How to Gain the Right Kind of Weight

How to Gain the Right Kind of Weight

One of the most common things we hear from young athletes—especially baseball players—is:

“I need to gain weight.”

Sometimes they do.

Sometimes they don’t.

There are plenty of athletes who already have enough size. They don’t necessarily need to become heavier; they need to become stronger and more explosive with the weight they already have.

But there are also a lot of young athletes who are simply undersized for where they eventually need to be.

A very rough rule of thumb I’ve used over the years is to take your height in inches and multiply it by 2.5. (I learned that from Dr. Heenan, the "90 MPH Formula" guy)

That gives you a general idea of a bodyweight you might want to be around by your senior year of high school.

Notice I said by your senior year.

If you’re 13 years old, don’t do that math and start panicking because you’re 30 pounds away from the number. You’re supposed to be. It’s a long-term target, not something you need to accomplish next month.

And obviously, the goal isn’t simply gaining weight.

The goal is gaining useful weight.

Body Fat Isn’t the Goal

I don’t get too far down the rabbit hole with body-fat testing with most young athletes.

You obviously aren’t trying to gain a bunch of body fat.

Fat has never made anyone faster or more explosive.

Think about it like adding weight to a truck. You don’t throw an extra 500 pounds of cargo in the bed and expect the truck to accelerate faster.

If you’re going to add weight, you want as much of that additional weight as possible to become part of the engine.

That means muscle.

Now, if you’re trying to gain 15 or 20 pounds, you’re probably going to gain a little body fat along the way.

That’s fine.

Don’t become so obsessed with staying lean that you make it impossible to actually grow.

Most of the athletes I’m talking to with this article are already extremely lean and desperately need additional size.

For those athletes, there are two things I want you to understand before anything else.

Rule #1: Stop Going Hours Without Eating

If there are only two things you remember from this entire article, make this one of them.

If you regularly go three or four hours during the day without consuming any calories, you are making gaining weight unnecessarily difficult.

I’m not saying you need to sit down and eat a full meal every three hours.

I said consume calories.

There’s a big difference.

One of the simplest strategies I’ve ever used with athletes is keeping a container of almonds or cashews in their backpack.

That’s it.

It sounds almost too simple, but I’ve probably helped more hard gainers add weight with that one suggestion than almost anything else.

Nuts are extremely calorie dense, easy to carry and easy to eat without becoming uncomfortably full.

And that last part matters.

Being Stuffed Is Your Enemy

Most hard gainers don’t have huge appetites.

If they did, they probably wouldn’t be hard gainers.

That’s one reason I’m not a huge fan of telling a skinny athlete to constantly drink gigantic weight-gainer shakes.

Sure, you can cram a ridiculous number of calories into a shake.

But what happens afterward?

You’re full.

Then you don’t eat again for six hours.

Now the giant shake has actually worked against the thing we were trying to accomplish.

For a hard gainer, I would much rather see calories spread throughout the day.

Eat your meals.

Snack between them.

Graze.

If you have a nut allergy, find another calorie-dense option that works for you. Beef jerky combined with some additional carbohydrates can work well.

The specific food isn’t nearly as important as the habit.

You cannot routinely forget to eat half the day and then wonder why the scale doesn’t move.

Rule #2: Stop Burning Calories You’re Trying to Keep

This is the other big one.

If you desperately need to gain weight, stop voluntarily going out and doing unnecessary conditioning.

I’m still amazed when I hear a 140-pound baseball player tell me he’s been jogging miles several days per week because he wants to “get in shape.”

Please stop.

You’re burning calories that we’re desperately trying to keep.

And beyond that, jogging a mile probably isn’t doing what you think it is doing for your baseball performance anyway.

If you want to sprint, sprint.

Ten- to 20-yard explosive efforts with plenty of recovery between them make considerably more sense for most baseball players.

But even then, if gaining size is your biggest physical limitation, I wouldn’t pile a bunch of extra conditioning on top of your training.

If you’re required to condition by your coach, that’s obviously different.

You have to do what your team requires.

What I’m talking about is the athlete who voluntarily adds several additional conditioning sessions because he thinks more work is always better.

It isn’t.

Training has a cost.

If you’re significantly undersized, adding 15 pounds of quality mass will probably improve more athletic qualities than all the random conditioning sessions you can dream up.

You’ll become stronger.

You’ll have more potential to produce force.

You’ll likely throw harder.

You’ll have the potential to hit the ball harder.

You’ll tolerate training better.

For many young athletes, getting bigger and stronger is the foundation that everything else is built on.

Don’t Fall for the Magic Weight-Gainer Shake

Every athlete eventually hears some version of this story:

“My brother drank this shake and gained 25 pounds.”

“My cousin used this weight gainer.”

“My friend takes this stuff before bed.”

There isn’t anything magical about the shake.

It contains calories.

That’s it.

The problem is that many weight-gainer shakes contain so many calories that they destroy the athlete’s appetite afterward.

Again, if you drink one before bed and it works for you, fine.

But drinking a massive shake in the morning and then not eating until dinner defeats the purpose.

For a hard gainer, consistently getting calories throughout the day is far more important than winning some imaginary contest for the biggest shake.

Hard Gainers Need to Graze

Years ago, there was a common recommendation that everybody trying to lose weight should eat five or six times per day.

Three meals.

Two or three snacks.

Keep the metabolism going.

Keep the blood sugar stable.

Whatever explanation was being used at the time.

For the average person trying to lose weight, that advice was often completely backwards.

But you know who that style of eating works extremely well for?

People trying to gain mass.

For an athlete trying to gain weight, three meals plus multiple snacks can be a great strategy.

You want repeated opportunities to get calories and protein into your body without becoming so full that you can’t eat again.

Get Enough Protein

My general recommendation is around one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight per day.

And yes, that can be difficult.

That doesn’t make it less important.

An athlete who weighs 150 pounds should be trying to get somewhere around 150 grams of protein per day.

Most young athletes dramatically underestimate how much protein they actually eat.

They’ll tell me they eat “a lot of protein,” and then when we actually add it up, they’re getting 60 or 70 grams per day.

That isn’t close.

This is where tracking your food for a few days can be incredibly helpful.

You don’t have to become obsessive about it.

You don’t need to track every gram of carbohydrate and fat for the rest of your life.

Track your food for three or four normal days and see where you actually are.

Most people eat relatively similar foods throughout the week anyway.

Once you learn what 150 grams of protein looks like for your normal diet, you probably won’t need to track it anymore.

But until you measure it, you’re guessing.

And most people guess wrong.

Parents: Don’t Fight Every Battle

Almost every parent of an undersized teenage athlete tells me some version of this:

“All he eats is junk.”

I understand the concern.

But teenagers also have a remarkable ability to do the exact opposite of whatever their parents tell them.

So sometimes we need to choose our battles.

If the kid wants Sour Patch Kids, fine.

Just put a steak next to them.

If he wants chips, fine.

Eat some chicken with them.

If he wants pizza, great. There’s at least some protein involved.

Would I prefer every athlete eat steak, eggs, potatoes, rice, fruit and vegetables every day?

Of course.

But I’m also interested in what is realistic.

If you have a 6-foot, 145-pound baseball player who desperately needs to gain 20 pounds, I’m much more concerned about whether he’s eating enough calories and protein than I am about whether every calorie came from a perfectly “clean” food source.

Get the big things right first.

What About Supplements?

Two supplements make this conversation pretty simple:

Protein powder and creatine monohydrate.

Protein powder is exactly what the name implies.

It’s a supplement.

It supplements your diet.

It shouldn’t replace meals.

Use it as a convenient way to help reach your daily protein target.

Have a shake between meals.

Have one after training.

Use it when getting an actual meal isn’t convenient.

But don’t replace breakfast with a protein shake and pretend you accomplished something.

Eat breakfast and use the shake in addition to it if you need the calories.

Creatine is even simpler.

Use plain creatine monohydrate.

You don’t need the exotic version.

You don’t need some proprietary blend.

You don’t need an expensive tub covered in lightning bolts.

You also don’t need to make the process complicated.

Take it consistently every day.

That’s the important part.

The Bottom Line

Gaining quality weight isn’t complicated.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy.

If you’re a hard gainer, you are going to have to do some things that are inconvenient.

You’re going to have to eat when you aren’t particularly hungry.

You’re going to have to plan ahead.

You’re going to have to carry snacks.

You’re going to have to pay attention to how much protein you’re actually eating.

And you may have to stop doing some of the unnecessary work that is burning the calories you’re trying so hard to consume.

The formula is pretty straightforward:

Eat consistently throughout the day.

Get enough protein.

Lift.

Recover.

Stop wasting calories on unnecessary conditioning.

Use protein powder and creatine as supplements—not substitutes for food.

Then repeat it long enough for it to work.

You don’t need a magic shake.

You don’t need a secret supplement.

And you definitely don’t need to make it more complicated than it is.

You need consistency.

Because when it comes to gaining good weight, the athletes who finally start growing are usually not the ones who discovered some revolutionary new strategy.

They’re the ones who finally started doing the simple things every single day.