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Training and Dieting for Hardgainers by AJAC 

● Most men that calls themselves hardgainers undereat and have 
unrealistic expectations for muscle growth 
 
● Train with all rep ranges, and focus on getting stronger in the 6-15 
range. If you had the genetics to get big from low reps, you would 
not be reading this document  
 
● If you’re naturally skinny and weak, accept it and train anyways. 
 
● Don’t compare yourself to people more genetically gifted than you 
and expect their level of results. Its both discouraging and they have 
nothing to teach you about training  
 
● EATING is paramount. Stop believing you have a fast metabolism, 
and track and record your calories and macros 

 
What is a Hardgainer?  
 
Depending on who you ask, a hardgainer is someone who gains muscle 
slowly, to someone who doesn't gain muscle at all. Or its someone who is 
naturally skinny and cannot get big, or can get stronger but doesn’t build 
size or gain weight.  
 
Here is the reality:  
 
I’ve been training men for 10 years. Not once in 10 years have I worked with 
a client who COULD NOT gain muscle.  
 
What I have encountered is a fairly typical bell curve distribution of:  
-Some men (about ¼ to ⅓) gain muscle slowly.​ They might gain 10-15lbs 
of lean muscle in their first year of training, BUT they need to train properly. 
Training for them is a long term process and they need to build up their 
strength submaximally over long periods of time. That means getting really 
really good at doing moderate to higher reps. They also have higher 
metabolic rates and need bigger calorie surpluses to achieve the same level 
of weight gain as someone with better genetics. They tend to lose gains 
quite fast, and their weight will drop quickly.  
 
-Some men (about ⅓ to ½) gain muscle at an “average” rate.​ They can 
gain one pound a week readily if they eat enough during a gaining phase. 
Their results are very typical, they can gain 15-25lbs of lean muscle in their 
first year of training. They can train for awhile, take a few weeks off, and get 
back to their prior condition within a few weeks. This middle group is where 
most men find themselves.  
 
-Some men, about (about ¼ to ⅓) gain muscle quickly. ​This is where the 
“freaks” fall into. These are men who will rapidly gain muscle and strength, 
and they are the guys in high school to gain 25-50lbs in one year from lifting 
and eating. They have very good strength genetics, and often lower bodyfat 
as well. Training them comes naturally, and they don't have to think about 
much to get results. At the tail end, the most gifted can “touch weights” and 
do literally any kind of training, and they’ll be exceptionally muscular.  
 
Now that we have some perspective, lets talk some major lessons.  
 
1. Being a Hardgainer Is Not A Life Sentence to Being Skinny.  
 
There is this attitude I encounter of young guys despairing and creating 
self-limiting beliefs about what they can accomplish. They write their own 
destiny and condition themselves to quit.  
 
This is an attitude of cowardice.  
 
The reality is that IF you train and eat with discipline, and you train properly 
and prioritize progressive strength gains over time, you WILL grow.  
 
Do not use your genetics as an excuse 
 
2. You Can Gain Muscle, But You Cannot Change Bone 
 
You cannot control your bone size. If your parents fed you a vegetarian diet 
and you ended up scrawny, I am sorry, but you have got the skeleton you 
got.  
 
What you can control is your training and eating. If you want to appear 
larger, prioritize building your arms and shoulders and create a wider frontal 
profile. Train your legs with high reps and watch them grow.  
 
Your skeleton is your skeleton is your skeleton. Add muscle to it, or dont.  
 
3. Dont Train Like A Powerlifter 
 
If Stronglifts or Starting Strength worked amazing for you and you put on 
muscle from nothing but sets of 5...well you would not be reading this guide.  
 
The reality is that low rep training is inferior for muscle growth in many 
people, as it does not provide enough muscle stimulating volume.  
 
There is also the fact that if you have small joints and are skinny, the 
likelihood of you being gifted for maximal strength is very very low.  
 
Does this mean you’ll always be weak!?!  
 
No, it means train like a bodybuilder and use moderate to high reps. 6-10, 
10-20.  
 
It also means  
 
4. Train to Actually BUILD Muscle, Not Test Strength 
 
When was the last time you did 20 rep sets for legs?  
 
When was the last time you did 3 different kinds of rows in a workout, plus 
chinups and shrugs?  
 
When was the last time you did incline bench, plus DB Chest press, plus 
dips, all in the same workout? 
 
When was the last time you trained all 3 heads of the triceps with different 
exercises, and got a sick pumo?  
 
If the answer to these questions is No times 4, then your lack of muscle is 
not only because you are a “hardgainer”. Its because you’ve NEVER 
TRAINED PROPERLY.  
 
This is very common with hardgainers. They get a routine from their friends 
or the internet, and its low reps, or they are only doing one or two exercises 
per muscle,  
 
And they sort of follow it, but they’re weak at everything, and they also 
undereat...and consequently their results are lacking.  
 
Hardgainers need a full spectrum workout that trains a muscle with multiple 
exercises from multiple angles. And they need to train OFTEN, which brings 
me to the next point  
 
5. Divorce Yourself From Dogma 
 
If the big 3 lifts, barbell squat, bench press, and deadlift dont work for 
you...FIND OTHER LIFTS.  
 
There is no mandatory exercise that you MUST do.  
 
Try front squats. Try Incline Bench. Try Weighted Pushups. Try Trap bar 
deadlifts. Try Romanian Deadlifts. Try DB Deadlifts, Try Machine Squats.  
 
Your best exercises should 
 
● Hit the target muscle 
● Not hurt your joints 
● Allow you to make progressive gains in reps and resistance 
 
Use whatever exercises you want. No one is paying you to be in the gym, 
and unless you are competitive strength athlete at the world class level 
(which you’re not), no one gives a fuck about your numbers in the Big 3, or 
any other lift for that matter.  
 
Leg presses can work amazing for skinny guys. Cable curls can be better 
than free weight curls. Bands are superior to free weights for lateral raises.  
 
My point being, there are zero mandatory exercises that you are obligated 
to do. Learn proper technique, experiment, and develop your own training 
style that gets YOU results.  
 
6. Bodyweight Exercises 
 
Chinups, pullups, dips, pushups. Those three exercises for the upper body 
can build A LOT of muscle by themselves, and they have many variations. 
They need to be a regular part of your training. If they are easy, ADD 
WEIGHT to them.  
 
Squats and lunges. You could do nothing but high rep Goblet squats and DB 
lunges, and I’d guarantee you’d have muscular legs. Dont underestimate the 
power of the basics.  
 
7. High Reps for Legs 
 
I don't believe anyone is unable to grow their legs and have bird leg 
genetics. Do 20 rep sets for EVERY leg exercise for 3 months, and I 
guarantee your legs will transform. I have yet to ever see this NOT work.  
 
8. Isolation Training 
 
You need to train your arms if you want bigger arms. You need to do deltoid 
raises if you want bigger shoulders. You need to use isolation exercises, 
because they work, and if you were the guy who could ONLY use 
compound movements and get swole...yep, you’d already know.  
 
9. Training 3 days a week is not enough 
 
Nor is doing some pushups in the morning and expecting to have SLABS for 
pecs.  
 
This is a mental discipline problem, not a physical one: expecting superlative 
results from subpar or infrequent effort is not going to happen.  
 
Train 5 days a week. Follow a program. Eat and sleep and STFU.  
 
Which is the next point  
 
10. You Don’t Eat enough 
 
Your meals should be protein, plus carbs. That means beef, chicken, fish, 
pork, eggs. It means rice, pasta, oatmeal, maybe bread if you like bread. It 
means eating 5-6 times a day, just as a bodybuilder would. 
 
Every food you eat should digest easily. Every meal you eat should go on 
quick.  
 
That you don’t naturally have a big appetite DOES NOT FUCKING MATTER.  
 
Hardgainers are notorious for insisting they eat a lot, and I ask them what 
they eat, and its barely 2,000 calories. And then they insist they eat so much 
and cant gain weight.  
 
11. Track your Meals and Calories 
 
Yep, this means COUNTING, and weighing and measuring your food. Don’t 
complain, because your way of doing things has already not worked. Once 
you learn calories and macros, then you can internalize these habits and 
won't have to do them. But in the beginning, you need to meal plan and 
track your numbers.  
 
What gets measured gets managed gets improved.  
 
12. SLEEP and Recovery 
 
If you’re sleeping less than 7 hours a night and stay up all night and your 
sleep schedule is all fucked up...don’t expect much in the way of muscle 
gains.  
 
Its hard enough for regular lifters and even freaks to get by with insufficient 
sleep, you definitely cannot afford to. There’s also the factor that it basically 
halves your testosterone levels on a daily basis.  
 
Get your 8 hours. Remember that you do not grow IN the gym, you grow in 
all the time outside of it when your body is rebuilding itself.  
 

13. You’re Not going to Overtrain 

 
That bitch instinct in you that worries about overtraining, tell it to shut the 
fuck up. Unless you’re in the gym 3 hours every day, you sleep only 5 hours 
a night, and you undereat, you’re very very unlikely to overtrain.  
 
Hardgainers fear overtraining because their starting point is coming from a 
place of weakness, and they get very sore, and then you mentally condition 
yourself to be quitter because your body is tired. Suck it up buttercup.  
 
The harder you train, the tougher you’ll become. Kill the old you.  
 
14. Patience 
 
If you gain 15lbs of muscle the first year of training, 7lbs the second, 3-4lbs 
the 3rd, and 1-2lbs the 4th and 5th year, you’re up 25 lbs of muscle mass.  
 
There will be some normal fat gain as well (this does NOT mean you’re 
getting fatter, as your overall lean mass to fat ratio will go down), which 
means you’ll have gained at least 30lbs.  
 
But put that into perspective.  
 
You gain barely more than 1lb A MONTH your first year of training.  
 
Year 2, it was 1lb every 2 months.  
 
Year 3, 3-4 months.  
 
Year 4 and 5, a whole year to maybe go up 2lbs on the scale.  
 
But that additional 30lbs will make your physique look dramatically different.  
 
But it took 5 years.  
 
But...5 YEARS ARE GOING TO PASS ANYWAYS. WHAT ARE YOU WAITING 
FOR? 
 
15. Visualization and FOCUS 
 
You’re not going to gain muscle with a negative self-image. You need to 
imagine the new, muscular you. You need to mediate and create a picture of 
who you will be turning into. And you need to program yourself with that 
vision every time you train, every time you eat, every time you go to bed at 
night.  
 
No more negative self-talk. See the future you want to become, and then 
make it your waking goal every day to bring it into being. 
 
In Closing...I hope you found this helpful  
 
And if you want a training program that does all of the above, get the 
Ectomorph Guide to Training : How To Gain Muscle and Build Strength If 
You Are Naturally Skinny.