How Long To Build Muscle Naturally?
Answer:
In the first two months of training, provided you are on a good program with a good diet, and getting sufficient rest, you could expect to gain anywhere between 6 – 7lb a month. This will taper off, becoming less and less in time, though.
At around month 3 – 4, in my opinion (and I dare say most honest, realistic natural bodybuilders opinions) gaining true lean muscle mass at the rate of 3 – 4lb a month is a good result for the next few months.
By month 7 – 12, you can expect your gains to have tapered off to maybe 1.5 – 2lb a month.
Is this a promise?
Not a chance. There are no promises in bodybuilding. This is merely an educated estimation based upon research and personal experience. And, I might add, my personal experience (and that of others) may hold absolutely no baring on what you can achieve. You may achieve much more, you may achieve much less.
What I will say is, don’t be fooled into thinking you can gain massive amounts of muscle mass in ridiculously short spaces of time. There are methods which will shock your system into growing a lot more muscle after your initial beginner gains have tapered off, but, you won’t ever grow like you did in the beginning again, without steroids.
The confusion about muscle weight:
There is no true way to measure weight of actual muscle fibre. Many people report erroneously large muscle gains, when what they have probably experienced is something of the following:
- Super-saturation from intentional / unintentional carb-loading: Let me tell you, the amount of glycogen you can cram into your muscles adds a fair amount of weight and size to your muscles. But, it’s not actual muscle fibre growth. And, within just a week or so of not eating so many carbs, it’s not uncommon to see a significant drop in body weight and size.
- Water retention from creatine: Creatine use is very popular among bodybuilders, and, it’s not uncommon for a bodybuilder to add between 5 – 10lb of weight (and report amazing size gains) in a ridiculously short time from using creatine. The problem is… those gains are likely 90% water retention – because that’s what creatine does, it makes you store much more water.
- Big increases in body fat: When training to gain muscle, adding fat isn’t avoidable completely. Most people gain a fair amount of fat when bulking because they aren’t careful enough with their diet. But, unless the trainee was very lean to begin with, sometimes the amount of fat they put on isn’t too noticeable to the eye. And, if they haven’t been checking with body fat callipers so don’t know what they were before, often mistakenly believe they’ve made much greater muscle gains than they really have – when the truth is, a large amount of it came from nothing but fat.
Don’t despair, this is what you need to do…
I know you are probably a little disappointed by the seemingly small numbers in actual muscle growth, but know that it takes time. Few people grow to the miraculous sizes people on the internet claim they did in just weeks. But, the guy who takes it slow and steady can’t go wrong.
The best thing you can do to get an edge is this:
- Start out by losing fat until you are pretty lean (not abs lean, but still lean.)
- Begin long, slow, clean bulk that could last a year or two without adding much fat.
The beauty of bulking slowly and watching fat levels is that you can continually add small amounts of muscle, and, never have to worry about losing much by cutting for 6 – 12 months at the end… because you already have a low enough body fat that you can cut in maybe just 2 months and you’re laughing.
