Unlike their genetically gifted friends, hardgainers have a difficult time putting on muscle, losing body fat, gaining strength and making consistent progress from one workout to the next. This doesn’t have to negatively impact your muscle gains though, if you take the time to understand your ability to gain muscle. Muscle building programs in the past have focused on very low volume, relatively high intensity programs for hard gainers. I believe this is a big mistake.
Hardgainers require a different approach to weight training if they want to gain muscle. The main problem for hard gainers is that while undergoing a high intensity weight lifting program you’re very likely to be high strung and you have a tendency to burn out your central nervous system (CNS). It’s not the only obstacle hardgainers have to deal with when gaining weight and building muscle, but it’s one of the biggest obstacles because the CNS is a major contributing factor for muscle performance.
You can think of your CNS as the central electrical power plant and controller of your body. It has both a central operating system and local operating systems. The central operating system would be your brain and spinal cord which act like a powerplant that provides electricity to an entire city. The local operating systems would be the nerves that fire your muscles. If your CNS is not functioning up to par the signals that fire your muscles will be less than optimal. This is going to be influenced by stress and influence your hardgainer workouts.
The problem for most hardgainers is that they burn out their CNS and use up their CNS energy with very little stress. One night of sleep deprivation or one really high intensity workout can wipe them out for days. Without a rejuvenated CNS muscle gains are impossible. This is because the amount of hypertrophy that you can induce by a given rep, set, or movement, is going to be determined in large part by how many muscles cells your nervous system can call upon to contract in a given movement. If you can’t contract a muscle cell during a training routine due to poor CNS capabilities not only will you not be gaining weight and muscle size but also a large majority of your muscles have no chance to fatigue and thus you are not going to grow.
In order to make progress you as a hardgainer have to emphasize recovery of your central nervous system. That means get plenty of sleep, plenty of nutrition, and cycle your workouts accordingly to prevent overloading your CNS. The training program in Vince Delmonte’s No-Nonsense Muscle Building is based on a periodization training program with cycles, which can seem complicated at first but it’s the most effective workout routine for hardgainers because it allows the CNS to properly recover.
One last thing, if you want to know why hardgainers should not generally be training to failure all the time (especially for the big compound exercises), study the effects of failure on recovery of the central nervous system.
Unlike their genetically gifted friends, hardgainers have a difficult time putting on muscle, losing body fat, gaining strength and making consistent progress from one workout to the next. This doesn’t have to negatively impact your muscle gains though, if you take the time to understand your ability to gain muscle. Muscle building programs in the past have focused on very low volume, relatively high intensity programs for hard gainers. I believe this is a big mistake.
Hardgainers require a different approach to weight training if they want to gain muscle. The main problem for hard gainers is that while undergoing a high intensity weight lifting program you’re very likely to be high strung and you have a tendency to burn out your central nervous system (CNS). It’s not the only obstacle hardgainers have to deal with when gaining weight and building muscle, but it’s one of the biggest obstacles because the CNS is a major contributing factor for muscle performance.
You can think of your CNS as the central electrical power plant and controller of your body. It has both a central operating system and local operating systems. The central operating system would be your brain and spinal cord which act like a powerplant that provides electricity to an entire city. The local operating systems would be the nerves that fire your muscles. If your CNS is not functioning up to par the signals that fire your muscles will be less than optimal. This is going to be influenced by stress and influence your hardgainer workouts.
The problem for most hardgainers is that they burn out their CNS and use up their CNS energy with very little stress. One night of sleep deprivation or one really high intensity workout can wipe them out for days. Without a rejuvenated CNS muscle gains are impossible. This is because the amount of hypertrophy that you can induce by a given rep, set, or movement, is going to be determined in large part by how many muscles cells your nervous system can call upon to contract in a given movement. If you can’t contract a muscle cell during a training routine due to poor CNS capabilities not only will you not be gaining weight and muscle size but also a large majority of your muscles have no chance to fatigue and thus you are not going to grow.
In order to make progress you as a hardgainer have to emphasize recovery of your central nervous system. That means get plenty of sleep, plenty of nutrition, and cycle your workouts accordingly to prevent overloading your CNS. The training program in Vince Delmonte’s No-Nonsense Muscle Building is based on a periodization training program with cycles, which can seem complicated at first but it’s the most effective workout routine for hardgainers because it allows the CNS to properly recover.
One last thing, if you want to know why hardgainers should not generally be training to failure all the time (especially for the big compound exercises), study the effects of failure on recovery of the central nervous system.