How long does it take to put on muscle?
Today, a question from a reader: “I read a book called The 4-Hour Body claiming that it’s possible to build 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days. Do you think this is possible? I’ve always heard that 25 pounds of lean muscle is as much as it’s possible to put on in a year. How fast can you build muscle?
In answer to your first question, if you leave out the influence that muscle memory and fluid manipulation can have on muscle growth, the claim that it’s possible to gain thirty-four pounds of muscle in less than a month by following the is complete nonsense.
Most people are doing remarkably well to build 34 pounds of muscle in a year, let alone 28 days.
It would be great if I could give you a simple answer to your second query. Unfortunately, there isn’t one.
The rate at which you can gain muscle depends on several things, including genetics, the length of time you’ve been training, nutrition, the effectiveness of your training routine and so on.
If you want a general idea about how fast it’s possible to build muscle, the average novice will build somewhere between two and five pounds of muscle per month in their first few months of training with weights. That said, building muscle is not a linear process, and you won’t continue gaining size at the same speed indefinitely.
Over the course of a year you’re looking at gaining somewhere between twenty and twenty-five pounds of muscle. This averages out at roughly 1.5-2 pounds of muscle each month.
The rate at which you can add muscle also depends on how close you are to the upper limit of what you’re capable of in terms of muscle mass, also called your ceiling of adaptation. The nearer you are to this upper limit, the slower your gains will be. Someone who’s been working out with weights for ten years, for example, will take longer to add muscle than someone has never lifted weights before.
Your rate of muscular gain is also going to scale up based on how much muscle you have to begin with.
For example, let’s compare 2 men, both with a body fat of fifteen percent. The first man is 6 foot 4 inches and weighs two hundred pounds. This means he’s carrying around one hundred and seventy pounds of muscle mass. The second guy is 5 foot six inches and weighs 150 pounds, which gives him around 128 pounds of lean muscle. All other things being equal, the taller man with more muscle will build muscle at a faster rate than the shorter guy, simply because he’s stimulating more muscle fibers every time he trains.
Needless to say, nutrition is also a vital piece of the muscle-building jigsaw. A lot of guys try to build muscle and burn fat at the same time, which invariably leads to a slower rate of muscle growth than if they’d focused solely on gaining muscle.
Although you can use some form of cyclical dieting strategy to gain muscle while losing fat, such as The Holy Grail Tom Venuto latest body transformation program, it’s an approach that’s best reserved for guys with a few years of hard training under their belts.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 30th, 2011 at 4:22 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.