If you’ve ever flipped through one of the many bodybuilding and fitness magazines out there, you may have wished you could transform your lean body like the guys on the covers.

So what’s stopping you from achieving your own skinny guy transformation? Is it a lack of knowledge of where to start or do you just feel like you are cursed with lean genetics and will probably never achieve significant muscle gain?

Whatever your reason, you shouldn’t believe the nonsense that says you can’t beat your skinny genetics – it can be beaten, it just takes a little understanding of the process of building muscle and what works for your body type.

Notice I said your body type… every body is different, and since you’re a skinny guy, you’ll need a training and nutrition plan designed for a “weight gainer.”

To gain muscle fast you need to combine quality nutrition with good weight training… so let’s start with the kitchen.

Eat your way to a better body

To pack on muscle fast, you’ll need to significantly increase your daily calorie intake.

As a skinny guy, you have a naturally fast metabolism that makes you struggle to gain any kind of weight, even fat. To counteract this, you need to consume a large number of calories and spread them out evenly throughout the day.

This is to ensure constant energy and nutrient levels to fuel your muscle tissue. Most skinny guys fail to transform their bodies due to a poor approach to nutrition. Great physics is done in the kitchen, so don’t overlook its importance.

As a rough guide, multiply your current body weight in pounds by 24 and you’ll get a ballpark figure for how many calories you’ll need daily to help you gain weight and build muscle.

Weight training

While improving your nutrition is vitally important to achieving a skinny guy transformation, it’s pretty useless without excellent weight training. An increase in daily calories without corresponding exercise and training will only result in fat gain…remember the goal is to feed muscle, not fat!

However, many skinny people make the mistake of following exercise routines that are not designed for their body type, or worse, hitting the gym without a plan and blindly moving from one machine to another with a clear goal.

Below are common mistakes skinny guys make in their workouts:

• Focus on isolation exercises (i.e. bicep curls) instead of multi-joint compound exercises like squats and bench presses
• Perform high reps with light weights instead of low reps with heavy weights
• Wasting time on cardio – this will only burn more calories, making it harder for you to gain weight and build muscle.

Cardio is great when it comes to getting lean and defined, but it can sabotage results when you’re looking to gain muscle.