Here’s a question someone sent me: “I read a book called The 4-Hour Body which claims that it’s possible to build 34 pounds of muscle in twenty-eight days. Is this possible? I’ve always heard that 25 pounds of lean muscle is as much as it’s possible to build in a year. How long does it take to gain muscle?
To answer 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 twenty-eight days by following the is total nonsense.
Most people are doing incredibly well to build 34 pounds of muscle over the course of a year, let alone 28 days.
I would love to be able to give you a straightforward answer to your second query. Alas, there isn’t one.
The speed at which it’s possible to build muscle depends on a number of things, including genetics, training age, diet, the effectiveness of your training routine and so on.
If you want a rough idea about how fast it’s possible to build muscle, the average beginner will gain somewhere between 2 and 5 pounds of muscle each month during the first few months of training with weights. However, it’s important to remember that gaining muscle is not a linear process, and you won’t keep gaining size at the same rate indefinitely.
Over the course of a year you’re looking at gaining somewhere between 20-25 pounds of muscle. This averages out at approximately 1.5-2 pounds of muscle per month.
How fast you can put on 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 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 guys, both with a body fat percentage of fifteen percent. The first man is six foot four inches and weighs 200 pounds. This means he has around one hundred and seventy pounds of muscle mass. The second guy is 5 foot six inches and weighs one hundred and fifty pounds, which means he has around one hundred and twenty eight pounds of muscle mass. All other things being equal, the taller man with more muscle will gain muscle mass more quickly 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. If you try to lose fat and gain muscle at the same time, your muscle-building results will come more slowly than if you’d focused only on building 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 two or three years of serious training under their belts.