Quote Originally Posted by weekend View Post
what am i naturally, an ecto? it's easy for me to gain weight now lol, i swear body types are bullshit and change due to many factors.
Bodytypes aren't the be-all and end-all of anything. They do help gauge a person's "natural" state when untrained and when fed to satisfy appetite. They don't necessarily gauge a person's ability to gain muscle or fat, but they are indicators. Lou Ferrigno, if you look at his teen pics, was a classic ectomorph, but he did have the ability to gain muscle once stimulated by training and eating. He also responded tremendously to anabolics. Some people will respond better to the stimuli of anabolics than others, as well, which is a whole other subject.

You gain weight now because you eat for it. You have the appetite now because you trained for it and built muscle that requires feeding for it to be maintained. So what bodytype were you? Ecto/meso or meso/ecto with insufficient calories to feed growth.

Can we change our bodytypes? I think to an extent, we can. We can't change the width of our shoulder girdle or the width of our hips (skeletal structure) but we can change the body's muscular set-point to a degree. Even when I stopped training for a period of years, I didn't go back to 95 lbs. I lost 50ish lbs and ended up somewhere in the middle of my big and my small versions of me. I looked thin, in ok shape, but not anorexic like in the beginning.

The other thing that changes over time is metabolic rate and other hormonal functions. Things slow down over time. You have a while before this will affect you. But I began to notice this in the last 10 years and more prominently in the last 5. Fat doesn't melt off like before. It takes a heck of a lot more work to burn it while keeping hard earned muscle. Metabolically, I've shifted a bit more toward the endo side in this area. The good side of that is now I don't have to force feed myself to keep my body from losing muscle like I did 20some years ago.