Illustration of a skinny person building muscle and bulking up.

Build Muscle. Gain Strength. Outlift Yourself.

If you're a guy who wants to build muscle, gain strength, and get fit, I think you'd love our newsletter.

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Illustration of a man doing a dumbbell biceps curl workout to build bigger arms.

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. We have an unconditional 30-day 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 dumbbell goblet squats as part of his leg workout.

The Best Dumbbell Leg Exercises & Workout

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | December 15, 2023

Dumbbell leg exercises are great for beginners. They’re perfect for gaining your first 30–40 pounds of muscle. Think of exercises like goblet squats, dumbbell Romanian deadlifts, and step-ups. Our main Bony…

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Illustration of a bodybuilder building bigger back muscles with dumbbell lat exercises.

The Best Dumbbell Lat Exercises

By Shane Duquette | June 29, 2024

Your lats pull your elbows in closer to your body, meaning that the best dumbbell lat exercises are some variation of dumbbell row. And dumbbell rows are fantastic. That’s all…

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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 of a weight lifter doing a 6-day workout split to build muscle.

The Best 6-Day Workout Split for Building Muscle

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

6-day workout splits can be remarkably good for building muscle. With so many training days to play with, you can take several different approaches, ranging from minimalism to total maximalism.…

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Illustration of a lifter doing a 5-day workout split to build more muscle.

The Best 5-Day Workout Splits for Building Muscle

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

5-day workout splits can be incredibly good for building muscle if you program them properly. When you’re training this often, it’s easy to beat up your hands, tire out your…

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Illustration of an athlete following an Upper/Lower Split workout routine to build muscle.

The Best Upper/Lower Workout Split for Building Muscle

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | November 9, 2023

When I first met Marco, he had just finished studying under Eric Cressey, the head strength coach for the New York Yankees, and was working as the strength coach for professional…

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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 a bunch of men deadlifting.

Hypertrophy Training Volume: How Many Sets to Build Muscle?

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

If you’re following a good hypertrophy training program, you should be able to maximize your rate of muscle growth with 10–20 sets per muscle per week. But that depends on…

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Illustration of a bodybuilder counting sets to tally up his weekly training volume.

What is Training Volume?

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS | September 18, 2024

With weight training, training volume is how many hard sets you do per muscle per week. For example, if you do 5 sets of bench presses, 5 sets of push-ups,…

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