Here it is guys! The interview I promised! ;) A well known figure in industry of building muscle/losing fat, Lyle McDonald from www.bodyrecomposition.com, agreed to answer questions about training and nutrition for skinny guys. The guy doesn’t tolerate BS, is straight-forward and knows tons of stuff. He has written some great books (like The Ultimate Diet 2.0 or The Protein Book) about nutrition. Guy has helped thousands of people with his advice already and now is sharing his knowledge with you!

Here are 10 questions I gave him. Some are a bit blasphemous (which makes the interview more interesting and useful!). Enjoy the interview!

1. Tell a little about yourself for those who don’t know you. If you have it, tell your message or vision that drives you!

Answer: There’s an old aphorism that mediocre athletes make the best coaches and this tends to be true. Guys who aren’t naturally gifted are usually the ones who go looking for better ways to do things. Naturally gifted athletes never have to examine what they are or aren’t doing right, and tend to make poor coaches. It’s the guys who aren’t great but with the drive that end up finding better ways of doing things.

And I was always a fairly mediocre athlete who wanted to be better. Couple that with obsessive tendencies and you get a guy who has spent 20 years studying every aspect of training, nutrition, supplements, recovery, mainly in an attempt to be a better athlete than he was. That I turned it into a career and was able to help other people is just a happy accident.

2. What are most common problems skinny guys have with training or nutrition when you get to work with them (or if they ask you about something, what is the most common question).

They don’t eat enough and they train in a stupid fashion. Ok, that’s two things and not necessarily uncommon to all trainees but the perpetually skinny have it even worse. But, in general, a hardgainer is a guy who doesn’t eat nearly enough to support growth and trains in a really dumb fashion. Usually they try to copy the training of pro bodybuilders who not only have good genetics but are on every drug known to god and man. Their information doesn’t apply to anyone not on drugs but certainly not the perpetually skinny guy.

But there are also a lot of poor ideas regarding hardgainer training out there that don’t really work either; if anything it’s the opposite of what they should be doing. Low volume, high intensity, low frequency training is generally a poor choice and they usually need more moderate intensities and higher volumes and frequencies to get anything approximating optimal growth. That’s in addition to getting them eating enough.

3. You are a nutrition specialist so you are one of the best guys to ask about it. How should the skinny guy eat? Is it Bulking or Clean Bulking? Is counting calories really necessary?

The perpetually skinny usually don’t have to worry about putting on much body fat, they invariably have physiological systems that prevent it. Not only do these folks tend to burn off excess calories through fidgeting and such, they tend to have hunger systems that shut down when they try to eat. That’s why they have such trouble putting on weight. They are protected from all weight gain, muscle and fat.

So the idea of clean bulking is simply idiotic for this population. So if you start feeding them rice, veggies and lean chicken, they can’t eat enough. They won’t be able to get enough food down the food hole eating that way. They need calories and lots of them and that means high calorie, energy dense foods. And you don’t get that from lean meats, veggies and rice.

4. What foods are best for skinny guys? Maybe they are very calorie dense or have a lot of healthy fats? I always recommend nuts, what else would you recommend, that might not be usually used daily in peoples diets today?

Despite what you read in the magazines, there are no best foods, although there are essential nutrients. Skinny guys need lots of protein, sufficient healthy fats and lots of calories. As noted above, trying to ‘eat clean’ or whatever crap tends to make it impossible for them to eat enough. They have to find whatever they can get down and this often means eating ‘junk food’ to get sufficient calories.

Now, I’m not saying to live on jelly beans and soda but things like peanut butter, ice cream, stuff with a lot of calories and some nutrition is the way to go. Basically, just finding a way to get the protein and calories in is the key.

5. Do you think supplements are necessary for skinny guys? Or do you think guys tend to rely on them too much?

Depends on what you’re talking about. The bodybuilding industry is based around selling lots of overpriced supplements and I see altogether too many people looking for magic bullets when their training is moronic and their diet isn’t correct. And until you get those two right, no supplements will help. And once you get those two right, you find that supplements don’t really add that much.

That said, various high calorie supplements, carbo powders, protein powders, etc. can be useful to help the perpetually skinny get in sufficient calories. Of course, even those aren’t necessary and mixing blender bombs (high calorie liquid drinks) from food works fine too.

Try this: 2 cups milk a scoop of protein powder, two tbsp peanut butter, a banana or two, some ice cream and whatever else you want to throw in makes a high calorie, nutrient dense, high-protein drink that will taste better than any mega-calorie mass gainer. Cheaper too. Mix one every day and drink it in addition to normal meals and you’ve added a lot of high-nutrient calories to the diet.

6. Your training philosophy for skinny guys. What would that be? Splits or Total body training 3 times a week?

Depends. For beginners, three time per week full body works best.

In the intermediate stage, an upper/lower split with each bodypart being hit twice per week or at least every 5th day usually works best although there are always exceptions.

Volume should be moderate (about 5-8 sets per bodypart with very few taken to failure) and weight should be added to the bar when possible to maintain a progressive tension overload. A combination of compound and isolation movements tends to work better in my experience than either extreme.

7. What is the place of compound exercises in training? Do you think they are best for skinny guys?

It depends. While there are certainly advantages to the big compounds a lot of skinny guys aren’t built well for them. Either they have mechanics (e.g. long arms which make benching problematic or dangerous) that make the movements difficult or their joints are too small that they get beat up by them.

Put differently, guys who are built to squat heavy tend to be built a certain way: good levers (usually shorter relatively speaking) and robust joints. They can pound away at low rep heavy squats and get away with it. A tall skinny guy may just get wrecked by that kind of training.

Here’s a case in point: tall skinny guys often have very long arms. If you have them bench to the chest, their elbows end up being so far below their torso that their shoulders take enormous stress. They also won’t ever move any decent amount of weight because triceps will always be so severely limiting due to the poor lever arm. In that case, a properly done flye or crossover might actually be the better movement for training the pecs. Yes, blasphemy I know.

The same goes for squatting. Tall skinny guys either have long torsos (making low back stabilization difficult) or long femurs (giving them a massive weak poin in the middle) that can make squatting of any sort difficult. Their low backs may give out long before their legs get trained or they may simply never move much weight due to the long lever arm of the leg. In that case, a good leg press may be a better choice. Yes, again, I know, blasphemy. But it’s reality.

But there are no generalities I can give here. So far as growth is concerned, the best exercises are the ones that let you train safely, work the target muscle, and apply progressive overload. Sometimes that is the heavy compounds but as often as not a properly selected isolation movement, or something kind of in-between, may be better.

But what ends up happening is that people who are built to weight train and grow well on low rep heavy compounds think that what works for them should or can work for everyone. And it’s simply not true.

8. What is the worst advice for skinny guys you have ever heard?

That they should train less frequently, with less volume and more intensity.

There is this idea that hardgainers need to do nothing but 2 short low
volume workouts per week or they overtrain. And that’s simply crap.
They don’t grow at all on that. 3-4 workouts per week is sufficient.

9. How would you recommend guys who are Skinny-fat to train and eat? First gain muscle and then get rid of fat? Or other way around?

You can’t cut bone. You need to have some muscle to define before you can define it. Unfortunately, a lot of skinny guys are neurotic as hell and always want to be dieting. But if they do that, they’re never going to gain an ounce of muscle. For these folks, taking the fat off is usually much easier than putting on the muscle. So put the energy where it belongs: get some muscle first so that when you diet down you don’t look like a concentration camp victim.

10. What guys do you think are best at providing training and nutrition information today? There is so much crappy information around, which guys do you trust and would recommend to learn from?

There are about 3 other people in this field that I will actually pay attention to, except for them all I read is research and textbooks. Those guys are Alan Aragon, Martin Berkhan and Borge Fagerli (aka Blade). These are guys with endless real world experience who read the research and know what they are talking about. Most everybody else is full of shit and I only read the nonsense they are writing about when I want to get my blood pressure up.

Now, what I take away from this interview is that I will have to give leg press a try instead of squats (or combine them) and I will go on a bulk instead clean bulk. I will give this 2 months and report the results you guys. This should be good experiment.

Best of luck with your gains,
Adrian

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