How Fast Can You Gain Muscle Mass? :

I was talking to my girlfriend the other day about getting in shape. She's a yoga instructor and is in great shape, but she has very little actual power. By power I mean explosive strength, the ability to manifest strength with speed. While she has phenomenal core strength, balance, flexibility and stamina, she's not very good at anaerobic exercise, or general lifting or resistance work. So I suggested she try some weight training to balance her out, and she said no, because she didn't want to get all jacked and ripped and covered in veins. Which lead me to explain how hard it is to gain muscle, but she remained dubious. How quickly can somebody gain muscle? What is the science behind weight lifting and muscle gain? In today's article we're going to take a closer look, so read on!

If you read the muscle magazines, you can find claims that people can gain 30 lbs of muscle if they just follow this one unique special four week routine. You see hundreds of supplements promising to help you gain 5lbs of muscle in one weekend, or other fantastic claims. Is this possible? Can you pack muscle on that quickly?

Let's look at the facts. Your average male trainee who is doing everything right, from nutrition to the right amount of exercise to sleeping properly and the rest of it can at best pack on about half a pound of muscle a week, which means about two pounds of muscle a month. A woman can do about half of that, so if a woman works out as hard as she can and does everything right, she can put on about a pound of muscle in a month.

Let's take the long term view on that. What that means is that if this man does everything absolutely right for a whole year, he can gain 24 pounds of muscle mass. A woman can put on about twelve pounds of muscle, and when you step back and think about it, that's actually a lot of muscle. It's just not the ridiculous rate that all these magazines and products seem to promise and guarantee. Which means that my girlfriend's worries that she would wake up huge one day, a veritable she-Hulk just because she picked up some free weights are largely delusional. Don't go listening to all the advertising; instead just realize that adding muscle takes a lot of work.