Photography

Lean to Mean was the name of our four-month “ectomorph transformation,” as we’ve learned it’s often called. We followed a different bodybuilding routine each month, we diligently tracked our progress, and we photographed absolutely everything.

2019 Update: we’ve come a long way since then. Read the updated story in our article about going from skinny to muscular.

Now, Jared and I are both “ectomorphs.” We’re naturally skinny guys, we’ve always had a hard time gaining weight, and we have a lot of trouble eating the sheer volume of food in most bulking diets.

However, to make things more interesting, we added in a control group. Or, rather, we added in an average overweight guy who was trying to lose weight. His name is Willem, and he started his journey last year when we planned out a diet that helped him lose twenty pounds in a single month. (More on that in our article about how to lose fat.)

Jared and I, skinny ectomorphs that we were, decided to do a hypertrophy training program designed to help us gain muscle. Willem, on the other hand, decided to be more physically active and do more cardio.

So, what we’ve got here are before and after pictures and measurements. We’ve all gotten bigger. We’ve all gotten leaner. And we’re pretty happy with our results. We’ve gone from Bony to Beastly (or at least we’d like to think we did) in just one summer.