My Weight-Gain Experiment

I recently read Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Body, which is currently number one on the Amazon Bestsellers list. All in all, it's an interesting and unusual book, worth reading by anyone interested in health and physical fitness, assuming that one has a fairly high tolerance for its author's terminal smugness, name-dropping, and flaunting of a hipper-than-thou attitude. Granted, Ferriss has accomplished some tremendous things at a young age, such as two national bestselling books, so perhaps he can be cut some slack for his boasting.

One of the book's chapters deals with fast weight gain, that is, in the bodybuilding sense. A post on Ferriss's blog, From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks, outlines the concept, which is fleshed out in greater detail in the book. Since over the past year I've been in a health recovery mode, and since up until the end of December I had put on 20 pounds via weightlifting, I decided to give the one-month weight-gain trial a go, and now that the month is nearly over, I can report results.

First of all, having read Ferriss's book, I also read another one that he recommended, McGuff and Little's Body by Science, which I can also recommend. Body by Science could be subtitled "Everything You Know About Exercise Is Wrong", and one of the main takeaway points from this book is the amount of rest one needs between workouts, which is far greater than current wisdom has it. In fact, McGuff and Little recommend only one workout a week, and back their claim with appropriate scientific references. I'm still having a hard time believing it, but nevertheless cut back my gym visits to one every four days, which appears to have led to a vast improvement in my progress, since when I work out I have no residual fatigue from the last visit. Cutting back on weightlifting sessions also figures greatly in Ferriss's one-month weight-gain program. I also began practicing McGuff and Little's recommended high-intensity workout mode, which is a killer.

Also figuring greatly is eating and, long story short, I had a tough time with that. Psychologically, I'm not attuned to eating more than I want; rather the opposite. But I gave it the old college try, doing things like drinking half-and-half by the glass, and eating larger quantities of my usual semi-paleo fare, such as meat, cheese, eggs, sour cream, with supplemental whey protein shakes and BCAAs, and so on.

The results: rather than Ferriss's 34 pound one-month gain, or Casey Viator's 45 pound gain - 63 pounds of muscle minus 18 pounds of fat - I gained a grand total of 6 pounds over the past 30 days. (I don't know my before or after body fat percentage.) So, that brings my 8-month total weight gain to 26 pounds, from 135 to 161 pounds, and I'm still wearing the same waist size as before. (Sorry, no shirtless photos.)

What accounts for my relative failure to really pack on the pounds? Well, it's either me or the theory. I may simply have not eaten enough, though Lord knows I tried. The theory may not account enough for genetics, as Ferriss, Viator, and some others may simply be genetically gifted that way - although Ferriss got himself tested with the result that he was cut out for endurance, not resistance, training, but managed his feat anyway. Another thing is my age (55); it's known that the older one gets, the more difficult it is to make muscle.

In any case, I'm not done with either weightlifting (I'm now an addict) or trying to add more muscle, so we'll see how it goes.