How To Gain Weight

If you’re going about the goal to learn how to gain weight, then it’s time to look at your nutritional intake, the workouts that you’re doing, the supplements that you’re using, and a few other additional factors that will influence your results.

The goal of gaining weight does take some work to achieve properly, but when done right, you can definitely make good progress and reach the goals you have set for yourself.

Let’s take a closer look into some of the key things that you must focus on when working towards the goal of how to gain weight so you can see precisely what it is that you need to be doing for best results.

Setting Up Your Workout Program

The very first component of a successful program for how to gain weight is going to be making sure that you set up your workout program properly. You skip the workout entirely, but then you would be gaining fat instead of muscle. There are a wide variety of different types of workouts that you could be using from full body approaches to upper/lower split workout designs to body part split workouts that have you focusing on just one or two muscles with each workout that you do.

Generally speaking, the full body or upper/lower split set-ups tend to be best as this allows you to work the muscles with a greater frequency level compared to the body part split workouts that others may be using.

When it comes to putting on quality muscle mass, the more often you can work the muscles while they are in a recovered state, the better.
The next thing to remember when designing a workout to help you see how to gain weight is that you should focus on always increasing the intensity in some manner. If you continue to place an overload on the body that will be the main factor that ensures that you make further and further progress.

While you can’t expect to increase the weight every single workout session, you can increase the reps you perform for selected exercises, add more sets into the workout, or do different exercises to further push up the intensity and boost your progress.

Just be sure that you are being mindful of recovery as you continually increase the intensity otherwise you may wind up overtrained.

Furthermore, when adding cardio training to your workout for how to build muscle, you want to be sure to keep this on the slightly lower side. While you definitely don’t have to avoid cardio training entirely as some people are led to believe, you should be minimizing it as it will take away from the results you’re aiming to achieve.

Keep the cardio sessions that you do perform to a lower intensity level of around 20-30 minutes and do them two to three times per week for overall heart health benefits.

If you do that then they shouldn’t have any negative influence over your results with gaining weight.

Taking Diet Into Account

The second part of the equation for how to gain weight is making sure that you’re eating enough food. Now that you’ve provided that overloading stimulus through the workouts that’s necessary to promote muscle gains, at this point it’s time to make sure you’re giving your body plenty of energy to use to generate that new muscle the workouts evoked.

When adding more calories to your diet they should come from a mixture of proteins, healthy fats, and carbs so as to take a very well balanced approach. You should never cut out and eliminate any nutrient on a muscle building program as all play key roles that are critical for success.

Aim to consume around 500 calories over and above your maintenance requirements in order to promote a one pound per week weight gain.

Keep in mind that if any point throughout the program you do start to notice that you’re gaining body fat, this is an indicator that you’re simply consuming too many calories and thus you should decrease them slightly to see better results.

For those who are struggling to gain weight, you may also want to make use of weight gain shakes that you create yourself to help boost your calorie intake and supply your body with what it needs. It’s important to avoid commercial products however as these are loaded with simple sugars and in some cases, unhealthy fats.

Instead, prepare your own made with whey protein powder, oats, natural nut butter or flaxseed oil, frozen fruit, yogurt, cottage cheese or Greek yogurt, and milk. This will be a much healthier alternative and encourage lean muscle mass building.

Have these home made weight gain shakes between your meals for best results.

Looking At Muscle Building Supplements

Next up we need to take a look at muscle building supplements. The best weight gain supplements to be using are those that either provide you with more calories such as a quality whey protein powder or maltodextrin for a carbohydrate source immediately after a workout or those that support better overall workout sessions or recovery so that you can get more out of your training.

On the workout side of things creatine is a good one to use as this will saturate the high energy molecules that are needed to execute each muscle contraction that takes place. Creatine will also help to increase the recovery process as well as it will replenish these high energy molecules immediately after the workout takes place.

Finally, you may also want to look into taking a zinc supplement as well as zinc is one particular mineral that helps to support healthy testosterone levels, which is key for building up quality lean muscle mass.

Most people aren’t getting quite enough zinc from their daily diet so this supplement can help to make up for that.

Additional Factors That Influence Weight Gain Success

Finally, it’s also important to think about other factors that may be coming into play that will also influence the success you see.

The big ones to think about here are stress, alcohol intake, and sleep.

In order to promote good recovery and give the body time to build up more muscle and gain weight, you must be sleeping at least seven, if not eight hours a night.

In addition to that, you should be doing whatever it takes to keep your stress levels low as leading a high-stress lifestyle is going to cause you to secrete cortisol, which actually encourages muscle breakdown.

Finally, you should also be limiting your intake of alcohol as much as possible because as soon as alcohol enters your system, all protein synthesis will stop, meaning you won’t build any further muscle and gain weight until the alcohol is cleared from your body.

As hard as it may be to cut out alcohol entirely, if you want best results with your program for how to gain weight, it’s essential.

So there you have all the main points to keep in mind as you work towards the goal to gain weight. If you make sure to design a good workout program and a smart diet and then support this will a healthy lifestyle and good supplementation, you will soon have a brand new body.