"Best Ways to Gain Weight and Muscle - How to Gain Weight Healthily"

Need to know how to gain weight healthily?

Forget diet. The best ways to gain weight starts with your training.

How Can You Gain Weight?

How can you gain weight and muscle mass - and do so healthily?

For many, the science of muscle building is a significant problem often leading to frustration and confusion.

For example:

• What is the best routine to gain weight and muscle?
• What is the best weight gain diet?
• How can you gain weight and lose fat at the same time?

These are all valid questions, and we hope this article goes some way to addressing them.


Photo by Beverly & Pack

How to Gain Weight Healthily

Knowing how to gain weight healthily begins with your muscle building training or routine.

If anyone tells you any different, or insists that diet is somehow more important than an effective strength training workout, their advice has no practical value to you.

Why is this? Simply, the best weight gain diet in the world becomes redundant if you are not training properly, as an overabundance of calories will ultimately turn to fat if you are using an ineffective training program. A weight gain diet only becomes important when helping to serve your recovery and rate of progress AFTER you have trained and not before.

Because of this, training is the first primary requirement, while nutrition is secondary. In other words, it is only in the context of having employed the correct training stimulus that nutrition then becomes a consideration.

Ways to Gain Weight and Muscle

So which training routine is best to gain weight and muscle? The answer, surprisingly, is a relatively simple one:

The best routine is one which consistently promotes size and strength increases while allowing you to sufficiently recover from your training.

If your current routine fails to meet these criteria, building muscle quickly - if at all - will prove an uphill battle.

This is why an effective muscle and weight gain routine should be taxing enough to trigger a muscle building response while allowing for sufficient recovery. Even the best muscle building exercises will fail to build your body if you are over-training - sadly, many ignore this cardinal rule to their cost.

Yet select an abbreviated routine for your strength training, and you ensure your body receives all the recovery it demands to grow.

For example, consider the remarkable story of Vim magazine editor Roger Eells. Using just three exercises and the benefits of squats, Eells's body weight would rocket from a sickly 109 lbs to a muscular 185 lbs - a weight gain of 76 pounds!

Ways to Gain Weight with Healthy Weight Gain Foods

Which brings us to ways to gain weight with diet, and the healthy weight gain foods you need to eat to gain mass.

For most, a gain weight diet can provide just as much confusion as exercise, yet the basics of healthy eating are easy to understand when presented with the right kind of information.

Nutritionist Patrick Holford writes about a healthy diet in The Optimum Nutrition Bible, saying: "diet is about giving the body exactly what it needs and no more". This means, if your goal is to gain weight and muscle with little in the way of fat, you must provide it with healthy, nutrient-rich foods, and enough calories to fuel the building of lean muscle tissue.

These calories should come from a well balanced diet, and can be achieved easily by getting your daily compliment from the four basic food groups:

1. Cereals and grains
2. Fruit and vegetables
3. Meat, fish and poultry
4. Milk and dairy products.

Since recent research shows the risk of dieting is hazardous to your health, avoid fad diets at all costs.

To discover the dangers behind your diet drink, see Diet Soda Weight Gain

Lose Fat Gain Weight

And finally, is it possible for the body to miraculously steal calories from your own fat to build muscle?

Nautilus inventor Arthur Jones alleged this during his one-month Colorado experiment with bodybuilder Casey Viator.

During the experiment, it was calculated Viator only consumed enough calories to account for a 45 pound gain, yet went onto add a colossal 62 pounds - this meant a further 17 pounds of body fat was sacrificed to build muscle.

However, far from an isolated case, this lose fat gain weight "miracle" was to take an interesting turn when members of the Denver Broncos Professional Football team proceeded to train in the same abbreviated manner, and also began to gain weight and muscle as they shed fat.

In Summary

Science shows the best ways to gain weight and muscle shouldn't start with your diet but begin with your training.

If you are underweight, knowing how to gain weight healthily is step one towards building a fit and strong body.