Illustration of a skinny person building muscle and bulking up.

Build Muscle. Gain Strength. Outlift Yourself.

We're Shane and Marco, known for founding Bony to Beastly and Bony to Bombshell, two of the most popular muscle-building sites for naturally thin people, each with tens of millions of readers.

We have fifteen years of experience coaching clients ranging from everyday people all the way up to college, professional, and Olympic athletes.

We consider lifting research, and we take it seriously, but we also delve into the darkest corners of lifting lore. There's wisdom in bodybuilding traditions, powerlifting programs, and callisthenics routines.

If you want us to walk you through the process of building muscle, start to finish, with personal feedback along the way, check out our programsYour results are fully guaranteed. We have an unconditional refund policy on everything we sell.

If you want to peruse the blog, here are the best articles to start with:

Hypertrophy Training

If you're interested in building muscle, we've written about almost every aspect of hypertrophy training. I recommend starting with our big hypertrophy training guide.

Here are some of our more in-depth articles about hypertrophy training principles:

How to Lift Weights

If you want to learn how to lift weights, build muscle, and get stronger, I recommend starting with our article about how to get stronger at the 5 big compound exercises.

You can read about the nuances of each lift here:

Hypertrophy Workout Routines

We've got a bunch of free workout routines you can look through. The articles will teach you how to follow these routines or build your own from scratch.

Healthy Lifestyle

We've also got some articles about how to live a healthy lifestyle, eat a good diet, maintain good body composition, and combine weight training with cardio:

If you have any questions about anything, drop a comment in the most relevant article. I answer every comment.

Before and after photo of an intermediate lifter bulking
Before and after photo of a skinny guy becoming muscular
Skinny-Fat to Muscular Transformation
Before and after photo of a skinny-fat guy becoming lean and muscular
Women's weight gain transformation
Before and after photo of an intermediate lifter building muscle

Recent Articles

Reverse Pyramid Training Workout Routine for Muscle Hypertrophy

Reverse Pyramid Training Guide

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | June 28, 2020

Reverse Pyramid Training is a popular way for intermediates to break through muscle and strength plateaus. It’s also quite efficient, typically involving three full-body workouts per week, each lasting less…

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Illustration showing a man doing a barbell deadlift.

How Much Can the Average Man Lift?

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | September 26, 2020

How much can the average man lift? How much can they squat, bench press, deadlift, overhead press, and barbell curl? How does the strength of the average untrained man compare…

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Illustration of a man doing a low-bar back squat, as recommended in Starting Strength.

A Review of Starting Strength for Building Muscle

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | June 26, 2020

Starting Strength was created by the former powerlifter Mark Rippetoe as a beginner program for gaining general strength. It has its roots in powerlifting culture, but it’s not a powerlifting…

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What Happens If You Spread Your Workout Throughout the Day?

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | January 21, 2023

What if, instead of doing your workout all at once, you spread your sets or exercises over the day? Maybe that means doing your squats before work, your push-ups before…

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Illustration of a bodybuilder demonstrating how to superset your exercises so that you can build more muscle size and strength with every workout.

How to Do Supersets

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | December 11, 2020

Building your workout routine out of supersets is one of the best ways to build more muscle in less time. Not because there’s anything magical about them—although there might be—but…

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Illustration of a man doing a squat with a fast lifting tempo to build muscle faster.

Lifting Tempo: How Fast Should You Lift & Lower Weights to Build Muscle?

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | November 27, 2020

Lifting tempo is one of the more minor muscle-growth factors, not because it doesn’t matter, but because most people have a good intuition for it. Most people lift in the…

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Illustration of a man doing a low-bar barbell back squat.

Review of StrongLifts 5×5 for Building Muscle

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | October 2, 2020

One of the most common questions we get is whether StrongLifts 5×5 is good for building muscle. More often than not, the question is coming from a skinny guy who’s…

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Illustration of a man doing neck side raises.

Should You Do Isolation Lifts to Build Muscle?

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | March 26, 2020

Isolation lifts, also known as accessory or single-joint exercises, are smaller lifts that are designed to “isolate” certain muscles. It’s a bit of a misnomer. No exercise works just a…

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Illustration of a man doing a Zercher squat.

The Hypertrophy Rep Range: How Many Reps to Build Muscle?

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | June 1, 2020

How many reps should you do to gain muscle mass? In strength training, doing five reps per set is a popular way to gain mass. In bodybuilding, though, where the…

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