Question of the Day

I received a lot of questions about how much muscle can be gained. Unfortunately, there is an inflated belief based on marketing campaigns that promise dozens of pounds in a short period of time. But if you really dig into the details, you'll find practical answers simply by looking at what current athletes are doing.
According to this interview with Dave Goodin, a lifetime natural bodybuilder, he has gained about 40 pounds over his 20-year career.

Forty pounds!

Some programs promise this much in three months. Here is an elite athlete at the top of his gain, and he's sharing that, on average, he has gained about 2 pounds of quality muscle mass per year. That breaks down to just fractions per week. Is that something you'll be able to easily measure? Is it pounds per week? Hardly.

Let's take another extreme example: Mr. Olympia Ronnie Coleman. It is beyond the scope of this answer to discuss whether or not he may have had assistance from substances such as steroids or growth hormone ... let's assume he was all natural for a moment. His most recent competition weight was around 300 pounds.

According to his biography, he was 215 in the 1990s. So that would give us a 85 pound increase over 15 years, or about 6 pounds per year.

Even then, with his awesome, top of the game physique, he's averaging less than 1/10th of a pound of muscle per week!

The bottom line is that building muscle takes patience and time. It will not happen overnight. Most people will experience the majority of their gains in the first few years, and then those gains start to dwindle as you reach your genetic potential.

In my own experience, I was able to go from a "skinny" 178 pounds to a bulky 195 pounds in just a few months. However, was it all muscle? Unlikely ... there was definitely some fat in the mix and if I were able to continue those gains consistently, I'd be hundreds of pounds of hulking muscle now, which just isn't the case. When you find the right combination that yields some good growth, don't expect it to last forever ... bodybuilding is a game of constantly changing your strategy to stay one step ahead of your body's natural ability to adapt to just about anything.

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