gain weight … really skinny go to the gym.. but what regime to follow to build muscles and gain weight?

There are three keys to putting on muscle:

1: trigger growth – that means weight lifting. Is there anyone at the gym who could spend a half hour with you to show you how to do the core lifts properly? The best lifts are the squat, deadlift, bench press, overhead press, bent over row, pullup. Cleans are excellent if you can get someone to show you properly. Some guys spend hours at the gym doing lots of special lifts. Its a waste of time for most people – unless you have specific areas you need to improve. You don’t have specific areas to improve, you’re just weak all over. Focus on the BIG compound moves (like the ones above). Hit the whole body with a few major moves, and put all your mental and physical effort into them. This is better then spending an hour moving small weights around. If you’re just beginning and have nobody to help, you could use the fancy machines if the gym has them, but look to switch to free weights in the future. To add muscle, you want to cause microtears in your muscle, which your body repairs by adding more muscle tissue. You’ll hear people talk a lot about ‘sets’ and ‘reps’. Reps (repetitions) refers to how many times you do a move before resting. That doesn’t just mean you say ‘yay, all done’. It means the weight should be heavy enough that you _cannot_ do more then the ‘rep’ target. If you are capable of doing more reps, do them and next time use a heavier weight. Different ‘rep’ ranges have different purposes – very low reps maximizes stregnth gains, slightly higher maximizes muscle gains, higher still endurance. To bulk up, I’d aim to use weight heavy enough that you can only do sets of 5-8 repetitions on each exercise. Perhaps do 2-3 sets. This tells your body to add muscle.

Step 2: Give the body fuel to build muscle. That means two things – enough calories and enough protein. I’ve seen authorities on weight lifting suggest a young man in your position eat as much as 5-6000 calories per day. This is an enourmous amount – easily double if not triple what an adult might eat normally. You will gain a little fat doing that, but it is the only way to have unconstrained growth of the muscles. You can lose the fat later I suppose. You want that diet to be very heavy in protein. You say you are a vegetarian, can you drink milk? Eat eggs? Milk and eggs are fantastic sources of protein and nutrients. Think how fast animals grow on nothing but milk! If you can’t consume milk, you’ll need to do some research. Nuts and so on might be the approach. I do _not_ suggest massive intake of soya based products, as they cause your body to produce estrogen (female hormones).

3: let your body build the muscle. Remember, your muscles do not grow in the gym. They grow when you are _resting_. The gym triggers the growth, but you need to give your body the fuel (step 2) and time it needs to recover. Aim to work out, HARD three times a week, then rest and let your body get a good sleep at night.