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 programs. Your 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

Illustration of a skinny guy using an upper-body workout routine to build bigger muscles.

The Best Upper-Body Workout for Building Muscle

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | October 28, 2023

An upper-body workout trains most of the muscles in your upper body. When you split your body in two, you could train it half as much but twice as often,…

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Illustration of a bunch of men deadlifting.

Hypertrophy Training Volume: How Many Sets to Build Muscle?

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | December 11, 2023

If you’re following a good hypertrophy training program and optimizing every factor for muscle growth, you should be able to maximize your rate of muscle growth with 9–22 sets per…

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Illustration of a man doing the dumbbell bench press exercise during his chest workout.

The Best Dumbbell Chest Exercises & Workout

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | December 12, 2023

You can bulk up your chest perfectly well with just dumbbells. In fact, you could make a strong argument that dumbbell chest exercises are better for your chest than the barbell,…

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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 an intermediate male bodybuilder doing a Push/Pull/Legs hypertrophy workout routine to build muscle.

The Best Push/Pull/Legs (PPL) Routine for Building Muscle

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | February 3, 2024

Push/Pull/Legs (PPL) routines divide your muscles into three groups: your pushing muscles, your pulling muscles, and your legs. Each group of muscles gets a dedicated training day, allowing you to…

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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 muscular man doing dumbbell lateral raises.

The Best Lifts for Building Broader Shoulders

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | May 5, 2020

We’ve already written an article about how skinny guys can build broader shoulders over on Bony to Beastly, including a bunch of neat information about genetics, aesthetics, and hypertrophy training…

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Illustration of a skinny guy who's worried about diabetes and insulin resistance while bulking up.

Can Bulking Cause Insulin Resistance & Diabetes?

By Shane Duquette, Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS and Cassandra González Duquette | August 23, 2023

Whenever we talk about how carbohydrates can be good for building muscle, we get comments from people worried that if they eat too many carbs, they’ll produce too much insulin,…

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Illustration of a man recomping—burning fat while building muscle.

Body Recomposition: How to Build Muscle While Losing Fat

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | November 6, 2023

Body recomposition is when you build muscle while losing fat. It sounds like the Holy Grail, but it isn’t quite so rare as that. Recomping is realistic for most people.…

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