Open up a modern body building magazine and you will see physiques that are literally impossible achieve without exceptional genetics and steroids. Unfortunately, these physiques are put up as evidence of what is achievable for the 95% of strength training population who aren’t blessed with exceptional genetics and who don’t use drugs. This can be frustrating for the average trainee who is trying to gain muscle on the high volume routines that these exceptional individuals use.

A hardgainer refers to someone who finds it difficult to build muscle on these high volume routines. This is in fact the majority of the population. According to the book Build Muscle, Lose Fat, Look Great, the best routines for hardgainers are those that are high intensity, abbreviated and focus on large, multi-joint exercises. Lets look at this factors one-by-one.

Abbreviated

This means a minimal number of sets and exercises. It is generally recommended that hardgainers only use a maximum of 3 sets, with some even recommending just 1. Sounds like a cope out? Well, considering that hardgainers should be training to maximum intensity (see below) and you will quickly find that a hardgainer who train properly actually workout harder the most people on high volume routines.

Hardgainer are also usually recommended to only workout one muscle group per week. This is to avoid overtaining.

High Intensity

It is not how long a muscle is fatigue for but how fatigued that it gets, that determines maximum muscle growth. Maximum intensity is “maximum muscle fatigue” – that is, when the muscle is so fatigued that you can no longer move the weight. Hardgainer routines that advocate going to maximum fatigue will usually only recommend 1 set per exercise. Otherwise, you will fatigue the muscle so much that it could lead to overtraining and cause a cessation in muscle gains or at worse, muscle atrophy.

Most hardgainers should train 1 to 3 sets with the final set causing the muscle to come near (but completely to) maximum muscle fatigue.

Large, Multi Joint Exercises

Multi-joint exercises, like bench press and squats, work large amounts of muscle at once. The hardgainer philosophy is that there is no need for single joint exercises for such muscles as the triceps and biceps as they are worked through larger movements like the bench press and chinups. In fact, adding too many single-joint exercises chould lead to overtraining. It doesn’t mean that a hardgainer shouldn’t do single-joint exercises – rather, he or she should focus on the larger multi-joint exercises and use the single-joint ones to compliment the larger ones.