Book Review: Scrawny to Brawny

For many of us, gaining muscle mass can be a serious struggle. In spite of hard-work, dedication, and a decent workout routine, skinny guys can have a lot of problems in actually seeing any results. While weight loss has been emphasized recently, being extremely skinny can actually be just as embarrassing as being overweight. In Scrawny to Brawny, this common issue for skinny people is addressed in great detail. Because of the focus of this book being to lean muscle mass development for naturally skinny people (ectomorphs), this book is utterly useful for much rounder people (endomorphs) and naturally buff people (mesomorphs).

But with this in mind, I am going to review this book from the perspective of an ectomorph who is attempting to increase their lean muscle mass while still keeping their body fat percentage at a fairly reasonable amount.

As one would expect of authors of a fitness book of this scope, authors Michael Mejia and John Berardi are both certified fitness instructors with impressive credentials. By this, I mean that Michael Mejia writes for Men’s Health, and John Berardi consults many professional athletes and body builders.

The book is split up into two distinct sections: an in depth workout guide and a diet plan. It begins by detailing the struggles of the average skinny guy as well as the physiological reasons for some of their issues when it comes to exercises such as the bench press. The author also shares some of his own personal struggles with weight gains despite his hard work. I personally was quite impressed by how much detail the book went into explaining all of this physiology of the average ectomorph.

Next, the author promotes weight lifting with a much larger emphasis on compound exercises than on isolation exercises. With this advice, he recommends using 3 exercises as centerpieces of your workout routine: the bench press, squats, and deadlifts. For the most part, I agree with this advice; compound exercises help develop many stabilizing muscles that isolation exercises simply cannot, and the motions often apply much more realistically to life. For example, people frequently lift things in a deadlift type of motion, but people rarely do bicep concentration curls outside of the gym. Towards the end of the first section, there are fairly detailed workout plans, which I found to be alright but not particularly innovative.

While the first section of the book is fairly informative and undoubtedly important to the overall plan to achieve lean muscle mass gain, I feel as though the second section is both more significant and imperative to a skinny guy having trouble with weight gain. Very quickly in this section, the book addresses one of the most prominent myths among skinny guys trying gain weight. This myth is that an ectomorph can maintain his eating patterns and then simply add weight training to gain lean muscle mass. But in reality, this is not how your body works. In order to gain muscle, you simply most eat more calories than you use.

So justifiably, the book strongly emphasizes this need to eat, eat, eat! Fortunately, there are several menus included with the book to help you eat the recommended 4000+ calories per day (but if you eat this much you will NEED to workout as detailed in the book). This great detail in which the authors go into about what to eat and when is in my opinion one of the great strengths of Scrawny to Brawny. Next, the book integrates the two sections by going in depth on how to eat before and after workouts. There also is a fairly detailed section about various supplements and whether or not they would be helpful for you.

Now that I have basically summarized the book, I’m going to point out a few problems of the book. Perhaps the biggest problem with the book is that the authors write in a somewhat condescending style that seems to look down upon the reader for not being ripped and muscular. There also is the issue that the diet plan that is highly encouraged and frankly almost necessary can be problematic for many peoples’ work schedules and grocery budgets. But besides these two issues, the book is overall quite informative. The strong emphasis on free weights and compound exercises instead of weight machines and isolation exercises is insightful, and the diet plans are quite elaborate in comparison to most books like this. So while Scrawny to Brawny is not a perfect book, its content can really benefit the average skinny guy who wants more lean muscle despite his genetic disadvantage.