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

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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Illustration of a bodybuilder with a huge bowl of food. Illustrated by Shane Duquette for Outlift.

How Many Calories Do You Need to Build Muscle?

By Shane Duquette | May 18, 2023

To build muscle, you need extra calories. Those calories don’t always need to come from food. Many of us carry quite a lot of extra energy in our guts. If…

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Illustration of a skinny person building muscle.

How Many Calories Does It Take To Build a Pound of Muscle?

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | May 31, 2023

A pound of muscle contains about 1,200 calories of stored energy (study, study). However, just like a mason spends energy laying stones, it also takes energy to construct that muscle,…

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Cartoon illustration of a bodybuilder going for a jog to improve his cardiovascular health.

Does a Calorie Surplus Help With Cardio?

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | January 20, 2023

You need an abundance of energy to build muscle. You use that energy to convert protein into muscle mass. You can get that energy by eating more food or by…

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Illustration of a muscular bodybuilder climbing through the mythical anabolic window.

The Anabolic Window: Both Fact & Fiction

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | September 18, 2023

The “anabolic window” is an old bodybuilding term. A few years ago, it was pilloried by the evidence-based fitness community, and perhaps rightfully so—the requirements were woefully strict. As so…

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