All my life I have been two things: short and athletic. When it comes to weight lifting and gaining weight, my size and physical attributes have helped and hurt the outcome of my weight training. In this paper I am going to describe methods I used to gain muscle and tips I learned from the pros. By the end of this paper I hope to have shown my readers a glimpse of the difficulties of being a high-school bodybuilder.

    There are three basic body types, ectomorph (thin), mesomorph (muscular) and endomorph (fat). Of course there are mixtures, especially after training, this system also recognizes around eighty-eight subcategories. Before lifting hard I weighed around 110 pounds and was 5'4", that's a classic ectomorph. Now after about 2 years of on and off lifting I have gained 35 pounds of solid muscle. I'm still thin but I would consider myself...