How Quickly Can You Expect to Build Muscle

How Quickly Can You Gain Muscle

If you’ve been working out for a while, then you know that increasing muscle and losing fat are two very different things and the processes of improvements are not on the same time scale.

When it comes to muscle gain, there needs to be synergy between your gym routine, how much you progress training, your overall training volume (number or reps and sets),  your caloric intake, and the types of food you eat, your recovery and lifestyle choices outside of the gym and your genetics.

To  accurately state how quickly someone can expect to gain muscle is a challenge as there are such large variance between individual responses to training Dennis et al 2009 & Patrella et al 2006.

Anecdotally it seems muscle gain is easier in the first 2 years of your strength training. This  is when people often see the most rapid changes in their physique. This is largely due to training being such a large neurological stimulus, of which the body has never had to adapt to but after the early adaptation the body becomes more efficient and therefore the weekly/monthly stimulus becomes less and less. What’s worth stating is even in these early stages, visual changes can still take months to show. It can be hard to track increases in muscle mass as scales and bioimpedance monitors are not very accurate and access to dexa scanners and bod pods is usually rare. 

Here are a few facts you might want to keep in mind while working towards your goal:

1. Keeping track of muscle gain is more difficult than keeping track of fat reduction
2. Fat loss is visible on a weekly basis and easier to achieve.
3. The time dedicated to lean muscle gain could include gaining some fat mass, but you need to make sure the fat to muscle ratio is under control
4. The human body is good at storing fat, building muscle isn’t an essential evolutionary function so is significantly more challenging.

What Reasonable Rates of Gain Can You Expect?

As a natural lifter you can gain a good amount of muscle over your lifting career, it’s often stated on average a woman can gain 10-15kg and a man 18-23kg of muscle, depending on your start weight. You need to appreciate the difficulty in making life span calculations as it’s not the sort of thing you collate accurate data on, as it usually relies on collecting surveys, based on total body weight which isn’t really a very clear measure of muscle gain, because weight gain can, of course, be fat mass gain.

There is a model you can use to calculate your theoretical natural potential.  By using Casey Butt’s research into elite natural bodybuilders. Here is a link to the calculator. There are, of course, limitations to this date. The biggest being it’s based on men and other issue  is that it uses elite bodybuilders, which are not exactly your average population but it can give you an idea of what could possibly be achieved.

As mentioned above, a good percentage of the total muscle you will build will happen in your first 1-3 years of serious weight training, don’t worry if you have been doing cardio and circuits for years you have plenty of new gains still to achieve. The harder part comes after when the rate at which you build muscle often slows down.

So let’s be a bit more specific on rates of muscle gain. Here is an estimation idea of what could be possible:

For beginners in the first 1-2 years of training 0.45-0.9kg of muscle gained per month is considered a fast pace for muscle gain.

Intermediate lifters with 2-5 years of lifting experience a rate of 0.22-0.45kg of muscle gained per month is a fast pace of muscle gain.

For advanced lifters with 5 years + experience a rate of 0.11-.045kg of muscle gain per month is considered a fast pace.

This information are the average hypertrophy responses based on this meta-analysis by (Bento et al 2020).

If your goal is to reach the lifetime averages started for men and women, then you need to expect it to take a minimum of five years and that’s when paying close attention to all the required variables.

Monitoring / Measuring Changes

I know it’s tempting to look at the number on your scale when you’re looking to gain muscle. But there are some important things to bear in mind.

1. Your weight will fluctuate every single day. The three main reasons for this are your hydration status, bowel content, and glycogen stored in muscles. The more muscle you have the larger the daily fluctuations.
2. It’s sensible to track your progress on a bi-weekly or monthly basis. Tracking more frequently will not give you accurate feedback on progress.
3. Use more than just bodyweight to track progress, there are other ways to observe changes need for hypertrophy..
   • • Max strength: track the maximum load you can lift for any given exercise and rep range
     • Volume load: this is the amount of weight x reps of all your hard working sets combined. So if you do 4 x 8 @ 50kg’s you achieved 1600kg’s volume load.
     • Total set volume: across your training, you will accumulate work on each body part. Keeping track of the total amount of hard working sets you do per body part is key. Let’s say you have 4 back exercises across your training days and each has 3 sets, that’s a set volume of 12 per week. This is a number you will want to cycle across your yearly training to maximise hypertrophy.
     • Take pictures. You can schedule a day when you want to take pictures, ideally monthly so you can visually see the changes.
     • Circumferences and/or clothing: this is useful additional information to give you an idea of regional changes to muscle belly thickness. Make sure you have the same measuring protocol for circumferences done at the same time of day and for women at the same stage of your cycle, ideally 1-2 weeks after the start of menses.

Gain Muscle Faster

As an intermediate or advanced lifter, to build more noticeable muscle, your scale weight will have to increase. You might need to accept some fat gain during this time and then make sure you’re training to take full advantage of this. As much as it is possible to gain muscle mass when in lower calorie intakes, it’s not optimal and if you don’t want to leave any gains on the table then eating in a surplus energy intake is going to be necessary. Anything over a 1:1 ratio of muscle to fat mass gained is excessive, when trying to cut fat it’s almost certain you will lose muscle so the key is to stay as close to your target body fat percentage as possible as you increase muscle mass. Having access to more accurate forms of measuring like Dexa or Bod pods can be really helpful.

Getting your diet aligned to your training and recovery is also important. Optimising a workout to maximise hypertrophy by cycling total set volume (mentioned above), logging load selection and your proximity to failure as well as keeping track of your session RPE (rating of perceived exercise). Using a flexible training template to allow for rest days and using deloads and recovery protocols to ensure training sessions are optimised. Plus tracking your nutritional intake and tweaking it if you feel you need to increase or decrease calories based on monthly/bi monthly progress. This level of attention is the difference between seeing modest-mediocre results and truly optimizing your outcomes.

I’m sorry to say that losing fat is easy, certainly from a scientific standpoint (I appreciate that behaviour and physiological aspects are the biggest challenges), but lean muscle gains are a far harder task, but you can do anything you want if you put your mind to it.