The Forgotten Part 4: The WORST thing for gaining muscle

If there is one thing that skinny guys are almost instantaneously afraid of when they start trying to gain weight, its gaining fat. 

At the first sign of their skinny guy 6-pack disappearing, they make a mad dash for the treadmill. But this is THE WORST THING they could do.

Go back to the first part of this series and see how many calories you've got to eat in order to gain muscle. What do you think happens when you hit the treadmill after a workout? Or if you spend 2-3 hours a day playing basketball with friends?

Using even more calories is counterproductive to muscle gain.

You have to eat that many MORE calories! 3 hours of basketball can burn up to 2000 calories. So now not only do you have to eat 4500 calories just to gain weight, but now you have to eat an additional 2000 calories because of what you burned playing basketball!

So what should a skinny guy be doing when he's not working out?? 

Stretch, sleep, eat. That's right. Until you start gaining weight, you need to back off all that extra curricular activity that is chewing up calories you COULD be using to gain muscle.

So unless you enjoy going crazy because you aren't gaining weight despite the dump truck worth of food you're eating, then you need to BACK OFF the extra curricular activity.

But at that point, the question becomes which do you want more: muscle, or the extra activity?