# Do This Exercise EVERY Day to Build Muscle (SKINNY GUYS!)

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Athlean-X
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiyccZSkU2o
- **Дата:** 16.03.2026
- **Длительность:** 11:09
- **Просмотры:** 324,895

## Описание

If you’re a skinny guy struggling to build muscle, there’s one exercise I believe you should be doing almost every single day. In this video I’m going to show you why the loaded carry is one of the most effective hardgainer exercises you can add to your training if your goal is to gain muscle, improve posture, and build a stronger, more muscular frame.

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A lot of hardgainers have trouble building muscle not because they aren’t working hard enough, but because they don’t yet have the structural stability needed to support heavier weights. If you’re a skinny guy with very little muscle mass, exercises like squats and other big barbell lifts can feel uncomfortable early on because there simply isn’t enough muscle to support the load properly.

That’s where the loaded carry becomes incredibly valuable.

The carry allows you to handle heavier weights safely while building the strength foundation needed for muscle growth. Instead of placing the weight directly on your spine like a barbell squat, the load is held in your hands, allowing your body to gradually adapt to heavier resistance while developing grip strength, trap development, and upper back stability.

This makes the loaded carry one of the best exercises for skinny guys because it helps you build the areas that often lag behind in hardgainers: the traps, forearms, grip, upper back, and core. These muscles play a huge role in stabilizing your body during bigger lifts, which means improving them will help your squats, rows, presses, and deadlifts get stronger as well.

Another huge benefit of this exercise is posture. Many skinny guys tend to develop rounded shoulders and poor posture from focusing too much on pushing exercises like bench presses and pushups while neglecting the muscles of the upper back. The carry reinforces thoracic extension, scapular positioning, and proper shoulder alignment, helping to reverse those imbalances while building muscle at the same time.

In this video I’m going to show you exactly how to perform the carry correctly so you get the most out of this skinny guy workout exercise.

We’ll cover:

- Why the loaded carry is one of the best hardgainer exercises
- How this movement helps skinny guys build muscle and strength
- How carries improve posture and correct rounded shoulders
- Why this exercise builds traps, grip strength, forearms, and upper back size
- How to use carries as conditioning without losing muscle mass
- The biggest mistakes people make when performing carries
- Different variations including farmer’s carries, overhead carries, gun carries, plate pinch carries, and trap bar carries
- How to incorporate carries into a skinny guy workout program

I’ll also break down how to properly program this exercise so you can progress over time. You can measure carries by steps, time, or distance, and beginners should start with shorter sets while focusing on maintaining proper posture and control.

When it comes to weight selection, a good starting point is around 25 percent of your bodyweight in each hand, gradually working up toward heavier loads as your strength improves. As you progress, you can increase the weight, extend the duration of your carries, or experiment with different variations to continue building muscle and strength.

The best part about the carry is that it’s incredibly versatile. You can do it with dumbbells, kettlebells, plates, or even a trap bar, and you can perform it in almost any training environment. That’s one reason why it works so well as one of the daily exercises you can add to your workouts without interfering with your other training.

If you’re looking for exercises to build muscle, a muscle building workout, or the best workout for skinny guys trying to gain size, the loaded carry is one movement that can dramatically improve your results.

Adding carries to your routine will help you build a stronger foundation, improve your posture, increase grip strength, and develop the kind of total-body muscle that many hardgainers and skinny lifters struggle to build.

If you’re serious about learning how to build muscle, how to gain muscle as a hardgainer, and what exercises to do every day to support your progress in the gym, the loaded carry is one movement you should start including in your workouts right away.

If you are looking to build lean, athletic muscle; be sure to head to athleanx.com and check out the program selector tool. It will take you just minutes to find the exact plan that fits your current goals and will help you to build ripped athletic muscle quickly.

For more muscle building, injury prevention, and nutrition guides; be sure to subscribe to our channel here on youtube via the link above and remember to turn on your notifications so you never miss a new video when it’s published.

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiyccZSkU2o) Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00)

What's up guys? Jeff Cavalere, athletext. com. So, I have an exercise for you skinny guys out there that is going to completely transform your body. We're talking Are you talking about skinny Jesse? — Remember me? Circuit 2016. — Can you put that down, please? Yes, I remember. You can show what not skinny Jesse looks like. All right. So, what we're talking about is an exercise that Jesse himself used as one of the exercises that really built up his base to help build out his frame. It can fix not just your frame and your size, but also your posture. Oh, you mean posture like this? — Oh god, that's so ugly. Jesse, yeah, I do remember that. It could do all the above. What we're talking about is a carry and specifically how to do it right, the right way to program it, the different variations that are best for you and your body. We're going to cover it all here today. And it starts with one of the biggest reasons of why this works so well, particularly for skinny guys, because it accommodates your body to handling heavier weights on the system without particularly loading the system like let's say the squat. Because starting out in a squat was pretty difficult for you. — Oh yeah. I had no shelf and it was just on my bony scapula. — Right. We hear about resting the bar on a shelf. But if there's no shelf and only bone is actually quite uncomfortable. Another reason why your deadlift actually rose faster than your squat because you didn't have to have those same loads. So what this does is accommodates your body to handling heavier loads. And you could do this in a progressive manner. We'll talk about how to load this specifically later. But as you're holding on to more of the weight in the carry, you're starting to feel more of that stress and stretch on the traps, in your hands, on your forearms, on your grip. Notably, actually, your grip will improve to allow you to do what with those rows? — Uh, handle heavy weights. — Handle heavy weights, too. So, it starts to feed into even the basic programming. And speaking of beginner programming, I actually put together a perfect beginner workout that I'm giving away for free. Head over to athletex. com/tbfree. You guys can grab that just for watching this video. The next huge benefit for me as a physical therapist is that this exercise helps to correct really bad posture. — Should I pick up the — No, no, no. We don't have to see that again. But we do know how far Jesse came with his posture as you saw in the beginning. A lot of it had to do with doing exercises like the carry that reinforce proper posture. So, how is that? Because you have to have good thoracic extension. shoulder back positioning. You have to be able to do that under load because when you pick up a weight, you don't want all the weights to be able to pull you down. Yeah. What skinny guys oftentimes do is again lacking muscle mass, they don't have postural stability. They're more likely to succumb to the force of gravity. When they decide to do something about their lack of muscularity, they do what exercises? — Pushing exercise, — anything front, believe me, they're not thinking about doing rows. So, what happens is it only further contributes to that poor posture. This exercise, again, I'll break down how to do it specifically, will do exactly what you need to do to start reversing that forward tilt of your shoulders. The third big benefit to carries is that you can actually work them in as a great conditioning option, and it can replace some of the things that you used to do a lot more often. — Running, — like running, like long distance running, which is not really one of those big muscle builders, as any marathon runner could tell you, but there are alternative ways to condition your body, and they're both important. We're talking about strength and conditioning for a reason. So the carry allows you to get your heart rate up after just even a few rounds. And it gives you an option that you could do on each workout day at the end or you could do on a conditioning day or as part of an entire conditioning day if you were to do this for 10 minutes or 15 minutes and even on an off day because the stress here is pretty localized and doesn't carry over from workout to workout. And fourth, when it comes to the specific stress that the carry applies that leads to this muscle growth, it is in the form of some of the stretch that we get on the traps, on those upper back, midback muscles when you do the exercise. However, it is not the same as another exercise that you used to use that did the same type of stretch. — Ah, the rack pull. — Like a rack pull. Now, we know that the rack pull can do the same thing but from a much different position which can lead to other issues like thoracic outlet syndrome. — Yep. which is something I had symptoms of from doing so — too much compression anteriorly when you hold that weight out in front. We'll get to that in a second. But again, all exercises are not created equal just because they may look like you're carrying weight. This one's a very specific exercise that involves carrying weight and it applies it in a way that leads to the muscle gains we're looking for without any of the unnecessary stresses, especially on that frail, skinny body that you might have had in the beginning. So, how do you do this right? And I mean exactly right. The first thing is the pickup. You do not want to set the dumbbells up in front of your body and pick them up from there like a deadlift. Instead, put the dumbbells on the side of your body. And when you pick the dumbbells up, you're putting yourself in the right position with your shoulders more easily held back because of that. The next thing is going to be the shoulders themselves as you fatigue. But fatigue here is going to show up as those shoulders start to drift and the dumbbells start to drift out in front of your body. If you see that happening, it should be your instant reminder that you're not doing

### [5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiyccZSkU2o&t=300s) Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00)

this with the right neuromuscular control over those backside muscles. Again, you're allowing the front side to dominate. Pull back and get those shoulder blades retracted. Which leads us to the third point. It's not just about retracting your shoulder blades because I've seen this posture a lot, too. — As have I. — Head forward, shoulder blades pinched, but nothing happening with the most important bone in your body when you're doing this exercise, and that's your sternum. If you can take your sternum and lift it, right? Try to think about taking this bone in your body right here in your chest and lift it as high as you can, that's going to restore thoracic extension and then allow for the retraction of the shoulder blades. That's going to put your body in the right position. The fourth thing actually comes in terms of the pacing of the exercise. Far too often, people want to go for a long distance and they do choppy steps. They're ugly, unstable steps. Your carry should look really, really smooth and deliberate — and deliberate. Each step should be done with stability. So, I want you to take slower, more deliberate steps. If you do that, you're requiring more time in single leg stance, which is applying more benefit to the exercise because as we put one leg up to take the next step, that opposite hip is having to hold your body level. That glute medius is really working hard. If I take short choppy steps, I'm removing that requirement. And one of the major benefits of the exercise. — Yeah. And as we know, stronger glute medius and stronger hips will prevent back pain. — Right. So all this stuff starts to feed into one gigantic reason why this exercise is really, really important. The last thing would be if you're finding yourself drifting a lot or if the legs start crossing up, then you want to deliberately contract your glutes. Consciously contract your glutes. Remember, your posterior chain is not just from your waist up, but it's from the waist down, too. Squeeze your glutes before you initiate the exercise. right after you pick the dumbbells up and maintain that contraction with every step and you'll find more stability throughout the entire duration of the exercise. Now, the fun part about the carry is it's actually quite versatile and there's a lot of variations that I alluded to earlier, each one with a separate benefit that you might want to consider. The first is something we call a gun carry. And here you're shifting the load, yes, heavily to the arms, really the forearms and the brachiialis as you have to hold them in this isometric 90° position. — And you're going to have to use a lot less weight. you Again, it's still challenging your grip in a way, not as much as it is with the dumbbells at your side, but there's a lot of things going on here. Shoulder stability, shoulder girl stability, but it's just a different way to do the carry. Again, with different benefits. And I think skinny guys probably want to build up their arms, too. Y, Jesse, the next thing we could talk about though is variations of that carry. And instead of carrying them both down at your sides, we have a one up, one down carry. Right away, as soon as you put any arm up over your head, the requirements for thoracic extension and mobility go up substantially. So, if you don't have good thoracic mobility, you're going to find this to be very, very difficult, especially those poor postured beginners who started out. And you'll definitely feel the core working a little bit more here to maintain that. You could certainly take this up another level by literally raising one more dumbbell up overhead. Now, this double overhead carry again, working the same things we just talked about, but even more so, more thoracic mobility into extension, more stability of the core, but again, it's a great variation of the exercise. It's one worth doing as you're able to. Then we can go kind of back to the beginning like where could true beginners start if they can't even handle heavier dumbbells they could just start with plates. Yeah. Like you — that's what I did. That's how one of the reasons I built grip strength was doing pinch plate car. — Right. Because it's not just all about grip in terms of forearm strength but intrinsic finger strength. So having to pinch the plates and walk with them even 5 pounders can be quite a challenge. You can work from five to 10 to 25s up to 45s. And then on the opposite side of that, when you start to be able to handle more and more weight and you sort of exceed your dumbbell carrying capacity, that's where something like a trap bar works. — So now, as far as programming goes, how would you program this? There's a lot of different ways for you to do this. Number one, you can measure in steps, distance, you can measure in time. Those are three main ways to do this. Now, for me, I like to go steps because even if I don't have a place that I can walk for a long distance, I could just count the steps. — Yeah. And if you don't have a lot of space, you can just go a distance, then turn around, and then come right back. — The turnaround is a factor. For those wondering, when you do have to do the turn, it requires a portion of that to be single leg stance. When you make the turn, they're a little bit more challenging when you incorporate turns into it. When it comes to steps, I'd say 15 to 30 steps per set is a good place for beginners to start. That'll be somewhere around, let's say, 15 to 30 yards, roughly, depending upon, right, how long of a step you have. For time, 30 seconds is a good place to start. work up to 60 seconds and do this for multiple sets. Four minutes in a day is plenty of work on this if you're going to do this in an everyday fashion. So now, how much weight and what are we talking about here? Well, first of all, we take these sets to failure. As with most other things in the gym, you want to ensure that you went hard enough and long enough to create change. So for me, failure is always measured in grip strength loss. The ability to hold on to the dumbbells is really your main

### [10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiyccZSkU2o&t=600s) Segment 3 (10:00 - 11:00)

criteria. How much weight do you use? Well, we always recommend starting with again either the plates like you did right in those fives, tens, and 25s, but once you start to use dumbbell weight, 25% of your body weight in each hand is where we recommend starting. So, if you're 160 lbs, you're talking about 40 lbs in each hand. And you work yourself up to 50% in each hand. Yeah. — You can go to those higher levels up to even 75% of your body weight in each hand or combined 150% of your body weight if you're doing it on the trap bar. If you want to transform that skinny body, this is the exercise. — Skinny body like this. I mean, come on. I was cute and adorable. — Just out of college. Come on. — Okay, show them the after. It's actually, if you want to check out Jesse's transformation video, you could do that right here. If you want a program that can actually help you get kickarted, it's actually free at athletex. com/tbfree. It's a free little total body workout that actually Jesse used to begin with. If you found the video helpful, guys, make sure you leave your comments and thumbs up below. Also, click subscribe if you haven't done so, so you can make sure you watch every video we put out, guys. Full programs and supplements available over at athletex. com. See you soon.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/16104*