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Gaining muscle: How fast and how much?

Gaining muscle: How fast and how much?

Many people have absolutely unrealistic expectations when they start strength training. The idea that you can build more than 1 lb of muscle every week is not uncommon.

The fitness industry is certainly partly to blame. You have likely seen the completely exaggerated marketing slogans of supplement manufacturers or those who want to sell you a 12-week muscle-building program that will supposedly make you look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Such promises motivate you to start training, but as soon as you see little or nothing happening after a few weeks, it becomes pretty frustrating.

Often the frustration is so great that people throw in the towel and stop training. That's why it's almost always better to set challenging but still realistic goals. That's exactly what we're talking about today.

"When will I see the first results of strength training?" "How much muscle mass can I build per year?" and "What is the maximum amount of muscle mass I can build in my lifetime without doping - in other words, what is my genetic potential?".

These are the 3 questions we are taking a closer look at today. Let's start directly with the first question:

When will I see the first results of strength training?

So when will you see that your body has become a little more toned and that you have built muscle? I'm sure you've often heard that beginners build the most muscle per week or month, as compared with people of higher experience levels.

The more advanced you become, the less muscle you will build in the same amount of time. Maybe you know this phenomenon as "diminishing returns". It is absolutely right that this is how training works, BUT there is one exception.

In the first month, most people actually build NO or virtually no muscles. This is often observed and is also shown, for example, in a study by Damas et al (2016).

This is probably because the body is not used to strength training at all and almost all training programs - even those for the untrained or beginners - put too much strain on the body.

This then leaves the body busy with the repair of the damaged muscles and does not even leave it with the resources to strengthen the muscles beyond the repair process. However, you can probably avoid this if you start with very few sets and low weight in the first few weeks.

So you can expect to get stronger in the first month, but will build zero or very little muscle mass.

Why do you get stronger even though you don't build muscle mass? This is because you get used to the technique of the exercises and gradually perform them more efficiently.

For example, you will wobble less during the bench press, thus requiring less energy to stabilize the bar, and will therefore have more energy to push the bar up.

It is only after this first month of onboarding that most people will start to see physical changes. So don't be frustrated if nothing happens in the first month. This is normal and not because the training is not working for you.

After this 1st month, however, the muscle building usually goes pretty quickly. And that brings us to the next question:

How much muscle mass can I build per year?

This depends on a number of factors - for example, how long you've been training, how old you are, your sex, how well and how regularly you train, how you eat, and how you manage your stress. And, of course, which parents you've chosen.

This last point especially is one of the most important - that is, your genetics for muscle building.

We now assume that you lead a life that is conducive to weight training. This doesn't have to be 100% designed for the sport, but already "pretty good". For example, you train regularly and hard, eat well, sleep a lot, are not too stressed, etc. AND have on average good genes for muscle building.

If you meet these requirements, we can use Lyle McDonald's model. These are indications that we can definitely consider realistic.

As a male beginner, according to the model, you can expect an average muscle mass gain of around 20 lbs in the 1st year of training. In the 2nd year you can expect 10 lbs, in the 3rd year 5 lbs and in the 4th year only 2.5 lbs. If you are female you can expect about half of these numbers.

Of course, if you haven't really focused on weight training for the first few years of lifting, you may not build up quite as much muscle mass in the early days.

But if you then gradually live more like a bodybuilder, you'll probably make up for it later and build more muscle in subsequent years than the model tells us to expect.

If you calculate the whole thing a little further, then you come to about 45 lbs muscle mass gain after 10 years of training for the average man. For women that number is about 25 lbs.

As I said, of course, this is only true if you focus on training for 10 years and have good genetics on average. Of course, there are genetic outliers. Some are genetically much more blessed and also build much more muscle, whereas some build less.

Like almost everything in life, however, the genetics for building muscle are normally distributed - in other words, the vast majority of people have genetics that are about average, and only a very few have much better or much worse genetics.

So now we have numbers that we can use as a rough guide. But what if you really live for weight training and pay attention to everything important?

What is the maximum amount of muscle mass you can build in your lifetime without using steroids?

For now, we'll assume that you have great genetics. Then we could actually just look at the body data of the best natural bodybuilders of recent years. They live for their sport and probably have the best muscle building genetics on average.

But the problem is that we don't know for sure whether these bodybuilders are all natural. It is no great feat to pass a drug test even though you have used or are using steroids. Basically, there could be some non-natural bodybuilders in our sample, which would skew the result upwards.

That is why it is a better idea to look at the data of the best real natural bodybuilders. These were the bodybuilding champions before about 1950.

It is very unlikely that many people were doping at that time. There were simply no truly effective substances that promoted muscle building - apart from some shakes with raw eggs!

So we can be pretty sure that these bodybuilders were natural - not 100%, but "pretty sure". Granted, they probably didn't train and eat quite as smart as the bodybuilders of today, because they simply didn't have the knowledge yet.

Nevertheless, it probably makes more sense to use this group as a comparison than a group of strength athletes, where some might have taken steroids. Steroids have a huge effect on muscle mass, which would skew the results enormously.

How muscular were they? The best way to do this is to look at the FFMI of these bodybuilders. This is the "Fat Free Mass Index," which takes into account body fat percentage, height, and weight. The formula is pretty simple: fat free body mass divided by height in cm squared.

So we can compare the bodybuilders' body data with our body data, even though they probably had a different body fat percentage, height, and weight.

On average, these (male) bodybuilders had an FFMI of about 25. This is, by the way, also the reason why nowadays many natural bodybuilding associations consider an FFMI of 25 or 26 to be the upper natural limit for men. Anything above that is probably not natural. At least that's what the associations think.

But the thing is that the FFMI of 25 was just the average of the FFMIs of the pre-1950 male bodybuilding champions. There were also a few who had a higher value. One even had an FFMI of 28. That was Jack Delinger - a real monster! Women, by the way, can just reduce these FFMI figures by about 3.

This already gives us a good indication of what we could maximally achieve in our lives if we have super genetics and live for sports exactly like Jack Delinger: namely an FFMI of 28 for men, or 25 for women.

That's all well and good, but what if you don't have such good genetics? How good are your genetics anyway?

So what is YOUR natural genetic potential?

Anthropologist Francis Holway has thought about this in detail. He has studied thousands of elite athletes. Among them were soccer players, martial artists, volleyball players, weightlifters, bodybuilders, and so on.

He came to a rather interesting conclusion: the larger and heavier a person's bone mass, the greater their muscle-building potential.

He illustrates this phenomenon with a comparison of two bookshelves. If one bookshelf is only 3 inches wider than another bookshelf, then it hardly weighs more. But if both shelves are filled with books, then it weighs a lot more.

It's exactly the same with the human skeleton. The heavier and larger it is, the more muscle mass fits on it, so to speak.

Holway has found that each lb of bone mass can support a maximum of about 6 lbs of muscle mass in men and 5 lbs in women. So your bone mass tells you an enormous amount about your genetic potential to build muscle.

Regardless of the fact that larger bones simply fit more muscle mass on them, this is a perfectly logical hypothesis for other reasons as well.

For example, Greg Nuckols writes in detail in one of his articles about how bone and muscle mass are interconnected. Bones as well as muscles have effectively the same stem cells and grow due to the same hormonal signals during puberty.

There are also some correlational studies that show that people with heavier bone mass tend to build more muscle during exercise than people with lighter bone mass.

So, theoretically, it would be a good idea to find out how heavy your bone mass is. From this result you could infer your genetic muscle building potential.

But the problem is that most people don't have the ability to accurately determine their bone mass. So for practical purposes, we'd best have some proxy for bone mass.

Fortunately, we don't have to worry about that anymore, because Dr. Casey Butt already has. He has found that there is a fairly strong correlation between wrist and ankle circumference and bone mass.

The larger the circumference, the higher the bone mass, and therefore the greater the muscle building potential. Dr. Butt looked at the circumferences of the true natural bodybuilders before 1950 and developed a formula from those data.

This is the beautifully named "Casey Butt Formula," and it gives you what is likely the maximum weight you can ever reach in your life. The formula takes into account your weight, your body fat percentage, your height, AND of course your wrist and ankle circumferences.

If you want to know how big your genetic potential is, just enter your body data into the Casey Butt calculator.

Don't forget, however, that the absolute bodybuilding elite were used as benchmarks by Dr. Butt, people who lived for the sport. AND remember that hand and ankle circumferences are, of course, only a rough proxy for genetics.

Of course, if we are realistic, only a few of us will ever reach our genetic potential. Not everyone is ready to devote 20 or 30 years of life exclusively to bodybuilding.

That's perfectly alright. There are other great things in life, and you can achieve very good results even if you don't sacrifice everything to this sport.

So presumably most of you will still be well below your genetic limit. And that's good, because that should motivate you.

If you see that you can theoretically build up another 10-20 lbs of muscle mass, then isn't that a great motivator to train a little smarter and possibly harder, eat a little healthier, sleep more, etc. to continue to improve?

By the way, even if you are very close to your genetic potential, this is no reason to bury your head in the sand. You can still try to gradually lower your body fat percentage (without losing muscle mass) or improve your weak points.

It is possible that you are close to your genetic limit, but have neglected your arms for years. In this case, you have probably not exhausted the genetic potential of your arms by a long shot.

With a focus on training the arms (by doing more sets, for example) you can probably achieve visible changes very quickly.

Of course, the arms are just one example. Almost everyone has some weak points on which they can focus more and still get something out of it.

Even if you already have a super low BMI and no weak spots in your physique (which is highly unlikely), you can still set a motivating goal to get stronger.

After all, strength is not only determined by muscle mass, but also by the performance of the nervous system. This performance can be trained.

Anyway, you shouldn't be limited by any numbers - even though this article was mainly about those numbers. These are all just approximate.

If you let yourself think you won't be successful in this sport, you probably won't be.

Mindset plays an enormously important role in this. A 1972 study even found that participants who thought they were getting steroids built up much more muscle than those who knew they weren't - all because of the placebo effect.

That's why you should set realistic goals, but approach them with a positive mindset, a lot of self-confidence, and of course discipline.

Conclusion

In the first month of training, most untrained people see almost no physical changes. After that, however, muscle growth is relatively rapid.

With reasonably good genetics on average and a lifestyle fairly well designed for weight training, you can expect 20 lbs of muscle mass in the first year as a man without steroids.

The increase in the following years is always about half of the increase of the previous year. After 10 years you will have built up about 45 lbs of muscle mass. As a woman, you can expect around half of these values.

If you dedicate your life 100% to weight training and have super genetics, then you will probably build a maximum amount of muscle to reach an FFMI of 28 as a man or 25 as a woman.

To determine your individual genetic potential, use Casey Butt's calculator. His formula includes the circumferences of your wrists and ankles as a proxy for your bone mass. And bone mass represents your genetic muscle-building potential quite well.

Whether you are far away from or close to your genetic limit, there are always some motivating goals you can set for yourself in weight training. There is never a reason to bury your head in the sand.

If you want to record, evaluate, and optimize your training, download the Alpha Progression app here.