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Illustration of a bodybuilder jogging to improve his cardiovascular fitness.

Concurrent Training: How to Schedule Cardio & Weight Training

In this article, we’ll teach you how to improve your cardiovascular fitness while building muscle and getting stronger. We want the health benefits of doing cardio, but we aren’t trying to lose weight. We’re trying to build muscle. That changes things.

  • You need to schedule your cardio and muscle-building workouts. That means you’ll need to schedule your cardio somewhat carefully. Otherwise, the so-called “interference effect” can interfere with the muscle-building adaptations you get from lifting weights. Some people downplay this effect, but the latest research shows it can cut your rate of muscle growth in half (study).
  • Lifting weights improves cardiovascular fitness. Lifting isn’t ideal for improving cardiovascular fitness, but it’s not too bad. If you lift weights, you’re probably in significantly better shape than the average person.
  • If you’re trying to build muscle, you’ll have different questions about cardio. What type of cardio should you do while bulking? Will doing cardio help you build muscle more leanly? Can weight training count as cardio? How can you maximize cardiovascular and muscle-building adaptations at the same time?
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Cartoon of protein powder and mass gainer supplements.

Will Mass Gainers Make You Fat?

Mass gainers are near and dear to my heart. They’re the only supplement on the entire supplement market that’s designed specifically for skinny people who are trying to gain weight. For a naturally skinny dude like me, sick of drowning in an ocean of fat-loss supplements I couldn’t care less about, that was a big deal.

I find the marketing for mass gainers appealing, too. Instead of needing to force down an extra meal, all we have to do is drink this high-calorie, high-carb, high-protein shake that’s specifically designed to help us pack on muscle quickly and leanly. No cooking, no cleaning, no chewing, and no eating. That’s pretty tempting!

On the other hand, mass gainers are packed full of cheap, highly processed carbs. It’s like cake mix with a scoop of protein powder tossed in. It’s processed food. Won’t that make us fat?

Let’s dive into it.

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Before and after results of a skinny guy building muscle.

How to Build Muscle If You’re Skinny—Full Guide

To build muscle, you need to do 3 things: challenge your muscles enough to stimulate growth, eat enough food to fuel that growth, and then recover.

We’ve helped over 10,000 people bulk up over the past 10 years, ranging from everyday people all the way up to college, professional, and Olympic athletes. This is what we live and breathe, all day, every day. It works every time, guaranteed.

But there’s nuance here. Some types of resistance training are better for stimulating muscle growth than others. Some types of food can help you make faster, leaner gains. And you don’t want to eat so much that you get fat.

So, how should you train, eat, and rest to build muscle?

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Illustration of a bodybuilder building muscle after working out.

How Long Do You Build Muscle After Working Out?

When you lift weights, you stimulate muscle growth. How long after your workout does that stimulus last? And how long does it take for your muscles and tendons to recover? If you can balance those two factors, you’ll know how often to train each muscle.

This is especially important if you’re bulking. You need to make sure your body is primed for muscle growth before you shovel down all those extra calories.

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Illustration of a bodybuilder doing giant sets.

How to Do Giant Sets

Giant sets are one of the best methods for gaining both muscle size and strength. They aren’t better than straight sets or supersets, but they are more efficient, allowing you to stimulate more muscle growth in a given amount of time.

Giant sets are also great for your overall health and conditioning. Because you aren’t resting very long between each set, your cardiovascular system is getting a hearty workout, too. And because each individual muscle is still getting plenty of rest before being worked again, giant sets are still great for gaining muscle size and strength.

So, what are giant sets? And what’s the best way to program them?

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Illustration of a "hardgainer" with a fast metabolism who can't gain weight.

How to Gain Weight With A Fast Metabolism

Skinny people often have a few traits dragging their weight down: thin bones, narrow frames, small stomachs, meagre appetites, and fast metabolisms. In this article, we’ll focus on that very last piece of the puzzle: how to gain weight with a raging metabolism. This is something we know all too well. I’ve lived it. So have Marco and Cassandra. And so have the 10,000 clients we’ve coached through it.

It’s not quite as simple as people often assume, though. Your trouble gaining weight probably has less to do with having a “fast” metabolism and more to do with having an “adaptive” metabolism. As in, the more food you eat, the more your metabolism revs up, and the more calories you burn. This is what the term “hardgainer” refers to. I think it’s also why some skinny people are dubbed “non-responders” when they first start lifting weights.

So, how can you gain muscle, strength, and weight with a fast metabolism? Let’s dive in.

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Illustration of a man lifting a calf to progressively overload his growing muscles.

What’s Progressive Overload & How Should You Do It?

Progressive overload is one of the foundational principles of both strength training and hypertrophy training. When you lift a challenging amount of weight, you provoke muscle growth, making your muscles stronger. To continue challenging your growing muscles, you’ll need to lift gradually heavier weights.

  • To get stronger, lift more weight.
  • To lift more weight, get stronger.

It’s one of those chicken-and-egg riddles, but both chicken and eggs are good for building muscle, so that’s perfectly fine. Speaking of which, you also need to progressively overload your calories to continue building muscle.

In this article, we’ll teach you how to use progressive overload to stimulate muscle growth with your workouts and fuel muscle growth with your diet.

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Diagram showing how our muscle insertions affect our strength.

Muscle Size vs Strength: Is Gaining Muscle Mass Good for Gaining Strength?

Many people start weight training because they want to improve their appearance. They focus on building bigger muscles. Hypertrophy training. Bodybuilding. And that’s great. Building bigger muscles can make us look bigger, stronger, and healthier.

But how well does that extra muscle size translate to our strength? What if we follow a bodybuilding routine that’s designed purely to build muscle mass. Will that make us strong? Or will it make us big but weak?

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Illustration of a bodybuilder doing High-Intensity Training (HIT) on the leg press exercise machine to gain muscle size and strength.

Is High-Intensity Training (HIT) Good for Building Muscle?

High-intensity training (HIT) proposes that we can gain muscle size and strength faster and more efficiently if we keep our workouts short, infrequent, and brutally intense. It’s not the most popular way to build muscle, but it’s had a loyal following for the past 50 years and shows no signs of giving up.

During these past 50 years, though, thousands of muscle-building studies have been published, and many of them have looked into the principles that define HIT. So, how many sets should we do per exercise? How often should we be training? Should we lift to failure?

Most of all, is HIT good for building muscle?

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Illustration of a bodybuilder building bigger biceps.

How to Build Bigger Biceps

Our biceps aren’t big muscles. They’re a mere fraction of the size of our quads, glutes, shoulders, and chests. But they’re disproportionately prominent. Building bigger biceps can make us look much stronger. And with good reason. Our biceps play a large role in our general strength.

There’s an old strength training adage, though, telling us that all we need to build bigger biceps is to get stronger at compound lifts—at chin-ups and rows. That’s not quite the case, and perhaps that’s why most people’s biceps lag behind. We don’t train them directly enough, hard enough, or often enough.

So, what’s the best way to build bigger biceps?

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