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Hard Gainers
Hard Gainers
Hard gainer Problem No: 2. Hard gainers anabolic to catabolic hormone balance is not optimal so this makes it difficult to partition nutrients into muscle and away from fat. Anabolic hormones like testosterone and growth hormone build muscle up and encourage weight gain on a lean body composition while catabolic stress hormones like cortisol break muscle down and encourage fat storage. The skinny rail look covered in a veneer of lard characterizes the body type of many natural hard gainers. Hard gainers having anabolic hormones that are naturally low and catabolic hormones that are naturally high directly cause this.
This makes it difficult to build muscle and be lean, yet easy to be skinny-fat for hard gainers. In direct opposition to this type is the genetically advantaged pure mesomorph, who can gain muscle without even looking at a weight and lose fat without even dieting. But don’t worry not all is lost for you if this describes you. Certain training and dietary approaches can increase the anabolic hormones while simultaneously decreasing the catabolic hormones. You change you’re physiology and you change your appearance. It’s that simple. Hard gainers must always pay attention to their hormonal balance. In fact in the future home testing kits will become available and used by nearly everyone that will instantaneously enable one to assess and optimize their anabolic to catabolic balance. Until then just assume your anabolic to catabolic ratios are sub-optimal and train, eat, and function in a manner that optimizes that balance the best way possible. As hard gainers if you didn’t struggle with anabolic/catabolic balance you probably wouldn’t be reading this right now!
Hard gainer Problem No: 3. You are not able to put as much stress on the muscle
tissue due to body structure. Many hard gainers are characterized by
long limbs and have an ectomorphic body structure. The trouble with
having long limbs is that when you execute many exercises the stress
is going to be distributed amongst many muscles and joints instead of
being placed squarely on the working muscle. To illustrate this, a pure
mesomorph can perform bench presses and get a near instantaneous pump
in his chest. A long armed ectomorph has a hard time throwing the stress
squarely on his chest in that movement, rather the stress is going to
be dissipated largely to the muscles of the shoulders and triceps and
the joints of the elbow and shoulder due in large part to his long limbs.
This goes for pretty much all-compound exercises. Because of this, hard
gainers actually need more volume per session, per exercise, and per
muscle group and not less for weight gain. As hard gainers if you have
trouble placing the stress squarely on the working musculature you’ll
have to make up for this with volume.
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