How long does it take to add muscle?
Today, a question from a reader: “I read a book called The 4-Hour Body which claims that it’s possible to put on thirty-four pounds of muscle in twenty-eight days. Do you think this is possible? I’ve always thought that twenty-five pounds of lean muscle is as much as you can put on in a year. How fast can you build muscle?
In answer to your first question, if you leave muscle memory and fluid manipulation out of the picture, the claim that it’s possible to build 34 pounds of muscle in less than a month by following the 4 hour body workout is complete BS.
The vast majority of people are doing remarkably well to build thirty-four pounds of muscle over the course of a year, let alone a single month.
As for your second question, I would love to give you a simple answer. Alas, there isn’t one.
The speed at which you can build muscle depends on several things, including genetics, the length of time you’ve been training, diet, the effectiveness of your training program and so forth.
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, it’s important to remember that gaining muscle is not a linear process, and you won’t continue gaining size at the same rate 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 per 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 known as your ceiling of adaptation. The nearer you are to this upper limit, the slower your gains will be. An individual who’s been working out with weights for ten years, for example, will build muscle a lot more slowly than a complete beginner.
Your rate of muscular gain is also going to be affected by the amount of muscle you have to begin with.
For example, let’s compare 2 men, both with a body fat percentage of fifteen percent. The first guy is six foot four inches and weighs 200 pounds. This means he’s carrying around one hundred and seventy pounds of lean muscle. The second man is five foot 6 inches and weighs in at one hundred and fifty pounds, which gives him around one hundred and twenty eight pounds of muscle mass. All other things being equal, the taller guy with more muscle will build muscle more quickly than the shorter man, primarily because he’s stimulating more muscle fibers each time he trains.
The quality of your diet is also going to have a big impact on your results. 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 Tom Venuto’s Holy Grail Body Transformation Program, it’s a system that’s best reserved for guys with a few years of serious training under their belts.
Motivation For Diet And Exercise
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