Even in overweight America there are plenty of under-developed (lacking muscle) or even scrawny (I don't mean anorectic) guys and gals who want to work on their strength, endurance, and overall fitness for life or to improve their athletic performance in some area. Chestless men and bony women.
My trainer tells me it's always an interesting challenge for him to train endomorphs (basically, skinny runner's builds) or, even more difficult, thinner or under-developed people with middle-aged guts.
People built like this will likely never have big muscles, but big muscles and functional fitness are not the same thing at all. Women, of course, can not build bulging muscles under any ordinary or non-chemical circumstances.
Weights and good nutrition are the keys to a sturdy body, but everything else is needed for balanced fitness too. A typical first-year program would be something like this:
- Weight-lifting 3 hours/wk (under age 45, 3/wk; older, maybe only 2- 2 1/2 hrs/wk with slower progress)
- Calisthenics and lighter weights, 1 hr/wk
- Endurance cardio 1 hr/wk
- HIIT cardio 30-40 min/wk (including rests)
You can't build muscle without adding a little fat to your bones along with it. The added nutrition to support a program like this, for the skinny or the under-developed, might be something like this:
- protein and fruit shake after workouts
- 2 mostly dairy snacks daily (eg yoghurt, glass of milk, some fruit or nuts)
- 3 modestly-sized "balanced" (ie protein, fats+oils, moderate carbs, greens, fruit) meals/day.
This volume of food intake can be a challenge for many, so it is something to work up to gradually. For most people to gain solid (vs fat) weight, the food intake will need to match the exercise intensity.
A program like that ought to be able to build 1 lb/month of solid (not flab) gain. A 10-12 lb gain in 12 months would be a good target. More might be too much because muscle builds very slowly. Let the scale be your guide and nourish yourself accordingly. If there is a gut, it should eliminate it. A gut on an under-developed guy or gal is not useful in life except in times of famine.
nb: Physically under-developed + overweight is an entirely different topic, as we have posted in the past
