Hard-Gainers and No-Gainers

These hapless folk probably aren’t what you’re thinking…When envisioning the exact opposite of a professional bodybuilding, such images as Brenden Fraser (in The Whale) or John Daly probably come to mind immediately. Our brains instinctually lunge to the furthest thing we can conjure from “jacked and ripped”—and that tends to land in the ballpark of morbidly obese, slovenly, or completely disinterested in health. But that’s actually not what I’m talking about here.

The genetically unfortunate relevant to our particular discussion at hand are those who actually DO care about their health. They want to improve their physical fitness and appearance. And they have actually tried to follow a structured plan to no avail. This group is commonly called “hard-gainers”, but let’s push it a bit further here and highlight the “no-gainers”—that is, those who just can’t seem to make progress no matter what they do. I’d even venture to guess that framing it this way makes you think of someone you know in your real life. Or maybe they’re even a regular at your gym. These people aren’t the caricatures that conceptualizing the antithesis of professional bodybuilders would seem to point to…They’re just regular humans whose regular nucleotides arranged themselves in regular ways that, when put together, created a desolate void of athleticism and resistance training responsiveness.

As bad as I’ve made the outlook for this population seem (and yes, it’s not great), all hope is not completely lost. Every gram of muscle gain will be a monumental effort. And every pound of weight added to a lift will require an attention to detail that would make Steve Jobs blush. However Herculean the challenge appears on the surface, something can always be done. Here are some guidelines for how to properly utilize intensity titrations and failure for those who just can’t seem to make any progress:

• Limit volume and frequency in favor of higher specific intensities. This group will have a drastically lower recovery capacity than the average so leaning into the intensity rather than volume as the primary driver of progress will be a good idea.
• Failure should be kept to minimally-fatiguing and low-skill movements due to the aforementioned recovery decrements as well as vastly lower baseline levels of coordination and proprioception.
• Utilize mostly machines and cables in lieu of free-weights especially when training at high intensities. This is due to the aforementioned poor coordination and proprioception.
• Unilateral movements should be used liberally and trained with moderate-to-high intensities. The upshot here is that unilateral work forces symmetrical neural adaptations, strength, and muscle development where an over reliance on bilateral movements has a disproportional likelihood of creating dysfunction in this group. Conversely, the downside is that having to perform everything twice will generate central fatigue much quicker, which can be a big issue when recovery is already a limitation. A few good rules of thumb here are to 1) keep the unilateral work non-axially loaded, 2) use free-weight variations to promote coordination and systemic integration, 3) while machine/cables provide stimulus via intensity, 4) emphasize variation with greater ROMs and more level resistance curves.
• Rather than methodically tapering the intensity up throughout the training block (like we’ve previously discussed with other sample populations), the relative intensities (i.e. RIR and RPE) should remain mostly consistent with much less aggressive progressions. Main movements should stay on the outer bounds of the minimal intensity threshold in order to control for systemic fatigue—so around 4-5RIR. The accessories will then have to bear the load and be pushed much harder—we’re talking from 2-0RIR depending on the exercise.
• Mesocycles will also have to be run for MUCH longer than would be typical. Once the hypertrophic wheels begin to turn for the no-gainer, the last thing you want to do is pull the e-brake. It requires consistency in doing things over and over right just to get to the point where their bodies’ begin to acquiesce. Once you get there, try to stay there as long as possible. If fatigue becomes unmanageable, rather than taking a traditional deload, employ novel strategies like consecutive off days (3-4 as needed), substituting an overloading session for a recovery/light session, or accessory-only training days. These strategies should be used for as brief of time as possible before continuing with the original training.

Even after presenting the above guidelines, and even if they are all used perfectly in practice, there is still no guarantee that progress will be made when we’re talking about the outliers of the outliers. The best we can do is to understand (and accept) the circumstances and do everything we can to optimize the training, and use of failure, in order to maximize the probability of success