I weigh 70kg and most of that is upper body. With my shitty back and legs I'm 179cm, maybe 182 if straightened up.

I can eat lunch, but can only manage tea for breakfast and eat no dinner. I walk and walk and walk and do pushups and genuflections and dynamic resistance etc but I just can't eat nor put on weight.

I'm not sure what your point is, but I only eat one big meal a day also. Made possible by snacking all day long on health foods of different sorts.

I had a friend who was a textbook endomorph. He didn't eat too much and he didn't understand why he wasn't getting bigger using a bowflex.

Eventually my friend started eating fast food and take out intermixed with protein shakes. Then he started hitting free weights. He started packing on some mass but then he started track and then he did cross country and last time I saw him, he was pretty skinny.

Bottom line, to get big you gotta eat big and lift big. Figure out out your basal metabolic rate, eat more than that and take in at least 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight.

You might want to try protein shakes as a meal replacement. Don't overuse them though, just drink one on the days you lift. Too much protein is bad for your kidneys.

Without heavy lifting with leg compound exercises such as squats, deadlifts or leg presses, I'd dare to say it's near impossible to gain a substantial amount of lean mass, which is what we want we we put on weight. And this is not taking nutrition into consideration.

There is truth behind the old saying of "squats and milk".

And steroids. Lots and lots of steroids.

Without heavy lifting with leg compound exercises such as squats, deadlifts or leg presses, I'd dare to say it's near impossible to gain a substantial amount of lean mass, which is what we want we we put on weight. And this is not taking nutrition into consideration.

There is truth behind the old saying of "squats and milk".

So are you saying that squats are neccessary to build upper body mass? If so...how does that work?

Your leg muscles are the largest muscle groups in your body. When you "rip" those (which is what you are essentially doing when you work a muscle group), the repairing process prompts your body to produce more testosterone. The more muscle tissue that needs to be repaired, the more testosterone that gets produced.

While it isn;t necessery to work your lower body to build your upper body, it will help keep your testosterone levels higher than if you didn't. (Besides looking like a gorilla with a large upper body and tiny legs is uncool)

If I remember right, Angry Spastic has some problems with his legs, mostly that they dont work, he cant walk. Am I right? So I dont think Squats or Deads will help much.

I don't know if Post #8 is the best answer....
When lifting you create micro-tears in your muscles, these heal and you grow.


So are you saying that squats are neccessary to build upper body mass? If so...how does that work?

Squats are necessary to maximise upper body growth. You will still see gain upper body if you do not work your lower body, but eventually gains will slow. Working your whole body will maximise these gains.
Your body grows as a whole.

PizDof beat me to it, but yeah, your body grows as a whole. When it comes to chest, as an example, you bench press to engage your chest muscles, and you squat to maximise the gains.

Mind you, it doesn't have to be squats. It could be deadlifts or leg presses, but squats seem to be the best for most people.


If I remember right, Angry Spastic has some problems with his legs, mostly that they dont work, he cant walk. Am I right? So I dont think Squats or Deads will help much.Yeah, I completely forgot about that detail.

One of the second best ways to maximise growth (and this is my own personal wild guess) is to do push ups until the cows come home. Unlike bench press, where it doesn't make sense to do high-rep sets all the times, you need to do lots of push ups for them to have any value.

They won't make big, but they can make you extremelly and obscenely dense (muscularly speaking.) Unlike bench presses, push ups hit more than the pecs/shoulders/triceps triumvirate. They hit wrists, forearms, biceps (if you try to squeeze the hands together on the way up), abdominals and lower back. I've seen people with brutal forearms from push ups alone (well almost).

So, as in Angry's case, if a person cannot do squats, push ups until the cows come home are another good (but not nearly as good) alternative.

I'm going to digress a bit to talk about push ups:

First, ideally, a person should be able to do 60 push ups, non-stop, in one single set in less than 90 seconds. That should be one test of fitness and strenght, a baseline per say. Again, let me say this again... a baseline.

Second, a lot of people pay lip service to push ups. Don't be one of those.

Third, and most importantly, a lot of people either don't know what to do with them, or complicate things unnecessarily and never get to use push ups as well as they could.

A good push up routine would involve a very high number of reps, in the order of hundreds. How can that be done? Simple: drop to the floor and do 30 to 40 push ups in good form and as fast as possible after every other major compound set you do, be it squats, barbell rows, etc.

Now, when you can't do squats, then mix push ups with some other bodyweight you can do, abdominals for example.

All you have to do to get a high number of push ups is to do them 30 to 40 at a time with no more than one minute of rest in between. Do 5 sets of 40 and you already have 200. Do 10 sets of 30, and you get 300.

You can do something like this (in a mini-routine apart from whatever else you do):

30-40 push ups
20-30 ab crunches
10 back extensions (body flat on the floor)
1 minute break

Repeat 5-6 times. Do that everyday, or every other day, in addition to whatever else you do (biceps, triceps, whatever). It won't make you big, but it will make you dense and stronger.

It's not only the amount of weight that's important; the intensity and the effort done during a workout is what makes or breaks things. Without the proper intensity, your body, your apetite and your metabolism will never change.

Good luck.

I don't know if Post #8 is the best answer....
When lifting you create micro-tears in your muscles, these heal and you grow.



Squats are necessary to maximise upper body growth. You will still see gain upper body if you do not work your lower body, but eventually gains will slow. Working your whole body will maximise these gains.
Your body grows as a whole.


I'm not going to pretend to know more than you all, but my answer does play a factor even if it is just a minor one.

When your body needs to build new tissue, you produce more testerone. Testosterone and estrogen, to a lesser degree, make the body generate new tissue faster. When you work the legs really good, that's a lot of tissue that needs to heal.

Lacking video evidence in this case, I will claim my current throat infection of some sort made me create a sub-par post. So here I go again...

I agree with what you stated in the above post. Though intensity or duraction of exercise was not mentioned; doing a real man's leg day will take a lot of healing and thereby use more testosterone.

I like to do a good lower back/core workout and a good leg workout at least one every two weeks. MA and upper body split when I can. I have thick legs from sprinting around in soccer.

My main point was that working your lower body maximises upper body gains.

If I remember right, Angry Spastic has some problems with his legs, mostly that they dont work, he cant walk. Am I right? So I dont think Squats or Deads will help much.

I can outrun my brother's main squeeze.

So yes, I can walk.

Okay, here's typical of my exercises

-One hand clutching another. Pull away from your hand which you have placed under the other hand.
-Walking
-Stomping the ground
-Practising the RNC/sleeper/ice cream and jelly hold
-Practising the fullnelson
-Finding something suitably padded and headbutting punching and kicking the **** out of it
- Pushups from the knees (better for my abs)
- Simple breath control

I'm glad to see you are including push ups in your routine. That gives you a lot of opportunities to increase the intensity and variety in your workouts. Because at the end of the day, we all require change and increased intensity to force our bodies to adapt and get stronger.

My suggestion to start is to change the width and position of your hands when doing push ups. It's hard to explain, and this is something I've seen both in MA clips as well as in PT sessions (for people recovering from accidents). I'm gonna try to get some pics tonight to better explain this.

Also, since you do hand clinchs, which are also good, have you tried small wrist weights or dumbells and your biceps through your full range of motion? Hand clinchs are good, but they are almost strictly isometric. There is no gradual increase in resistance, and after a while, your body will adapt to it and won't make any progress.

This may be why you don't see further changes in your apetite and weight. I'm just guessing since I may not have the full picture.