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:

Common Lifting Questions

Here are some of the more common lifting questions we've gotten over the years:

If you have any questions about anything, comment on 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

Illustration of a bodybuilder doing chin-ups first in his hypertrophy workout.

Exercise Order: Which Exercises Should You Do First?

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | February 2, 2024

The conventional wisdom is to start each workout with the big compound lifts, then move to smaller assistance exercises, and then finish with isolation exercises. That’s a perfectly fine way…

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Illustration of a weight lifter trying to manage his stimulus to fatigue ratio while building muscle.

How to Optimize Your Stimulus-to-Fatigue Ratio (SFR)

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | February 21, 2024

The Stimulus-to-Fatigue Ratio (SFR) is a way to compare how much benefit a workout stimulates against how much fatigue it generates. The idea is to increase the stimulus while reducing…

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Illustration of a man doing a barbell front squat

The Barbell Front Squat Guide (for Building Muscle)

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | December 14, 2020

The barbell squat is the strength training lift. It’s the best lift for bulking up your quads, glutes, and calves, and it stimulates more overall muscle mass than any other…

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Illustration of an athlete doing a squat workout to build a bigger and stronger lower body.

The Best Lower-Body Workout for Building Muscle

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | November 8, 2023

“Leg Day” and “Lower Body Workout” sound similar, and indeed they are. The difference is that Leg Days are usually used by bodybuilders, whereas Lower Body Workouts are more often…

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Illustration of a weight lifter doing compound exercises to gain muscle and strength.

The 5 Best Compound Exercises for Building Muscle

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | March 2, 2024

All the best muscle-building programs are built on the idea of progressively overloading the big compound exercises. If you aren’t able to progressively overload those exercises, then you won’t build…

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Illustration of a bodybuilder doing long-muscle-length shoulder training for his side delts.

Long-Muscle-Length Training (Aka Stretch-Mediated Hypertrophy)

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | June 2, 2024

For at least a few decades, bodybuilders have favoured exercises that challenge their muscles at long muscle lengths. “Go deep! Feel the stretch!” The mechanisms weren’t known, and the results…

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Illustration of a bodybuilder's full body split into three pieces.

Full-Body Workouts vs Splits: Which Builds More Muscle?

By Shane Duquette | June 2, 2024

A new meta-analysis by Ramos-Campo gathered together all fourteen studies comparing full-body workout routines against split workout routines. This is the latest study, and it includes all of the previous…

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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 | July 7, 2024

How much can the average man lift? We can look at a few studies, and I also surveyed 600 of our newsletter subscribers, asking them how much they could squat,…

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Illustration of a man doing a sumo deadlift (outlift)

The Deadlift Hypertrophy Guide

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | August 30, 2019

The deadlift strengthens us from our forearms down to our calves. In fact, it’s such a good indicator of overall strength that it’s the only lift in both powerlifting and…

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