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:
- How to build muscle (for everyone)
- How to bulk up (for skinny people)
- How to recomp (for overweight people)
- How to do cardio
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:
- Progressive overload
- The best hypertrophy exercises
- How to structure your workouts
- How many reps should you do per set?
- How long should you rest between sets?
- How many sets should you do per workout?
- How often should you work out?
- How range of motion affects muscle growth
- How close to failure should you lift?
- How fast should you lift and lower weights?
- Which isolation exercises do you need?
- How to do supersets
- How to do giant sets
- How to do drop sets
- How to do lengthened partials
- Stimulus-to-Fatigue Ratio
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.
- What training split should you use?
- 3-day workout splits
- 4-day workout splits
- 5-day workout splits
- 6-day workout splits
- The Bro Split
- The Upper/Lower Split
- The Push/Pull/Legs Split
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:
- How to gain weight with a fast metabolism
- Is lifting weights good for burning fat?
- How much protein do you need?
- How to sleep for muscle growth
- How to schedule weight training with cardio
If you have any questions about anything, drop a comment in the most relevant article. I answer every comment.
Recent Articles
The Best Upper-Body Workout for Building Muscle
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,…
Read MoreHypertrophy Training Volume: How Many Sets to Build Muscle?
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…
Read MoreThe Best Dumbbell Chest Exercises & Workout
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,…
Read MoreExercise Order: Which Exercises Should You Do First?
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…
Read MoreThe Best Push/Pull/Legs (PPL) Routine for Building Muscle
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…
Read MoreHow to Optimize Your Stimulus-to-Fatigue Ratio (SFR)
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…
Read MoreThe Best Lifts for Building Broader Shoulders
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…
Read MoreCan Bulking Cause Insulin Resistance & Diabetes?
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,…
Read MoreBody Recomposition: How to Build Muscle While Losing Fat
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.…
Read More