By Shannon Clark

Struggling to gain weight? If you’re a skinny guy who just cannot seem to build muscle no matter what you try, there could be some vital things that you are doing wrong with your muscle building workout program that’s hindering your results.

Many skinny guys are making critical errors that do keep them from seeing results – and often these errors go exactly against what they think they should be doing.

Here’s are the top 5 muscle building mistakes skinny guys make.

Too Much Volume

Think doing more exercises in the gym will help you build muscle fast? You might want to think again. For the skinny guy, the saying ‘less is more’ couldn’t be more true. If you’re struggling to gain weight, do yourself a favour and half all the number of sets you’re doing for each exercise for two weeks and see what happens.

My guess is you start growing. Skinny guys just cannot handle that much volume with their workouts.

Not Enough Food

Next up is not enough food. This is probably the most common mistake I see people making. They complain that they’re doing workout after workout after workout but still cannot gain weight.

If the workout pans out to be decent, then the next place to look is the diet.

Let me ask you this. If I told you to build a house and gave you 10 bricks to do it, would you be successful? Obviously not.

So why do you think your body would be able to build new muscle tissue without supplying the raw materials? Food is the raw materials so if you’re not gaining weight, this is a pretty clear indication as ever that the reason is more than likely because you aren’t providing the materials.

Start eating more – and don’t stop until you start seeing weight gain taking place. Many skinny guys have to take in far more calories than they would originally think.

Too Much Cardio

Another issue for some is cardio. The skinny guy figures that he can keep fat gains minimal if he throws in 3-4 cardio sessions a week.

Well, first off, if you’re a skinny guy, you likely don’t really have much body fat to lose. So what are you worried about? Usually these individuals could actually gain a bit of body fat and it’d just make them look fuller and a bit more muscular.

Only worry about cardio if you’re really packing on the fat weight. Otherwise, it’s just going to interfere with your ability to recover.

If you must do some cardio, do 2-3 sessions of walking. This should keep your heart healthy and won’t sacrifice your ability to build muscle.

High Stress Levels

Stress is not only nasty to deal with, but it’s also going to make building muscle quite difficult. When your body is in a highly stressed state, it’s going to be secreting a hormone known as cortisol throughout the body.

The job of cortisol is to break tissues down (for energy – it comes from the ‘flight or fight’ response). If you’ve got cortisol flowing through your veins breaking down tissues, it’s pretty hard to start building tissues up (which is the goal of muscle building).

If you’re a high stress person, you may want to do something to deal with that. Deep breathing, writing in a journal, or removing some of these stressors from your lift is where you should start.

Reliance On Supplements

Finally, the last mistake that some skinny guys make is relying a little to heavily on supplements. They pimp out their cabinet full of the latest and greatest products aimed to help you build muscle.

While it’s great that they’ve got the desire to burn a whole in their wallet and support these supplement companies, remember that no supplement will do the work for you. When you spend more time reading up on supplements than you do actually doing your workouts in the gym, you know you’ve got a problem.

If you want to build muscle, the main three supplements I’d recommend are protein powder, creatine, and fish oil. After that, you’re just not going to need a great deal more to see results – assuming a proper diet is in place.

So, keep these points in mind as you go about your muscle building program. Making changes if you aren’t seeing results is vital because if changes aren’t made, chances are you’ll be starting back at the exact same image in a year’s time. Progress doesn’t happen without change so make sure you’re not standing still if you aren’t getting the results you’d like.

For more great training information, visit Shannon’s site at www.fitnessuncovered.com