How much muscle can you put on in a year?
Posted on August 21st, 2011 in infomercial | Comments Off
Today, a question from a reader: “I read a book called The 4-Hour Body saying that it’s possible to gain 34 pounds of muscle mass in twenty-eight days. Do you think this is possible? I’ve always heard that 25 pounds of lean muscle is as much as you can build in a year. How fast can you build muscle?
In answer to your first query, if you leave muscle memory and fluid manipulation out of the picture, the claim that you can build 34 pounds of lean muscle in 28 days by following the 4 hour workout is complete BS.
Most people are doing remarkably well to build 34 pounds of muscle in a year, let alone one month.
I would love to be able to give you a simple answer to your second question. Alas, there isn’t one.
The speed at which you can gain muscle depends on a number of 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 beginner will build somewhere between two and five pounds of muscle per month in their first few months of training. That said, gaining muscle is not a linear process, and you won’t keep gaining size at the same speed indefinitely.
Over the course of a 12-month period most people will be able to build somewhere between 20-25 pounds of muscle. This averages out at approximately 1.5-2 pounds of muscle each month.
The rate at which you can build muscle also depends on how near 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 the gains will come. Someone who’s been training with weights for 10 years, for example, will build muscle a lot more slowly than a complete beginner.
The speed at which you can gain muscle is also going to be affected by the amount of muscle you have to begin with.
For example, let’s compare two men, both with a body fat percentage of 15%. The first man is 6 foot four inches and weighs 200 pounds. This means he’s carrying around 170 pounds of muscle mass. The second man is five foot six inches and weighs in at one hundred and fifty pounds, which gives him around one hundred and twenty eight pounds of lean muscle. All other things being equal, the taller guy with more muscle is going to build muscle more quickly than the shorter guy, simply because he’s stimulating more muscle each time he trains.
The type of food you eat will also influence your progress. A lot of guys try to put on muscle and lose 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 Body Transformation Program, it’s a system that’s best reserved for guys with 2-3 years of serious training behind them.
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