The word ‘hardgainer’ is miss-used in so many ways.
-
People who don’t eat or train right put themselves under the hardgainer umbrella
-
The one I hate the most, because it insults true hardgainers and is partly to blame because of the crew above (1), are the ones who say that you are “being a pussy and need to train exactly like them!”
Training is individual - people’s ability to tolerate volume differs.
Chris Colucci sounds like he trains quite a few people (hence a rounded opinion), and like other people who train others and don’t have a closed mind, they realise that not everybody is the same and that hardgainers DO exist.
Hardgainer is not a handicap (lol), it just means that you need to train according to your body type in order to spur on growth (to a much higher level than you would grow at if you followed unsuitable advice). Also, hardgainers aren’t ALWAYS ectomorphic (skinny frames with fast metabolisms). Hardgainers can be skinny fat, chunky etc…but respond to what I’m about to say next…
There are people out there that say the training program doesn’t matter, and all that matters is hard work…well I’m saying that they are only partially right! A program that has a true hardgainer (natty) doing a typical high volume “bodybuilding” routine of 12+ sets/bodypart/week would be crap for them (just give a cosmetic pump and that’s it).
Food is always a constant when it comes to different people - EVERYONE needs to eat enough (however this doesn’t mean that somehow food is THE answer to a hardgainers problems…although in general, they do tend to underestimate their metabolism). Not everyone responds to the exact same training stimulus. A hardgainer usually responds to brief routines, done less frequently, in other words, short workouts (less exercises per bodypart or fewer sets, or both) with more rest days (to allow their “fragile” nervous systems to rebound better).
Even if eating enough to gain weight, a hardgainer putting in 100% effort would reach a point of diminishing returns after 3-4 weeks of training 5+ days per week. The exception to this “rule” would be if only 3 of those days in the week were intense (pushing the intensity on 3+ multi-joint movements), if the other 2-3 days were only sessions with a few small isolation exercises, this would be more manageable (in effect, your isolation days are like days off because they have little impact on the nervous system).
OP - If none of that ^ rings a bell with yourself, are you really a hardgainer? Either that, or you just aren’t pushing the exercises as far as you can do (near failure, and adding weight every time you can)…and eating enough