Question Of The Week: How Long Does It Take To Put On Muscle?
How long does it take to lose weight? How long does it take to gain weight? One of the most frequently asked questions, in fact, is how long does it take to put on muscle? Having been a personal trainer in South Austin for the past 22 years, I am very used to these questions. People want instant results. It’s natural for us not to want to wait around for what we truly desire, but it’s a question that’s nearly impossible to answer.
Asking me, or anyone for that matter, how long does it take to put on muscle, is like asking someone what will I be doing with my life 20 years from now? It may seem a silly analogy, but pause for a moment to consider how many variables need to be considered. There’s what the trainee can control, which is nutrition, effort, and consistency, but what is totally out of their control, however, is genetics.
Asking a personal trainer how long does it take to put on muscle is going to get you the truthful response, which is the one I have written, or some generalized statement of how much muscle someone can put on in a year that is based on nothing more than speculation and/or misinformation. Certainly, we can reference statistics and offer up those values as a response, but that doesn’t answer the question of how long does it take to put muscle on YOU. I Googled the question of how long does it take to put on muscle, and the top results were astoundingly humorous. One website suggested you can add 5 pounds off muscle per year. This is completely erroneous, even if the trainee were eating flawlessly, taking steroids in large quantities, training like a beast, and resting sufficiently in between. It just isn’t going to happen.
Since the majority of our body’s composition is water, if you were to weigh yourself after a year of weight training and try to figure out how much muscle you actually put on, not just how much you weigh, that would be a tricky thing involved far more rigorous testing protocols than simply stepping on a scale, or even getting an accurate body fat measurement.
For those in a hurry to get bigger, I would suggest you take a good long look at your nutrition, a realistic look at your exercise regimen, and make some changes. Clean up the diet, hit the gym like you mean it, and then continue, even when you don’t feel like it. The only way top get more muscle on your frame is to eat and lift more. Simple as that. Supplements and drugs aside, without the extra food, and extra working out, you won’t grow from where you currently are plateaued. How long does it take to put on muscle? A very long time if you don’t follow the protocol, or a lot quicker if you do. If you can gain 10 to 20 pounds in a year, while maintaining a low body fat percentage, you’re doing something right. We can’t definitively say just exactly how much of that is water or muscle, but it is safe to say, however, that a great deal of it will be muscle.
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Andy
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