What’s a typical rate of muscle gain? Every body responds a little differently to strength training, so the short answer is “it depends.” One review of research on how resistance training impacts muscle growth found a range of amounts for muscle gained over time.
But in general, the average exerciser can expect to gain anywhere from a half pound to 2 pounds of muscle in a month of training, according to the American Council on Exercise.
How Does Muscle Growth Happen?
If you’ve chosen muscle building as a fitness priority, it helps to understand how your body puts that extra muscle on — otherwise you might find yourself doing things that are actually counterproductive to your goals.
The nutshell version, according to research, is that intense exercise like resistance training activates satellite cells on the outsides of your muscle fibers that then multiply and fuse, forming new muscle fibers and repairing old ones.
But this doesn’t happen during your workout — research highlights that it happens during the rest period afterward. That’s why a mindset of “more is always better” can be counterproductive when it comes to weight training.
The truth is that more stimulus usually does provoke more results, but only if you also allow your muscles sufficient rest and recovery time in between bouts. Otherwise, you’re not giving your muscles time to put themselves back together.
How to Track Your Muscle Gain
Individual strength and hypertrophy — muscle growth — responses can vary quite a bit, even under the same stimuli. Your age, sex, and training status can all affect your personal rate of muscle gain, according to research.
So what’s the best way to estimate the amount of muscle you’ve gained, especially in the face of sometimes contradictory studies about which methods yield the most muscle growth?
The bathroom scale probably isn’t it. Retained water, hormonal changes, shifts in body fat, and even what you had for breakfast can cause frequent weight fluctuations, notes Cleveland Clinic, so weighing yourself isn’t always the best way to measure how your muscles have grown.
Tracking how much weight you can lift is one simple, if also less accurate way to approximate your muscle gains. Although the relationship between muscle strength and muscle size varies from person to person, increases in muscle strength correlate somewhat to increases in muscle size.
Keep in mind that more research backs the relationship between muscle density and size, but measuring muscle density isn’t possible for most people to do at home.
A pound of muscle takes up less space on your body than a pound of fat, according to Cleveland Clinic. So even if the scale doesn’t budge, tracking how your clothes fit can also give you an idea of how your body composition is shifting from adipose (fatty) tissue to muscle.
If you’re really serious about tracking your rate of muscle gain, a flexible measuring tape could be just the tool you need. Measure the circumference of whichever muscles you want to track — for example, your upper arms or thighs — at set points in relation to markers such as the crest of your hipbone or the point of your elbow and the bump at the top of your shoulder.
Write those measurements down and recheck them periodically, making sure you always measure at the same point in relation to those markers.
Tips for Encouraging Muscle Growth
One way to pack on more muscle is to add sets: A study comparing how personalized and standard approaches to weight training impacted muscle growth found not only that tailored programs were more effective, but that moderately increasing the number of sets you perform — by about 20 percent — could promote the most muscle growth.
Other research backs up the idea that the number of sets you perform is a good way to keep track of your training volume, or the overall amount of weight you lift, in pursuit of muscle growth.
Adding workouts for the week could help, too. Research suggests that the effects of strength training two or four times per week aren’t much different when the overall volume is the same, but adding a workout session that increases your volume could support strength and muscle gains.
Research published in 2018 highlights the importance of allowing each muscle group to rest for at least 48 hours between intense workouts.
Any increases in workout frequency or intensity should be gradual so your body has a chance to adapt. Doing too much too fast often leads to injury, and that’s guaranteed to set back your muscle-building journey.
Nutrition to Fuel Muscle Gains
Just hitting the gym isn’t enough to build bigger muscles. Your body also needs the right nutrients — in particular, protein — to create the new muscle tissue.
There’s some debate on how much protein you really need, as noted by research. A systematic review and meta-analysis on the amount of protein necessary to support muscle mass found that consuming 1.6 grams (g) per kilogram (kg) of body weight was enough to maintain and build muscle mass.
Other research highlights that protein recommendations and intake for athletes typically ranges from 1.2 to 1.7 g per kg — or 2.2 pounds — of body weight. The exact amount you need can depend on factors including whether your workouts skew toward endurance or strength training.
For most people, the math is much easier if you just convert your body weight to kilograms. For a rough and ready conversion, divide your weight in pounds by 2.2 to get your weight in kilograms.
For example, if you weigh 150 pounds, that works out to 150 ÷ 2.2 = 68.2 kilograms. So your ideal protein intake would be between 1.2 × 68.2 = 81.8 g per day (a low limit) and 1.7 × 68.2 = 115.9 g per day (a higher limit).
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