I’m tryna look more cut

peteristherock

New member
I’m relatively skinny compared to other boys my age. I’m 15 and weigh 122 lbs. My chest is almost completely flat and I barely have abs. Also you can barely see my bicep or forearm muscles. I do have decent upper body strength tho, cause I can do 12 pull ups and I’ve been told that’s uncommon. Ofc I’m not actually skinny, I feel like that word is overused, but I’m definitely not cut, chubby, or fat either. What do I need to do to look more cut?
 
@peteristherock The guy telling you to do 500 push ups, 500 squats, and 100 pull ups a day is crazy. No one is doing that daily at 15 without overtraining. At your age and weight (you should really add your height for your weight to mean anything to us) you should work out 4-5 times a week max (honestly true for most people), and you shouldn't slam the same muscle groups every day. Working out is a destructive process, it tricks your body into thinking it needs to repair itself bigger and stronger. If you're only destroying it you're just going to fuck yourself.

Some muscle groups are much larger and require more time to recover, some are smaller and can be hit multiple times per week. But nothing gets repaired if you're not eating, sleeping, and resting fatigued muscle. Learn which workouts are the most draining (hint: weighted squats and deadlifts) and make sure you let yourself recover from them.

I'm all for "strengthening your foundation," and body weight exercises are an excellent tool, but blindly doing a full body workout everyday is going to bite you in the ass. If you did squats yesterday, don't do them today. If you did 3 sets of 7 pull ups with full ROM, holy moly nice job, make sure you rest your back.

The hardest pill to swallow when you get into working out is that fitness isn't a sprint, it's a marathon. Fitness is going a months of working out hard 4-5 times a week, while eating well and sleeping well. Trust me, after a point you'll realize the harder thing to do is to force yourself to rest and eat enough/well.

Don't burn out. You want to look cut? Be consistent, do your research (what exercises hit what muscles, what's a healthy diet, ect), and give yourself rest days. If you don't see progress in 3 months, i.e. you aren't lifting more/doing more reps/putting on weight, but your still working out then the most likely answer is your not eating enough/well enough. The other problem could be you're not pushing yourself hard enough working out, but you sound motivated so I doubt that will be it.

Good luck, and for the love of god don't try and to do 500 push ups, 500 squats, and 100 pull ups every single day. Feel what's sore and rest that shit, you have time. You're not going to make any progress destroying yourself in 3 days aiming for the impossible then not working out for a week because everything hurts.
 
@peteristherock Bet, start working out 4-5 days a week (on your lift days don't do a fuck ton of cardio, save that for cardio days -- esp if you're trying to put on muscle) and EAT, ideally healthy shit. I'm 5'8" and for most of highschool I was 125-135, then college 140ish. Now I'm 170, still 5'8" lol. The biggest factor for me that triggered growth was eating more. I was always active, not always super diligent about working out, but still active. You can't get gains if you don't have fuel, and you're likely still growing, meaning your calories are doing double duty.

Highly recommend making protein shakes, but not as a meal replacement - as a meal supplement. Hard core diets are mostly chicken, rice/bread, fish, sweet potatoes, and a fuck ton of veggies, but you're a kid - don't overthink it. Just avoid intense amounts of daily sugar (Soda) and keep eating eating eating
 
@peteristherock You should check out my profile. As I am the same weight as you. You'll probably be able to develop better than I did with the same as much exercise as I've had, but it's still some insight on what to look forward to what you can accomplish even at 122lbs.

That other person that talked with the long comment, they were pretty spot on for the most part. It's still possible to work out 7 days a week if you were really trying to be at the top of your game, she said for most people and she's right for most people they just need 5-6 days a week. But, if you're in athletics for instance, you really wouldn't have any other choice if you were trying to be better than everyone else, the couches only have 30min a day to crack you into shape, which is just never enough, so most people in athletics after coming back home continue working out, plus perhaps only sticking with cardio on the side during their weekends.

And it's not great to work smaller muscles multiple times a week like that's somehow better because bigger muscles need to recover, you build more muscle in bigger muscles faster than you do little ones, that's one way to over train by straining small muscles too many times. You need less exercise for smaller muscles and more exercise for bigger muscles. I mean, if you don't do it like that, that's how you ware yourself out right before attempting a big major exercise, and you'll never get as big as you could have gotten by doing it that way.

You don't need to get anxious over anyone always lifting more weight than you, because that's good for them that already have a lot of muscle and strength, first you need to get the strength, which really needs you using lightweight a lot more than just lifting heavier, and then once you have the strength, you lift heavier, and therefore build more muscle.

I won't lie to you, there's not an absolute guarantee that if you work out your abs more that they'll become more visible. I've seen people that weigh less than me that never worked out before who had full on six packs, and I would know because also I used to be able to do 450 suspended sittups multiple times a day and I still don't have visible abs, only obliques that show.

I would stick with 5 ab exercises at one workout session. You can do more, but it's less likely to stay sustainable in the long term. For pushups, I would stick to 4 sets no matter how many more you do at once, because once you start going upwards of 50, I've been able to do 116 straight to the floor at once, and there's no force in heaven or hell that would compell me to do it twice in one day lol. I don't know how many pullups I could have done back when I still had all my strength, but 12 is good, I can only do 15 now that I'm working out again, but getting past 30 is the real challenge no matter how strong you really get, your muscles simply can't supply energy long enough to keep doing more at that point unless you really are that good at doing pullups. I could, however, do a chinup hang time of over 12mins, but back then I was also able to curl 65lb dumbbells in each hand and press them overhead. I feel that preacher curls are best for the biceps with either an ez bar or dumbbells, I mean, I did tons of biceps curls other ways, but still came to the conclusion that preacher curls were still the best at working the whole bicep if you do it right. And the other reason why I'm saying this is because, if you do them, don't overestimate your strength when it comes to if you use a pad under your elbow that you'll be able to curl more, that's one way to tear a bicept, I've seen it happen. And cables, cables, cables. Don't underestimate what you can do using cables, they supply a constant force on your muscles that you can't beat with dumbbells or a barbell, if you know how to use them properly. It's a good thing to also use resistance bands while you're young starting to learn how to exercise because it builds a lot of confidence for other equipment and safer than lugging around heavy weights.

I can keep talking like this, but only if you still want to hear more after reading this.
 
@peteristherock Forget cut! You gotta develop strength and start teaching your body to put on muscle at this age.

Begin with strengthening your foundation.

Start with:
- 100 push-ups a day (target to increase it to 500)
- 100 body weight squats a day (target to increase it to 500)
- 20 pull-ups a day (target to increase it to 100)

Eat 4-5 meals that are high in protein (2 x body weight), good carbs (3 x body weight), good fats (0.25 x body weight)
 
@bonnielynn The push ups and pull ups I can do, but is 100 squats not too much? I was in powerlifting and we started with 6 reps and slowly increased the weight till we could do one. Plus I can’t get 120 lbs up onto my shoulders.
 
@peteristherock Forget lifting weights till you reach these numbers. With consistency, you can easily make them in a year.

You have a lot of time then to learn and improve your performance with weights. You will, in fact, do it better and faster, if your foundation is strong.
 
@peteristherock Something else I almost forgot to say. It's better to work out your entire body at once than each muscle individually. It's one thing to try not to be overtraining, but you're still able to build more muscle with workouts for your entire body, it amplifies the effectiveness of working out muscles individually.

You should work out the smaller muscles right before attempting bigger exercises like deadlift, bench and squat. It's not going to hurt you by being unable to do them, it’s better than getting hurt by more weight at one time. You need to exercise the supporting muscles, in order to knowingly know that you're really as strong as you would like to believe by doing those bigger exercises alone.

And stretching is something that you should already be doing. If you stretch before you lift, you won't have as much power to keep working out, but it's still something to consider because flexible muscles are still strong muscles, and it does help with building more muscle. It causes more of the micro tears in muscle needed for muscle growth. It might even help you to work out better, too. Because when you work out, you get sore, and then you can stretch it out, now it's both tight and limber at the same time, so you can focus more on your workout rather than whatever it is if it's actually working, that way you'll be in a constant state of repair and any added workouts you do, have a greater effect on muscle growth.
 
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