Muscle Building For Skinny Women

The results of a skinny woman building muscle.

We've been helping naturally thin people build muscle full-time for the past fifteen years, with over fifteen thousand members, including athletes (high school, college, professional, and Olympic), fitness models, celebrities trying to look better for TV appearances, and most of all, regular people ranging from teenagers to grandmothers.

If you're a skinny woman who wants to gain weight, build muscle, and become stronger, I think you'd love our newsletter. It kicks off with a 5-part series that covers:

How to lift for muscle growth
How to eat for lean weight gain
How to thrive with skinny genetics
How to get stronger, healthier, and better looking

After that, we'll send you 1–2 newsletters per month to keep you updated on the latest muscle-building research, methods, and workouts—all of it 100% focused on gaining muscle and strength as a naturally thin woman.

12,264 newsletter subs & counting!

Illustration of a woman doing barbell back squats to gain muscle and strength.

We Help Skinny & Skinny-Fat Women Gain Muscle

For the past ten years, we've specialized in helping naturally thin people gain weight, build muscle, and become stronger. We've had clients ranging from everyday women all the way up to our Canadian Olympic women's rugby team. If you're finding it hard to gain weight, build muscle, or become stronger, this is the site for you.

This isn't a general site where we help the average person become fitter. Those sites are great, but if you're anything like us, they also drive you kind of crazy. They tend to assume that we're overweight and eager to get thinner—that we have a natural propensity to overeat. But we don't. We're naturally thin. We find it hard to gain weight. We don't need weight loss advice mixed into our strength training advice.

Here at Bony to Bombshell, we write about how to eat more calories, not fewer. About how to train for muscle mass and strength. About how to overcome the struggles of being naturally thin. And we help our clients make "bulking" transformations like these:

Before and after results of a woman building muscle and gaining weight.

Before and after photo of a woman's muscle-building results.

Before and after photo of a woman's weight gain transformation

You may know us as the founders of Bony to Beastly (for skinny men) or Outlift (for everyone). Bony to Bombshell is our site for naturally thin women. I'm Shane Duquette, and I gained 55 pounds in a little over two years. I was lucky. I had the help of my business partner, Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS, PN.

Marco is a naturally skinny strength coach who had already gained 63 pounds. He'd also coached clients ranging from everyday people all the way up to college, professional, and Olympic athletes.

Before I met Marco, I felt lost. Whenever I would try to exercise, I would lose weight. I found it so frustrating that after every failed attempt, I would spend years festering in inactivity before I could muster up the motivation to give it another go.

When Marco taught me how simple this could be, I was blown away. And I gained 55 pounds while keeping my abs. I then reproduced those results with my roommate, who gained 45 pounds.

I also married a naturally skinny nutritionist, Cassandra. Not only has she gained 20 pounds herself (as a new mother), but she also helped us improve our nutrition and workout program.

Some of Our Popular Articles

Every article on this site is about how to gain muscle and strength. Here are some of our more popular ones:

Our Muscle-Building Program for Women

If you want our help getting stronger, leaner, healthier, and better looking, check out The Bony to Bombshell Transformation Program. The program includes a 5-month workout program, with a video course teaching every exercise. It also includes a complete muscle-building lifestyle and diet guide, and a recipe book full of healthy muscle-building meals.

We'll coach you through your entire transformation. We'll take a detailed look at where you're starting and what your goals are, come up with a plan, and guide you through the entire program, answering all your questions, helping you track your progress, and giving you feedback.

Our Recent Articles

Illustration of a woman with skinny upper and lower legs making them bigger.

Why You Have Skinny Legs & How to Make Them Bigger

By Shane Duquette and Cassandra González Duquette

There are three reasons why some women have skinny legs: All three problems look different, but they all share the same solution.

Survey spread showing three women with different waist sizes.

The Ideal Women’s Waist Size: For Health & Attractiveness

By Shane Duquette

Having a narrow waist is incredibly important for your health. Most research shows that your waist size has an even stronger effect on your health than your weight (study). Your waist size also has a huge impact on your appearance. I’ve run several surveys on thousands of men and women,…

Illustration showing a skinny woman who can't gain weight.

“Why Am I So Skinny?” Why Some Women Can’t Gain Weight

By Shane Duquette and Cassandra González Duquette

In the middle of an obesity epidemic, as almost everyone else is desperately trying to lose weight, it can be lonely and confusing as a skinny woman trying to gain weight. The common advice is to eat more food, and that makes sense, but some skinny women actually eat quite…

Illustration of a skinny women doing goblet squats to build muscle.

Beginner Muscle-Building Workout Plan for Women (Home or Gym)

By Shane Duquette and Marco Walker-Ng

This is a 3-day full-body muscle-building routine for women just starting out or just getting back into lifting weights. You can do it in your living room with adjustable dumbbells, in your basement with a barbell home gym, or with a full gym membership. This is a beginner routine, but that doesn’t…

Imagine of three different female body shapes: thin, athletic, and curvy.

The Ideal Female Body Shape (According to Men)

By Shane Duquette and Cassandra González Duquette

This article is about the ideal female body according to men. I’m writing this because women read my article about the ideal male body according to women, and they wanted me to do the same for them. That article went into the science of beauty, but it was also based…

Illustration of a woman getting a smaller waist, illustrated by Shane Duquette.

How to Get a Smaller Waist (With Before/After Photos)

By Shane Duquette and Cassandra González Duquette

The most obvious way to get a smaller waist is to lose fat overall. As you lose weight, some of that weight loss will be fat loss, and some of that fat loss will come from your waist. But we can do much better than that.. Have you heard of…

Seated Cable Row With A Neutral Grip How To Do Exercise Female Woman

Seated Cable Row With Neutral Grip: Overview, How To Do It, & Tips

By Jared Polowick and Marco Walker-Ng

The seated cable row with a neutral grip is a great exercise for women who want to build some muscle in their back. You use a weighted cable machine that is set up horizontally with foot plates. Like other horizontal rowing variations, the main muscles it works are the lats,…

Barbell Romanian Deadlift For Women: Overview, Proper Form, & Tips

By Jared Polowick and Marco Walker-Ng

The Barbell Romanian deadlift is one of the best female lifts because it’s a compound lower-body exercise that targets your hamstrings and glutes while also training hip mobility, good posture, and balance. The barbell allows you to safely and consistently increase the weight over time, allowing for easy progressive overload.…

How to Make Your Butt Bigger in a Week

By Bony To Bombshell

There are four ways to make your butt bigger in one week: I’ll explain how to do all of this, and then we’ll give you some extra butt-building tips.