ARE YOU A HARDGAINER AND CAN'T PUT ON WEIGHT?

How To Gain Weight The Natural Physique Way.

Quite often I have someone email me or come up to me in the gym and ask how they can put on weight as they find it impossible. After they tell me they eat a ton of food I ask them to tell me a typical days nutrition. 9 times out of 10 I find they are eating way too little. A sandwich, packet of crisps and a Milky Way won’t go far when you have the metabolic rate of a Bugatti Chiron!

Winning the Junior Mr Europe at 20 years old in Holland 1992.

When I was a teenager just starting training I didn’t realise the importance of nutrition and getting in enough calories. My nutrition was based around cornflakes, jam sandwiches and whatever my mum cooked for dinner! It’s just food, it stops you being hungry I thought. Well, after a long chat with the owner of the gym I trained at, who was an IFBB Professional bodybuilder, he convinced me of the importance of food. It’s worth a try this food lark, lets up my food intake and see what happens!

Well, he wasn't wrong! After thinking what the hell can food do, I had a complete turn around of thinking. I grew like a weed, a couple of stone on in just a few weeks. There’s something in this eating game! The muscle went on, I got so much stronger and not long after training I had plenty of compliments from gym members about my gains, that does wonders for an extremely shy 16 year old!

The day before I won the ANB South East Junior Championships at 19 years of age 1992.

My jam sandwiches and cornflakes made way for eggs, steak, milk and weight gain protein drinks. Increasing your calorific intake is like training with weights, you have to build the calories up over time and be very disciplined. Over time my daily food intake was 26-30 whole eggs, 2lbs of steak (I had a friendly butcher who helped me out) 6 pints of milk and plenty of chicken! It is a lot of food and sometimes I had trouble eating it all but I wanted to gain size and naturally so bad.

So if you want to gain weight and muscle and you are not putting on weight then seriously think about the amount of food you eat. If the weight isn’t going on then your calories are too low. Increase your calories say by 500 calories a day, after a week if no weight has gone on then add another 500 calories until the weight starts to increase. It really is as easy as adding calories! Pick good calorie dense foods, combine with a good training program and see things happen. If weight still isn’t going on then keep raising your food intake. I never said it will be easy!

Here’s an example of my nutrition as a junior natural champion in the off season. I’m not saying follow it to the letter but rather what I had to do personally to gain weight/muscle without putting on too much fat -

Breakfast

12 whole egg omelette or boiled eggs

1 very large bowl of oats made with full fat milk or cereal like bran flakes

1 pint of milk

Mid Morning

Weight Gain drink made with whole milk

3 bananas

Lunch

1 lb of fillet/sirloin steak

2-3 jacket potatoes with cheese

Plenty of veg

1 pint of milk

Mid Afternoon

Weight Gain drink made with whole milk

3 bananas or pack of rice cakes

Dinner

1lb of minced steak

2-3 potatoes or big serving of rice

Plenty of veg

Big bowl of ice cream

Before Bed

12 whole egg omelette or boiled eggs

1 very large bowl of oats made with full fat milk or cereal like bran flakes

1 pint of milk

If you need someone to guide you through this and want continued support have a think about my online coaching and I can be there every step of the way.

Thanks for listening!

Peter Chown

How I Transformed My Physique In Under A Year To Win Natural Mr Universe!

DREAM BIG TO GET BIG! 

Do you want to transform your body in the shortest space of time even though you've been training for years?  That can't be done surely?  Of course it can!  

Training In The Colosseum Gym, Fullerton, California Post Natural Mr Universe Win

I'll tell you what I done back in 2005.  After winning the heavyweight world championships I still realised I needed more size, even though I won I could still look at my physique and tell where I needed to improve.  I needed more balance with my lower half as my legs were always ahead of my upper body, so that meant more size on the upper body, great!  The challenge was set.

So what was my secret?  Well, for years I was doing the same type of training, each body part once a week, low sets, low reps and heavy weight, very much along the lines of Heavy Duty training, Dorian Yates style.  This type of training is phenomenal to be honest and had got me fantastic results over the years.  But after a couple of years my muscle size hadn't changed dramatically.  It got to the point where I thought whats the point in carrying on.  Maybe all the size I had put on over the years was all that my body could build naturally?  Someone wrote on a forum that myself and some others had reached their genetic limit and we couldn't get any bigger, well that was it, just what I needed! That was the motivation that I needed to get bigger, better and not accept the size that I was!  

So, back to the drawing board, what was I going to do to get the results that I was after?  I knew what would work,  go against all what I believed in!  Instead of training three to four days a week, each bodypart once a week, heavy duty style, low sets, low reps, a fair bit of rest, I'd do the opposite, surely that will work?  My mindset had to change to progress further and get out of my plateau.  Three to four days a week training turned into six days a week, each body part trained once a week became each body part twice a week.  Training six days a week, each body part twice a week was a recipe for serious overtraining for a lifetime natural competitor surely?  Well my train of thought was to shock the body, if I do something radically different my body would surely have to change!  Once you increase your frequency and volume of your workouts the body will adapt and recover a lot quicker (as long as your nutrition is spot on too) which means training each body part more often will result in more muscle gain, we all want that right?  

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Checking Out My Progress In Muscle Limit Gym Leading Up To The 2005 Season

So heres what my plan was.  I split my body over three days, the first three days I trained heavy, keeping the rep range in the 6-8 range, rest until my breathing recovered.  I then repeated my body split the following three days but training lighter and upping the reps to 15-20 and my rest between sets was 30-60 seconds.  I trained on the lighter days just short of failure, really going for a massive pump, gorging the muscles with blood.  The training split I used was as follows -

• Monday - Heavy Chest/Shoulders 
• Tuesday - Heavy Back/Arms
• Wednesday - Heavy Legs/Abs
• Thursday - Light Chest/Shoulders
• Friday - Light Back/Arms
• Saturday - Light Legs/Abs  
• Sunday -REST

The results were shocking to me, I had gained approximately 7lbs of lean muscle from April 2006 to the end of July 2006, I hadn't made that much progress since i first started training!  Here I was  17 years into my training and I was making gains like a beginner.   

So, if you have reached a plateau in your own training,  which a lot of my clients have when they first come to me, then radically change things, do what you wouldn't normally do.  If you always train heavy and low reps then change your rep range to 15 reps, or higher, drop your rest down too.  Do the opposite of what you would normally do, shock the body, do something different!  

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Winning The Natural Mr Universe In Los Angeles, California, A Dream Come True.

Good luck and let me know how you get on!

Peter