Hard Gainer Training Controversy: 2 Opposing Theories. My Experience

Vince Gironda believed that hard gainers required more volume, but needed less rest. Hard gainers tend to twitch, fidget, pace, and move a lot. All are examples of non-exercise activity thermogeneses. Therefore, hard gainers often seem to recover more quickly between sets than others.

Here's a direct quote from Vincegironda.com on the topic of Training Strategies for Different Body Types:

"...ectomorphs, who are typically lean and have a hard time gaining muscle, may benefit from higher-volume training with shorter rest periods."

Meanwhile, HardGainer publication affiliates (known now as abbreviated training and leaning more towards HIT, aka, High Intensity Training) believe hard gainers should do LESS volume and train infrequently. They actually believe everyone should do less volume (1-2 sets per exercise, maybe 3 sets, at most. And train no more than 3 days per week).

Vince Gironda realized true hard gainers weren't as strong on typical compound exercises as the more normal or easy gainers, but could handle more workload because they were often better suited to high activity and endurance.

Now, Gironda didn't recommend super high frequency training for hard gainers, but he did think that 4-6 days per week with these moderate to higher volumes, and shorter rest periods, would be beneficial.

HardGainer and abbreviated training advocates, like Stuart McRobert and Peary Rader, believed hard gainers should stick to basic compound exercises and ignore isolation exercises and specialized exercises. People from this community promoted – and continue to promote – basic barbell training. McRoberts and his fans have recently become less dogmatic on the barbell front – largely because they're all beat up from the barbell – and now advocate for barbells, machines, or dumbbells – but always with a focus on the basic movements (squats, bench, deadlift/RDL , overhead press, rows, pulldowns or pullups) and minimal isolation exercises (arms, calves, hamstrings, side delts, rear delts, traps, etc).

Vince believed the basic compound exercises didn't do a great job building a beautiful Physique – from a proportion and symmetry standpoint – and he believed that hard gainers would have an even harder time building muscle with these basic compound exercises. So he suggested exercises that were, in his mind, biomechanically more advantageous.

What's my experience, as an actual hard gainer who's now 6'2, 200-210 pounds, and firmly escaped from the hard gainer accusations (though, I still find it takes me a bit longer to increase muscle mass, compared to mesomorphs, but I've moved on from being the skinny runt I was)?

My experience is that Vince Gironda is more right than the HIT/"HardGainer" writers. But both sides get parts right and parts wrong – at least according to my experience training for myself and my clients. 

Hard gainers need better exercise selection, for sure. But this doesn't mean that they should ignore the basic movement patterns. Do the vertical push and pull, horizontal push and pull, along with good hinges and squats or lunges. You probably need a couple exercise variations for some of those movement patterns though. The trick is finding which variations of these basic movement patterns, and what equipment works best for you.

For example, barbell bench press and barbell overhead press never did much for building my chest, shoulders, and triceps. They actually encouraged asymmetries in my upper body. 

Dumbbell bench presses (incline and flat) work great for me and have been my go-to exercises for packing on quality mass to my chest. 

When it comes to shoulders, I've found that the kettlebell feels great to overhead press, while dumbbells, barbells, and machines feel awkward. The awkward feeling made those variations not fun, leading me to be discouraged when it came to shoulder training and my shoulders lagged behind my chest and back development for a long time. When I learned how to properly press a kettlebell (or 2) over head, everything just clicked. The movement felt amazing, my shoulders and triceps felt appropriately stimulated, and I fell in love with pressing steel orbs over my head. Enjoyment plus individual body mechanics will affect how much progress and enjoyment you derive from a given movement. I enjoy kettlebell overhead presses and the variations, and as a result I train overhead presses vigorously with the kettlebells and my shoulder gains have exploded. 

Hard gainers definitely need isolation work. Hard gainers are at a disadvantage from a muscle building standpoint. They will not build muscle in areas that are not directly trained as the primary, targeted area of an exercise. Do 2 bicep variations, 2 tricep variations, a calf raise variation, and make sure to get some sort of lateral raise in your program. Hard gainers can't get by with less exercises – it's totally illogical. We need the big 6 movement patterns PLUS a bicep curl or 2, tricep isolation or 2, lateral raises or upright rows, and calf raises. Of course, everyone should be training abs at least a couple days per week. 

Another example is squats. I was a big barbell squat advocate in my early and mid-20s. I still think the exercise can be great. But, as a hard gainer, all I got from barbell squats was a thick waist, good glute gains, hip impingement, labrum tears (hips), and minimal quad growth. When I switched to Bulgarian split squats and lunges, my glutes continued to respond well, but my quads finally began to grow thicker and more defined – more muscular. Plus, my hips don't cause me constant, debilitating pain anymore.

In my experience, hard gainers need more volume than what the Stuart McRoberts style abbreviated training (I hate that they've taken that entire phrase to represent themselves)/HIT advocates promote. And everyone would benefit from more total training frequency than 1-2 days per week. While this community recommends 2-3 days in the gym per week, or 3 days out of every 10, they often answer every question or problem with: "decrease training frequency and decrease volume and decrease the number of exercises." This is a silly answer for people that are failing to make progress due to under training! Again, this isn't 1-3 days per week per given muscle group. They recommend only working out with weights 1-3 days per week. That's not gonna lead to growth for most people between the ages 25 and 75.

Next, most guys that promote this ultra low frequency, low volume style of training look like they don't lift (and, no, it's not because everyone else is on steroids – like they claim when called out for it). Those in this HIT/HardGainer community that DO look like they lift are pure mesomorphs – thick bones, naturally athletic or stout builds, rarely tall, and often they're quite strong – favoring powerlifting type training. These representatives have never been hard gainers, yet they're the inspirations for hard gaining. 

Even Mike Mentzer – who's often touted as HardGainer idolatry – built his best physique in his 20s training 4-5 days per week, 5 sets per exercise and doing 5-6 exercises per session. He was definitely not a low volume (or natural) body builder. He also was obviously not a hard gainer. The dude had massively thick bone structure. He didn't begin promoting super low volume training until his stint with Arthur Jones (inventor of HIT, largely to market and sell his nautilus line of resistance machines), and even Arthur's recommended volumes were higher than Mentzer's increasingly minimalist lifting programs.

Dorian Yates is another popular HIT and low volume example. Again, he did high volume his first handful of years in the gym then came over to the US in the early 90s and began working with Mentzer. He excelled with low volume (a few warm up, acclimating sets, then 1 extremely heavy set taken to true failure, often using rest pause to get a few more reps out of the set). He is another freak of nature who obviously was not a hard gainer. He was a genetic freak who had elite physical and mental strength. Just like you probably won't be able to manage Arnold Schwartzenegger levels of volume, you won't be able to handle Yates' level of intensity. You don't have either of their genetic advantage.

So, I don't think low volume is a good method for actual hard gainers. 

I think a moderate volume per muscle group is ideal for most hard gainers. Something like 8-16 sets per muscle group per week, directly. I know that's a big range, but there's a lot of lee-way when it comes to making progress and some of it will depend on intensity, frequency, and training experience. 

And no, arms don't actually get stimulated very much – at least not for significant growth – during compound pressing and pulling exercises. So you – especially hard gainers – need to be doing direct arm isolation work. 

Also, do some isolation exercises for tough to grow muscles like the side delts and, of course, calves.

I don't think hard gainers should necessarily rest as little as Vince Gironda recommended (30-60 seconds). I think you can handle 1-2 minutes between sets/sides of the body for unilateral exercises and some isolation exercises. For most exercises 1.5-3 minutes is probably right. I find the old 2 minutes rule of thumb still is about perfect for most people with most exercises.

As for training frequency, I definitely find 4-5 days per week (but keeping sessions under 1 hour) is best. Give your body 2-3 days to rest and recover, but if muscle growth is the goal, hard gainers – like most others – will benefit from training a little more often than they're resting. Especially with how sedentary our current lifestyles are. And, really, let's think about it. Even if you're training 5 days per week – those 5 training sessions likely only take 30-60 minutes (I never recommend training more than 60 minutes, especially not if you're a hard gainer, by the way). That's around 3-5 hours of training per week. There are 168 hours in a week. Even if you're doing 5 hours, that's less than 3% of your week. You have plenty of time to recover with 4-5 sessions per week. Don't be dramatic. 

When I look back at my training and my current experiments, when it comes to maximizing muscle gain (both when I was a beginner and now, in my 16th year of lifting), I can narrow it down to these general rules:

1. Train 4-5 days per week

2. Train 30-45 minutes per session

3. Do 3-5 exercises per session (usually)

4. Cycle between 2 or 3 separate workouts (upper/lower, PPL, something similar)

5. Rest 2 minutes between sets

6. Do 3-4 sets per exercise (occasionally doing more, especially if total exercise number is 3)

When I do less volume than this, I simply maintain – which frustrates me, unless that was the plan all along. For the most part, though, I always want to be gaining ground and improving, unless I'm in a crazy time of life where training needs to be put on the back burner and I can just manage minimalist training. It's easy to maintain what you've built. It takes a bit more volume (I'd call it moderate volume) to actually continue to build additional muscle mass. Especially as you get older!

When I do too much volume or frequency, I get burned out quickly. It's very obvious when my volume or my frequency is too high. I get run down quickly from it and everything sucks. So I adjust. The key is to NOT over-adjust and walk back into the trap of low volume, high intensity style of abbreviated training where I'm doing just a couple sets per exercise.

3-4 sets per exercise works best for me and most of you. If you're doing 4-5 exercises, that comes out to 12-20 sets per session, spread out across at least 2-3 muscles groups usually. 

It's also very difficult for me to accidently stumble into "high volume" (20+ sets) territory, because I keep my training sessions around 25-45 minutes all the time. You can only squeeze so much quality volume into that time frame, and the moderate volume, around half hour workouts has worked extremely well for me and my lifestyle.