Mass building may come easily and naturally for some people, but it can become a real problem for others. It all boils down to your genes basically, and if you’re not naturally predisposed to storing extra fat, you’re going to see some trouble working out and trying to build an impressive body. Luckily, no matter what your body type is, there’s always a way to buff yourself up successfully – even if you’re what’s commonly known as a “hardgainer” – a person whose body retains very little extra weight and burns calories like a furnace.

Now, before we go on any further, you should know the basic principle – there is no “secret” to building lots of mass – the one and only trick for that is to make sure your daily calorie balance is positive. That is, the calories that you take in as a total must exceed the ones your body burns – simple as that. If you eat a lot and still find yourself losing weight instead of gaining it, there are generally two things that could be going wrong:

A) You’re eating wrong. You should form a proper diet that has a strict routine to it – and stick to that as best as you can. If your body can’t get used to your eating habits, it won’t behave the way you expect it to when it comes to either gaining weight or losing it – that’s why you should always start with getting your diet in order. If you’re still going by the old “three large meals a day” scheme, forget that – you should eat the same amount of food (roughly), but divided into 5-6 smaller meals spread throughout the day. This way your body will not only get used to a specific scheme, but it will also be constantly fed instead of receiving its energy in smaller servings with larger delays between them.

This point also includes something else – you may be unaware of your body’s actual daily calorie expense. There’s no quick way to verify that, so you should start making some graphs and charts to figure out what is your own personal daily calorie expense – this way, you’ll know what exactly to do about your diet and what calorie count to be looking for in your daily meals, roughly.

B) You’re eating the wrong type of food. Simply eating a lot doesn’t mean it’s doing any good for your weight – if your eating plans include all the wrong types of meals, you won’t see much progress. After you’ve figured out your body’s daily calorie expense (see above), try to work out an amount of calories that’s noticeably above that. In most cases, you’ll want to go above 3000 calories a day if you want to gain weight for a normal person, and you may have to even go up to as high as 5000 daily for short periods of time if your body type is a more needing one (like the hardgainers we mentioned earlier).