You know how the old saying goes, oftentimes too much of a good thing isn’t really so bad. Sure, $100 is great, but $1000 is better, like good patio cleaner. If you’re offering Super Bowl tickets, I’ll take two, thank you very much. And can you ever have too many channels on television? So long as there is a multi-gigabyte device and songs to be found.

I think we’ll keep that expression. How about the way you train? Many times, when bodybuilders reach a plateau, we begin putting on exercises to your program and spending more and more time in the gym, thinking that if they hit it hard enough and long enough, they’ll pass through and start seeing results again. Unfortunately, like scrubbing stains that need a patio cleaning products for many hardgainers, that way is the exact opposite of what they should do, especially when battling a white-hot metabolism that burns through calories faster than they can be shoveled in.

Here you go – the answer to it all – don’t lift more. Instead, try dialing back the overall time you’re training, and in that shortened window, train smarter, harder and with maximum intensity. So for example, eliminate the excess from your program, get in and out of the gym, and give your body additional time to recover, rest and, most important, grow. Worrying about those stains on the concrete won’t matter with a good concrete patio cleaner.

To that goal, an extreme hardgainer program is short and simple, cutting back to the bare minimum of exercises you need to ensure that you touch on all the important muscle groups and no more. It also relies heavily on compound moves because these are the most efficient exercises in your arsenal. They call on multiple muscle groups at once instead of just one set. The isolation moves, when they do appear, are worked in the end as one final “burnout” set to all-out failure.

Here’s where the plan gets strange. At least if you’ve been a firm proponent of high-volume training and find yourself working out 4 to 6 times a week on a regular basis. For this plan, you’ll only train 3 to 5 days a week. The key bodyparts are broken across 3 workouts – a leg day, chest and back day, shoulders and arms day. You’ll do each just once per week, inserting at least one rest day in between them. This is how to train to get maximum muscle gain.