Q: My son needs to gain weight for {insert sport}. Can you make him a meal plan?
A: Great question because it gets asked all of the time.
Let’s break it down real quick.
The first question is – Does my son really need to gain weight?
If you’re asking that question, I can assume he’s as skinny as a clothes rack so it’s a 100% YES! A bigger, faster, stronger athlete will always be the superior athlete, pending their skill levels are similar. And, to create a bigger, faster, stronger athlete you need two things: 1) weights. 2) calories. Most high school boys are already lifting weights with the coaches of their respective sport, so their Achilles heel is almost always not consuming enough calories to actually feed the muscles to make them grow.
Side note: You probably already think he’s eating enough calories, and thus feel the issue is the quality, not the quantity of food he’s eating. It’s not. It’s always the quantity. If the scale isn’t moving, he’s not eating enough. It’s that simple. Parents will automatically assume he’s “eating like a horse” because he can sit down and eat a large pizza or box of cookies in one sitting. However, if you really track his calories, you’ll see he’s probably only eating one meal per day. It just happens to be a whole pizza so it looks like he’s eating 5,000+ calories per day. However, if you’d track his food intake throughout the day and see how many calories he’s burning at practice and in the weight room, you’d quickly see he’s severely undereating.
If you haven’t spent time talking with Jacob Kirkwood much, you should because he has a wealth of knowledge about lifting heavy things, eating to lift heavy things, and performing at a high level without resorting to illegal substances. And when you do talk with him, I guarantee he’ll say one phrase over and over to emphasize the importance of food – Mass moves mass. Said in another way – Yes, your son needs to gain weight.
I often use basketball as an example to drive home this point. Compared to football, basketball is largely a sport dominated by skill. Over the years I’ve seen some ridiculously gifted athletes from football and track attempt to play basketball and look absolutely terrible. The athleticism that made them star players on the field and track wasn’t enough to overcome their lack of skill needed to excel on the hardwood. However, even in a sport that’s largely dependent on skill, size (weight) and strength have a large impact on the success of the player. If you watch a player progress over his 4 years of high school basketball, what you’ll see is his success as he gets older is largely influenced by his increase in size and strength, not skill. In fact, over the last 10 years, I can only think of a handful of players that truly improved because they became more skilled. For 95% of them, they were no better a shooter their senior year as they were their freshman year. Their off-hand dribbling saw little, if any improvement, during those same 4 years, and rarely would one increase his arsenal of finishing moves at the rim during that time period. He simply went from scoring a point or two per game his sophomore year to 15 points his senior year because he got bigger and stronger. Of course, one could make the argument that he improved because he also got taller, but the vast majority of boys grow very little after their sophomore year. There will always be that kid that shoots up 6” between his junior and senior seasons, but that’s the exception, not the rule.
So, if a sport that’s as highly dependent on skill as basketball benefits greatly from an increase in size and strength, the more “athletic” sports can see even a greater improvement from an increase in size and strength.
Question 2 – Can you make him a meal plan?
No, because meal plans don’t work.
How many times have you told your son to clean his room? Five? Ten? Twenty? All he needs to do is ONE thing and rarely will he do it by the 5th attempt. So, do you really think he’s going to follow a meal plan with 28 meals on it? He has to buy the food, make the food, and eat the food.
Not. A. Chance.
So, what does work?
Nick Kravanya was a senior when I was a freshman. His arms were as big as my legs. After being pushed around for almost half a basketball season because I was no wider than a stick, I finally asked him – Nick, how can I get arms like you? What’s your secret? I’m already lifting weights, and I’m not growing.
His response – Eat more steak.
Simple.
In fact, it was something so simple that even a high school boy could follow. For the next two years, that’s what I did – eat more steak. And I grew just like he said I would. Of course, at the time, I was hoping for something more elaborate, but I definitely wasn’t going to argue with a guy who had a bicep bigger than my quadricep. So, I listened.
World-renowned strength coach Dan John is famous for turning throwers in track and field into All Americans as well as putting slabs of muscle on football players. If you’ve ever heard him speak or bought one of his books, you know he loves the K.I.S.S. method. His advice is pretty simple – Lift heavy things. Throw more. Drink more milk.
Drink more milk. That’s his nutrition advice. Although it sounds ridiculous, for skinny high school athletes, that has far better results than meal plans and diets.
Nassim Taleb is often fond of saying that if the solution is so complex you have a hard time understanding it, not only will it probably not work, or at best be very inefficient, but he’s also probably trying to sell you something that has a cheaper, simpler solution. Hence, you can’t go wrong with simple, even if it looks too simple to work.
So, I won’t create meal plans. However, I will give you my K.I.S.S. method that is guaranteed to add slabs of muscle on even the hardest gainer. Within a month of using it, and your son will use it because it’s so simple a caveman could even do it, he’ll see the scale jump 5-10 pounds, quickly followed by an increase in strength in the weight room.
The Mass Gainer K.I.S.S. Method
Drink one of these shakes twice per day in addition to the meals/snacks he’s currently been eating.
Strawberry Gainz Shake
- 2 scoops of whey protein
- 2 cups of frozen berry mix (strawberry, blueberries, raspberries)
- 3 servings of whole milk
- Ice cubes as needed for thickness
Blend for 2-3 minutes.
That my friend delivers 850 calories, a handful of vitamins and minerals, and a whopping 74 grams of protein. Just watch the strawberry to blueberry ratio, or it may end up a little sour. Usually, it takes 3 or 4 tries to find the perfect blend.
Tropical Gainz shake
- 2 scoops of whey protein
- 2 cups of tropical fruit mix (peach, pineapple, and mango)
- 3 servings of whole milk
- Ice cubes as needed for thickness
Blend for 2-3 minutes.
That’s another 850 calories, a handful of vitamins and minerals, and a whopping 74 grams of protein.
Both taste absoFRUITly delicious.
So, if I were training your son, I’d do the following:
- Take him to my kitchen and show him how to make it.
- Watch him make one.
- Give him a blank calendar for the month and have him put an X down each time he drinks one.
- Weigh himself on the same day each week and write it down on the calendar.
That’s it. Do “X”. Watch “X” make “Y” happen. Repeat.
