Articles

Creatine is probably the most popular supplement aside from protein powder. It’s commonly used by athletes and bodybuilders to improve muscular performance and muscle size.

But is creatine supplementation right for women? Like all supplements, creatine has some benefits and tradeoffs. Let’s take a deeper look.

I wrote a detailed bodyweight workout guide on Bony to Beastly, along with another article about how to build a home gym. I wanted to write a third guide specifically for women. After all, many women have different goals, different struggles, and different questions.

Many women want to lift at home. There are many good reasons for that: it’s private, it’s cleaner, it’s cheaper, and there’s no travel time. You can exercise while listening to your favourite music or watching your favourite show. You can do your workouts while supervising kids. Cassandra and I train at home, too. We totally get it.

But how can you build muscle at home? What equipment do you need to get started? Can you get results with your own body weight? What exercises are right for a beginner? What’s a good workout routine for women to follow? Let’s jump in.

We’ve written a full guide on how to build muscle on Outlift, but we wanted to write an article specifically for women. After all, women often have different muscle-building goals, benefit from different exercises, and tend to have different questions.

If you’re just beginning, building muscle can be exciting but also daunting. You need to challenge your muscles and eat enough food to support muscle growth. That sounds so simple, but how do you do it? What exercises should you do, and in what order? How hard should you push yourself, and how often? And what should you eat, and how much of it?

For example, some styles of workouts are better for stimulating muscle growth than others. Strength training will challenge your muscles, but it’s designed to help you contract your muscles more forcefully, making you stronger for your size. It’s not designed to help you build muscle, making you bigger and stronger. There’s nuance here.

Inside, we’ll cover everything a woman ought to know about working out, nutrition, and recovery.

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 the hardest things about gaining weight is finding a good meal plan. Most meal plans are designed for women trying to lose weight. Your goal is the opposite of that, so you need a radically different approach.

In this article, we’ll talk about how to eat a healthy weight-gain diet. We’ll break down the best foods, how to eat a balanced muscle-building diet, what schedule to follow, and how to build a meal plan that works for you, your goals, and your lifestyle.

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 woman who’s trying to build muscle fast, but you’re trying to bulk in a healthy way and without gaining too much fat.

If you’re smart with your food choices, bulking becomes much easier. You’ll find it more comfortable to eat in a calorie surplus, you’ll build muscle faster, you won’t layer on tons of belly fat while you’re doing it, and you’ll end up with curvier, more three-dimension muscles.

How do we know all this? We’ve been helping skinny women gain weight for nine years now. As a man, I’ve personally gained over 60 pounds. My business partner Marco has studied under the top experts and trained female Olympic athletes. Plus, there’s a rich bulking tradition we can draw wisdom from. Let’s take a look.

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 to help over 3,000 naturally thin women build muscle quickly and leanly.

I’ve personally used these methods to gain over 60 pounds. Cassandra used them to gain twenty. As a strength coach, Marco has given these same recommendations to the professional athletes he’s trained—including members of our women’s Olympic rugby team.

There are three parts to this guide:

• How much you should eat to gain weight. (And how to adjust.)
• What proportion of protein, carbs, and fat you should eat.
• What actual foods you should eat.

There’s nothing edgy or controversial here. We won’t claim that this is the one and only way to eat for muscle growth. These are indeed the most effective methods, having been refined by both research and tradition over several decades, but you can modify most of them—if you know how. We’ll teach you how.