Are You an Ectomorph? Here's How to Eat and Exercise to Look and Feel Your Best

Are you an ectomorph? Here's how you tell. If you tend to be skinny, fine boned, long limbed and find it hard to put on weight, you are an ectomorph, or hard gainer.

While female ectomorphs tend to be envied for your ability to eat anything and everything without getting fat, male ectomorphs tend to be frustrated at being the skinny guy.

While you can eat "anything you like" it is wise for you to ensure that you eat only what is really good for you, rather than the fatty, salty, sugary junk food that is on tap all around you.

For you, planning of each day's food intake is even more critical than for the other body types (muscular mesomorph and cuddly endomorph).

You need to graze throughout your day. Never be more than 2-3 hours away from a meal or snack. Meals and snacks must incorporate plenty of protein and complex carbs.

While you can "get away with" scoffing deep fried food, why would you? Everything you eat needs to be of top nutritional value to best benefit your highly metabolised body and put some shapely flesh on your scrawny bones.

A high carb diet is a good option for the hard gainer.

With regard to exercise, cardio can be very damaging to your body shape. While ectomorphs make terrific marathon athletes generally hard gainers don't want that extremely lean look.

In order to round out your shape with some lean or mass muscles you need to concentrate on heavy resistance training with plenty of rest between your training sessions.

Become as informed as you can about diet and exercise for the ectomorph body shape. You can get extremely frustrated with mainstream "one size fits all" programs that just don't suit your particular needs.

If you can plan your meals and snacks, never go hungry and get into some serious resistance training you will gain a more shapely body and feel a lot better both within and about yourself.

Rosie Peters gives common sense advice, encouragement and tips for weight loss, sensible diet and lifelong fitness. Find out more about your body type and read more about fat loss and fitness at lose-fat-get-fit.com.