Finding a Workout Plan as a Hardgainer

Bigger Stronger Leaner
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I’ve looked at tons of plans, tried making my own, everything, and nothing seems to be quite right. I’ve made progress for sure, but I’d like to find a plan that I know actually works, and won’t be a beginner plan. I’d also like to have actual abs, there’s so many ab plans out there and most of them are geared completely for beginners, I have abs but not the chiseled abs most lifters have.

Do any of y’all know of a good 4 day a week training split that’s proven to work? Especially if it has compound lifts, that would be great. Thanks!

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All plans work if you work fuxking super hard

Are you working super fuxking hard?

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Hmmmm…
There’s 5/3/1 and any of its variants, PPL, Full Body, Deep Water(beginner to advanced. Granted I think it’s all advanced lol), Westside, GZCL, whatever 5x5 schemes you come across, Volume training, The Best Damn…

Point being most if not anything “will actually work”, depending on how you’re implementing it. Also in agreeance with Chong’s post above.

I think maybe for you, it’s just time to start cranking stuff up to the level. Since you’ve seen noticeable progress, perhaps you’ve stalled, or adapted quite well to what you’ve currently been doing.

I’d also wager to say that you’re not as much of a hard gainer as you think? Personally, I don’t think hardgaining is actually a thing (at least not entirely), it’s just finding that groove to which your eating matches the amount of work you’re doing depending on your goals.

Just my opinion though.

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You say you’re a hardgainer but also that you aren’t super cut. Don’t want “beginner” programs but seem to have only made your own.

Are you sure you’re a hardgainer? or perhaps your past training needed improvement and your diet could be cleaned up a tad…

@flipcollar is also a hardgainer, just look at how little muscle this dude has! /s/

“Hardgainer” typically means someone whose diet, training, or effort are not adequate to produce gains… often it is more than one of these. Not saying this means YOU, just hoping to give some insight

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I second @Andrewgen_Receptors completely, and a “like” wasn’t enough.

It’s also a question of goals: do you want to gain muscle or dial in your midsection?

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Jon Andersen’s Deep Water program

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Probably not a workout plan problem but an eating plan problem

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Oh man say no more!

There was a time at the Old Westside gym where I couldn’t gain weight to save my fucking life.

There was this dude who trained there who could just put on weight like fucking magic. He’d go from 198 to 308 and then to 275 and back down to 198. And he was never fat. It was amazing.

I finally asked him one day how he did it.

“You mean I never told you the secret to gaining weight? Come outside and I’ll fill you in.”

Now remember, we’re at Westside Barbell. And this guy wants to go outside to talk so no one else can hear. Think about that for a minute. What the hell is he going to tell me? This must be some serious shit if we have to go outside, I thought.

So we get outside and he starts talking.

“For breakfast you need to eat four of those breakfast sandwiches from McDonalds. I don’t care which ones you get, but make sure to get four. Order four hash browns, too. Now grab two packs of mayonnaise and put them on the hash browns and then slip them into the sandwiches. Squish that shit down and eat. That’s your breakfast.”

At this point I’m thinking this guy is nuts. But he’s completely serious.

“For lunch you’re gonna eat Chinese food. Now I don’t want you eating that crappy stuff. You wanna get the stuff with MSG. None of that non-MSG bullshit. I don’t care what you eat but you have to sit down and eat for at least 45 minutes straight. You can’t let go of the fork. Eat until your eyes swell up and become slits and you start to look like the woman behind the counter.”

“For dinner you’re gonna order an extra-large pizza with everything on it. Literally everything. If you don’t like sardines, don’t put 'em on, but anything else that you like you have to load it on there. After you pay the delivery guy, I want you to take the pie to your coffee table, open that fucker up, and grab a bottle of oil. It can be olive oil, canola oil, whatever. Anything but motor oil. And I want you to pour that shit over the pie until half of the bottle is gone. Just soak the shit out of it.”

“Now before you lay into it, I want you to sit on your couch and just stare at that fucker. I want you to understand that that pizza right there is keeping you from your goals.”

This guy is in a zen-like state when he’s talking about this.

“Now you’re on the clock,” he continues. "After 20 minutes your brain is going to tell you you’re full. Don’t listen to that shit. You have to try and eat as much of the pizza as you can before that 20-minute mark. Double up pieces if you have to. I’m telling you now, you’re going to get three or four pieces in and you’re gonna want to quit. You fucking can’t quit. You have to sit on that couch until every piece is done.

And if you can’t finish it, don’t you ever come back to me and tell me you can’t gain weight. 'Cause I’m gonna tell you that you don’t give a fuck about getting bigger and you don’t care how much you lift!"

Did I do it? Hell yeah. Started the next day and did it for two months. Went from 260 pounds to 297 pounds. And I didn’t get much fatter. One of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life, though.

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You sound like a beginner. I think a beginner program would be ideal for you.

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JM Blakely is my spirit animal. Best thing I heard him say that made a lightbulb go off in my head was relating gaining size to “conservation of mass”. We need food (mass) to gain muscle (mass). Funny how many people miss this point.

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Hardgainer is someone who doesnt want to do the hard part - eating. Training doesnt matter if you dont eat to grow. Even if training would be shit, you still would gain weight and be at least fat.
Training and gym is the easy part. Force feeding is the hard part. Always full, always burping and farting, shitting 5 times a day. Cant bend over to tie shoes without almost vomiting in your mouth.
If you are not gaining 1-2 pounds a week, programs dont matter to you.

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Eating enough has always been the hardest part of this for me. If you’re truly working hard in the gym consistently, AND you’ve been doing it for a long time, then the program is almost never the issue if you can’t gain muscle. It’s your food intake. I’ve run TERRIBLE plans in the gym and still gotten good results because I bust my ass in the gym, and I eat sufficiently.

Now that being said, you also said you want better ab definition. Your understanding of how that happens tells me you’re a beginner, because you’re trying to get there through an ‘ab program’. You can see in my profile picture that I have decent abs, and I’ve definitely been more shredded at times than this. I’ve NEVER DONE DIRECT AB WORK. Period. No ab programs. You get abs by getting lean. There’s no way around it. Direct ab work can have some value in terms of athletic performance (if you do the right things), but it barely carries over to aesthetics, if at all. And it only does when you’re already extremely lean.

But let’s get back to this ‘you are clearly a beginner’ thing that I mentioned. I think there could be more to this, and your perception of what should or should not be your results to this point may also be… improper. So, I have a few questions.

  1. How long have you been lifting weights at least 3x a week consistently, without more than a week break at any point?

  2. What equipment do you use at the gym?

  3. How hard do you push yourself in the gym? Do you try to work up a sweat by pushing through a lot of exercises and reps, or do you focus on getting the most out of every rep you perform, pushing to your maximum capacity?

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Thank you everyone for the great advice. I’m not super cut just because I’ve been bulking, I used to be around 12% body fat at 130 lbs and incredibly skinny but I’m up to around 16% now at 151. It’s not that the plans I’ve been using haven’t been working, I’d just like to be as efficient as possible with my progress.

I’m a varsity football player and I would like to put on as much weight as I can while trying to stay on the leaner side until the season. The ab workout thing is mostly to builds a great core that will look good when I cut down .

I’m not sure how to tell if I’m a real hardgainer or not, I’ve found putting on weight fairly easy but it’s also very easy for me to lose it, and I’ll default to skinny genetically, I’m 6’1 and I have a lot of tall, skinny college basketball players in my family so it’s a struggle to keep weight on.

I’ll check out the deep water plan for sure, hopefully that’ll help with mass and strength gain. Thanks everyone!

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This kind of disqualifies you from fitting into the category of “Hardgainer”. If you lose it easily, it’s a consistency problem, not a genetics problem. Keep hitting the weights and keep your diet in check (for you, probably eating more protein (around 1gram/lb bodyweight) and carbs should do the trick).

You should know that Deepwater is pretty much guaranteed to put slabs of muscle on you, it will also be harder than your football hell week (I promise). Still, if this is your goal, I 100% agree that Deepwater will do the trick; and if you decide to partake in Deepwater training, ignore what I said about diet and follow the Author’s (Jon Anderson’s) recommendations. Be prepared to EAT

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And really, I only picked that because of the “4 day a week” requirement. If we allow ourselves 3 days a week of lifting weights, Super Squats or 5/3/1 Building the Monolith will do the job nicely. 5/3/1 BBB Beefcake fits in there well too.

Since I now know this s a high school football player we’re dealing with…actually, I don’t think any of my recommendations would change much. I’d favor Super Squats over Deep Water just because the nutrition is simpler, but the question would also be if there are requirements to participate in some sort of sports training.

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I’ve been working out 3x a week without breaks since around January. I had worked all through the fall and it kinda dropped off during the holidays.

As far as equipment I’ve been using mostly dumbbell, barbell, and compound lift exercises with some cable work.

I have no problem with workload, gym, I’ll work until failure and until I’m numb, but I’ll admit I do cheat reps sometimes and could improve there.

I’ve been making actual progress for sure, I’ve been eating until I regret my life choices, counting calories and watching my nutrition and I’ve consistently been putting on around 1lb a week recently, but I’ve just been trying to find a program that’s as efficient as possible.

I really like the Deep Water program but looking more into it I can’t afford it as a broke high school student. I’ll be looking more into the other similar plans and 5/3/1 systems.

I’m kind of stuck in a limbo between being a beginner and intermediate, I don’t have the knowledge but I can lift semi heavy and take a heavy workload due to being used to constant punishment in football the pain doesn’t bother me.
Getting into lifting has been great so far. I appreciate all the responses and information, it’s helped a lot.

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What position?

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This ^^^

Why did it take almost 20 posts before you admitted this? Instead you started a thread with Hardgainer in the title. You have absolutely nothing to prove to a bunch of strangers behind their keyboards, but it’s important to be honest with yourself first.

Whether you believe you’re a hardgainer or not…you’re right.

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This is kinda the deal for the rest of your lifting life. You don’t need to understand it. Just find stuff that works and use it. Which leads nicely into:

No you’re not. The tags that people use to describe “where they are” are really there to say who should do what kind of work out. And they can be some what useful. For example - I would not recommend 5x5 linear progression to 600lb squatter.
But in all honesty “I’m an intermediate” - what dos that mean? That your body doesn’t respond if you do a whole body 3x week? How do you know that? Stop labeling yourself and experiment.

FYI - if you REALLY think you are a hard gainer share some meaningful info.

What programmes have you been using?
What did you eat yesterday? Was this an abnormal day?
How much weight have you gained in the last 12 weeks?
How much have your lifts changed in the last 12 weeks?