Frequency

A hardgainer would benefit most from a 2-3 time a week full body approach. This allows you to spread your body part work over more days so that you can hit the exercises fresher. Hitting them when you’re more fresh allows you to use heavier weights than if you tried squeezing all your work for one body part in one day. When we hit a muscle, we elicit a signal to grow. That signal goes back down to baseline after 48-72 hours. If we know this, then we would want to keep elevating that signal once it comes down. Spreading the weekly volume of each muscle into a full body approach allows you to tap into this muscle building signal more consistently.

Exercises

Stick to predominantly compound exercises like the bench press, squat, deadlift, overhead press, row, and pull-up. These target more muscles per exercise and allow for the most weight to be moved. This provides the perfect stimulus to elicit muscle growth. I find when lifters plateau in their career, sometimes they’ve veered off into too much isolation work, and not enough time spent bringing up the big lifts. These will be the best at packing the most amount of muscle in the least amount of time when you are starting out.

Progressive Overload

You should be aiming to do 1 more rep or 5 pounds more than the week before. This progression is crucial to muscle gain. If we stick to the same weight, or not push ourselves close enough to failure, you may find yourself spinning your wheels in the gym. To further break this down, what does training close to failure look like? We don’t need to HIT failure, but stay 1-2 reps shy of it. Research shows staying 1-2 reps shy of failure produces the same muscle growth as going to failure. The benefit of staying shy of failure is that you won’t overtax your central nervous system. This will allow you to do more volume in the gym.

Reps

Stick with a certain rep range for 3-4 weeks and then change it up. If all you’ve done is stick with the same rep range open-ended, then this can be leading to a plateau. Cycling through reps of 1-5, 6-10, 10-15, and 15-20 will allow a fresh signal to be sent to those muscles that can slightly change how the muscle is stimulated for growth. By sticking with each rep range for a couple weeks it will allow you to practice getting good at that rep range, but provide some change-up so you don’t stall out staying too long.

Recovery

We also want to make sure we aren’t overtraining. One of the reasons I say to focus on compound lifts is that it can be easy to overload on too many isolation exercises and sets that result in junk volume. We want to make sure we are getting enough sleep and nutrition to grow. Track your calories for a week or so, and try to see how many calories it takes to see the weight move up. It could be a matter of needing to eat more food and/or protein that’s holding you back from growth. If the scale isn’t moving up, you need to eat more food as you are not in a surplus. Shoot for 500 calories above your maintenance intake and see if that changes the scale.