Muscle Building For Skinny Women

The results of a skinny woman building muscle.

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.

7,465 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.
Women's weight gain transformation
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.

Before and after results photo of a skinny man building muscle.

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 and after results of a skinny guy bulking up.

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.

Before and after photo of Cassandra González Duquette building muscle and gaining weight.

When we realized how many other people were struggling to gain weight, we created Bony to Beastly and Bony to Bombshell. That was ten years ago, and since then, we've helped over 10,000 naturally skinny people build muscle. I also married a naturally skinny nutritionist, Cassandra. Not only has she gained 20 pounds herself (as a new mother), but she's 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’re ready to start building muscle, we can guide you through the entire process. The Bony to Bombshell Program includes a video course teaching all of the exercises, a 5-month workout program, a complete weight-gain diet guide, a recipe book, and a year-long membership in our online coaching community. You’ll be building muscle alongside other women with similar goals, and posting weekly progress updates. We’ll be here to give feedback and answer all of your questions.

Our Recent Articles

Hip Thrust Alternatives

Hip Thrust Alternative: Other Solid Exercises to Strengthen Your Glutes

By Jared Polowick and Marco Walker-Ng

If you’re looking to mix up your lower body lifting routine, you might want to consider some alternatives to the hip thrust exercise. While the hip thrust is a popular exercise for targeting the glutes, it’s not the only glute-building exercise. Let’s explore some alternatives.

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Weight Gain Meal Plan For Females

Weight Gain Meal Plan for Women: Full Guide

By Shane Duquette and Cassandra González Duquette

Gaining weight can be hard for naturally thin women. It’s even harder if you’re trying to gain weight in a healthy and sustainable way. We’ve been there. We’ve helped thousands of other women through it, too. It’s hard, but you can do it, and this guide can help. One of…

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Skinny Legs Female

“My Legs Are Skinny!” A Women’s Guide to Building Bigger Legs

By Shane Duquette and Cassandra González Duquette

If you’re a woman with skinny legs, you might worry that they look too thin or don’t have enough muscle tone. You might even change how you dress because you’re embarrassed about how they look. Fortunately, the biggest muscles in your body are in your legs. Those muscles might be…

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Best Bulking Foods For Women

By Shane Duquette and Cassandra González Duquette

Are you confused about what to eat during bulking? If you’re a woman who’s trying to gain muscle by bulking, the obvious answer is to eat high-calorie foods, making it easier to get into a calorie surplus, so you can gain weight. But there’s a catch, especially if you’re a…

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Female Bulking Guide

The Bulking Diet Guide for Women

By Shane Duquette and Cassandra González Duquette

This bulking diet guide will teach you the basics of eating for muscle growth. This is how the top athletes and fitness models build muscle. It’s also what modern science shows us is most effective. This isn’t just theory, either. Over the past decade, we’ve used these exact dietary principles…

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Illustration showing a weight gainer supplement.

Best Weight Gainer Supplements For Skinny Women

By Shane Duquette and Cassandra González Duquette

Weight gainers, also known as mass gainers, are high-calorie supplements designed to help naturally skinny women gain weight. They’re almost always made of protein powder, carb powder, and some flavouring to make them more palatable. The idea is that by drinking all of these calories, you can gain weight more…

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Illustration of a skinny-fat woman.

The Skinny-Fat Woman’s Diet & Workout Guide

By Shane Duquette and Cassandra González Duquette

How should skinny-fat women approach their diet, exercise, and lifestyle? It’s a confusing situation because if you’re a skinny fat girl, it’s unclear whether you’ve been overeating or undereating. It’s hard to know whether you should be trying to gain weight to encourage muscle growth or trying to lose weight…

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Best Workout Equipment For Women

Best Equipment For Women To Build Muscle

By Shane Duquette and Cassandra González Duquette

One of the most common questions we get from our female members is, “What equipment do I need to build muscle?” You can use a few different setups, but some setups are particularly good for gaining muscle size and strength. Let’s take a look.

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Illustration showing a variety of female bodies, ranging from thin to muscular.

Survey Results: The Most Attractive Female Body Composition (Muscle, Fat & Proportions)

By Shane Duquette and Cassandra González Duquette

We’ve been getting asked to do research on female attractiveness for over ten years now, and now we have the results. We surveyed 1,072 men, asking them to rate varying amounts of muscle and body fat on women, as well as which proportions they preferred and what muscles they found…

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