The Hardgainer Solution: The Training and Diet Plans for Building a Better Body, Gaining Muscle, and Overcoming Your Genetics

As of writing this review I am 10 workouts into this program. First and foremost I think it is worth mentioning that this program is geared toward the trainee who is ready to embrace a long term commitment to fitness. If you are looking for a 3 month magic program, this book will leave you feeling disappointed. If you were hoping for a couple quick and easy tips for a diet to give you ripped abs in 6 weeks while simultaneously building lean muscle mass, it ain't here (or anywhere for that matter).What you will find here is a realistic and honest approach to what it takes to live and sustain the fitness LIFESTYLE. It talks about the importance of sleep regularity, meal times, day to day routine, mind-muscle connection, intensity, biofeedback. It stresses the importance of truly working the muscle with focus rather than mindlessly executing a movement. It casts aside any misguided notions of high weight, ego gratifying, 1 rm exercises without context or purpose.One of the most valuable lessons I was able to learn from this program was the importance of the mind/muscle connection - that every single rep was a meaningful opportunity to try to mentally bridge my brain to my muscles. For the first time in my training life I have completely lost any emotional attachment the what the weight of the dumbbell says because now the weight is merely a lever point against which I stretch and squeeze my muscle. I am still a relative novice in this regard, and it takes a few reps for me to produce the connection, but what I can tell you with certainty is that this program has yielded me most success in achieving muscle awareness.Another awesome feature of HGS is that every workout is a full body workout. Now when I first saw this I have to admit I was a bit put off. It was different from every other program I had ever been on. Traditionally, on any given day in my old program I would wail away on one or two muscle groups and then rest them up for a week. However, after about two weeks worth of HGS, my concerns have been alleviated. With HGS the training effects accumulate over a period of time because the workouts are ALL CONNECTED. And folks, I gotta tell ya, when you come off of an amateur program that is merely a body part split wherein each workout is a self-contained cacophony of exercises, and you take up a well thought out systematic program, you gain an appreciation for the hard work and expertise that goes into creating something like that. It's like weaving together strings of exercises and rep schemes to make a beautiful oriental rug. It's amazing to feel how, after training a muscle group in the lower rep range on a previous day, the almost immediate connection and stimulation to that same muscle group with a higher rep range the next day.Now, admittedly, it's still early on in the program, and it would be fair to assume that I am still "honeymooning" HGS. I imagine that down the road my day to day enthusiasm will even out when I get deeper into the program. But I am looking forward to reviewing my progress next summer and I remain extremely hopeful.

I will start by saying that Scott Abel does not know me personally, but I know him. I have been a reader of his work for nearly 10 years! The sad thing is that I have kept Scott my closely guarded secret for years. I selfishly did not want anyone to know that I had I found the truth about changing my body...which gave me the freedom to ignore the newest fad and see through the marketing of the new, latest and greatest supplement. I write this review now...to give back. Anyone that wants a true understanding of physique development, without the "noise" that seems to be prevalent these days...needs to tap into the wisdom of Scott Abel ! He has a handful of books on the market...and as with them all, he has produced another "gem"!This book is EXACTLY as described on the cover. Scott is the guy you turn to when you are seeking the "non-internet marketing hype" approach to a better physique. This best part of the book is you get the "why" backed up with plenty of "how"! There are 80 different workout plans included with a free web-link to Scott's video library that explains how to perform each exercise with proper form. And, something extremely rare to Scott's books, his hardgainer's nutrition philosophy with eating plans to help guide you through the confusion that comes with managing this portion of physique development. Scott is an author and a scholar with many years on stage and "backstage" in the bodybuilding world. He doesn't publish anything that promotes particular supplements or current fads, but instead provides well-researched, quality information that you can rely on! The combination of investing in Scott Abel's work and investing in yourself is an equation with one outcome...Success!

As the title suggests, this book is very specifically targeted to people who have a hard time gaining muscle with exercise. It is not specifically a strength training program, and it is not a conditioning program. The emphasis is on avoiding the things that work for elite bodybuilders or work best for lifting more weight and on avoiding the mess of internet marketing hype, and instead focusing on the principles that work best for people who gain muscle very slowly and with great difficulty.The program is based on training the entire body in each workout in a sustainable way to get enough stimulation for muscle development without taxing the limited recovery capacity of the hard gainer.The way this is approached to go back to basics with the the concepts: (1) muscles are recruited by the nervous system not by the weights, (2) learning how you should feel from training is more important for stimulating your muscles properly than watching for strength targets, and (3) eating properly for gaining muscle is not a matter of bulking up or special diets, it is a matter of getting enough nutrition to recover properly from training.The way the program accomplishes these basics is by using a strategy of high repetition complexes per body part at a very deliberate cadence to train the entire body in each workout so that you get enough stimulation to encourage muscle growth without exceeding your capacity to recover.The program allows for exercises to be swapped out with similar ones and for different variations of repetitions and weight progressions within a session, but not varying the overall range of repetitions for each exercise. The specific repetition ranges used and hitting the body parts according to the "peripheral heart action" principle are the central hard rules of the program. The program is not intended for fast results in the short term, it is intended for reliable results in the longer term, and the author suggests a one year commitment to the program. The Kindle book contains lists of exercises, and provides links to a printable PDF for convenience and to videos of the exercises.This seems like a very solid approach to gaining muscle compared to most of the heavily co-marketed and over-hyped programs I've seen available on the web. This is not a program of magical fast results, fad techniques, superficial sciencey citations, or mixed objectives. This is a program and set of principles very specifically intended to go back to the simple goal of putting muscle on people who have failed at that goal consistently in the past.The only thing I found to be a negative here was that it isn't easy to actually do this program without a lot of work if you aren't already an experienced lifter or a coach. It will help a lot if you are already familiar with weight training because this is not a primer on how to exercise. There is nothing preventing a novice from using the associated videos to help learn the exercises and the design of the program is all about learning as much as it is about training. But I am hoping to adapt some of these principles to my bodyweight training for example, and that seems like it will take a bit of thought and a learning curve. I think it will be well worth it though.

Since I first read the HGS I found something different from other 'bodybuilding' books, because the author was really speaking to me: a man in the middle of his forties.Before I was used to split muscle groups in three or four days a week: I found that three/four exercises a day were too much stressing for the targeted muscle groups but I also realized that it was not enough to train a muscle group only once a week, and results languished. I tried not to limit myself to train a muscle group once a week so I tried to insert 'recall' during the week, and so on, and so on, endless trials, with no method at all.I never thought that at my age I could train each muscle group four or five times a week. With the HGS approach I can do it without overtraining, with visible results and psycsatisfaction. It took me four months to follow the wokouts from the number one to the number eighty. Now I'm more 'full' and more defined. No injuries occured me in this period, I have a good warm-up (Abel teaches) and then ready to train.The book gives you a tried and trusted method but it doesn't explain how to perform each exercise. For this you can learn from the Abel's website, where all exercises described in the book are superbly explained with videos, for free of course. I discovered so many mistakes in the way I was used to train and target my muscles ...The HGS book and the support of the website videos are now the only tools to my body fitness. Abel's mantra is 'train the muscle and not the movement': so true when understood and applied.

As a hard gainer myself this is an interesting book and written by a man with a vast amount of knowledge and experience. I have trained nearly all of my life and have now reached the ripe old age of 69. At 5' 6" I have never weighed more than 10 and a half stone and although I achieved 15" arms, 43" chest, 29" waist and 23" thighs in my early 40's, it took me 4 years to put on 1 and a half stone of muscle. 5lb a year. Strength came relatively easily though, with for example 180k box squats for 6 reps, but muscle was hard. It's hard to keep the enthusiasm of youth on the boil as you get older and you loose muscle mass with age anyway, but I have started to train seriously again and expect to see much improvement in my shape. At the moment I train for 45 - 60 mins with max weight for 6 reps, 3 exercises for 1 body part per session, 5 days a week, which is probably unwise at my age as you don't recover that quickly, albeit that my muscle mass has noticeably increased. It can also be tough on the joints and injury more likely. So the programme proposed by Scott in The HGS which focuses on higher rep sets (up to 20 reps), a total body workout per session and managed recovery times, should be good for us older guys too. The programme is built on a sound premise and should be adhered to for a year, so you have to give it a chance. For me time will tell, but I have faith in what Scott has written and given my own experience over the years.

Das Buch ist in 2 Teile aufgeteilt.Im ersten Teil wird die zugrunde liegende Theorie der Hard Gainer Solution (HGS) erklärt.Im zweiten Teil sind dann (ich glaube) 80 Workouts aufgelistet. Zudem auch noch mehrere Ernährungspläne.Das HGS ist ein PHA basiertes Ganzkörper-Training, das seinen Schwerpunkt auf Volumen setzt und nicht auf die bewegten Gewichte. Das System sei "rep based", also auf viele WH angelegt.Scott schreibt dazu, dass kein richtiger Muskelaufbau stattfinden kann wenn man nur im niedrigen WH Bereich und mit wenigen Sätzen trainiert. Er sagt, "development" käme von Volumen.Ob das Training dir auch Fortschritte bringt kann ich nicht sagen. Das muß jeder für sich selbst herausfinden. Aber ich glaube, es bringt dir ganz sicher etwas.Ich hab jedenfalls eine außerordentliche Muskelentwicklung erreicht (natural).Ich kann das Buch nur empfehlen. Hab es schon 2 mal gelesen (und bestimmt lese ich es noch ein 3. und 4. Mal).Das System macht Spaß und ich fühle mich hinterher sehr gut!

Another greet book from scott abel!! No hype, just the real deal.A must have for everybody who wantsresults !!!!!

Very comprehensive!