How long it takes to build muscle is something everyone thinks about when they’re starting a fitness routine. I certainly thought a lot about this at first as I was going through the same workouts day after day, wondering when my work would finally begin to produce noticeable results, and I’ll bet you have as well. While a straightforward answer to this question would greatly help with setting expectations for achieving your goals, the truth is that this requires a much deeper discussion, which we’ll dive into in this post.
The Honest Truth
As much as I would like to provide some sort of general timeline for the muscle growth process, everyone’s journey is unique. “It depends” is probably the last answer you want to hear, but that’s the honest truth when it comes to how long it’ll take for you to see visible progress. Working out isn’t a standardized process in the slightest, and is instead a very different experience from person to person. To make matters more confusing, even with all else being equal, your rate of muscle growth naturally slows down as you progress.
In theory, there are ranges for what can be expected at different levels of experience. For example, beginners have the capacity to build 2-4 pounds of muscle a month as a result of newbie gains, whereas more intermediate and advanced lifters may only reasonably expect to put on 1-2 pounds of muscle a month at best. Whether you can actually attain or even come close to these rates, however, is heavily dependent on how well you address a multitude of factors, which I’ve summarized below.
Factors that Determine Muscle Growth
How Frequently You Train
The first factor that’ll heavily influence your rate of progression in the gym is how often you work out. If you go to the gym very sporadically, the reality is that your muscles won’t receive enough steady stimulation and activation to grow.
Generally speaking, the more frequently and consistently you train, the faster you’ll build muscle. All else equal, working out a muscle twice a week is likely to result in faster development than only working it out once a week. It’s worth noting, however, that sufficient rest is necessary for muscles to fully recover and get stronger. Training a muscle too frequently, such as every day or even every two days, prevents it from properly repairing and will actually impede muscle growth.
To balance the need for consistent training and adequate rest, have a workout rotation that gives you a few days between when you train the same muscle group. Be sure to also incorporate rest days to allow for full body recovery, which can be crucial for maximizing your strength development.
How Properly You Train
If you train all the time, but don’t do so correctly, this will severely limit how much muscle you can build and how quickly you can do so. When doing any exercise, there are a few things you always need to be cognizant of: how good your form is and whether you’re targeting the right muscle.
It’s important to maintain proper form during any exercise because if you don’t, your body will naturally try to recruit stronger muscles to assist with the exercise. As a result, this ends up taking the focus away from the muscle you’re trying to strengthen and interferes with its growth.
In addition, being conscious of what parts of your body an exercise actually targets is another key aspect. If you don’t feel tension in the specific muscle you’re attempting to train, then you’re probably not training it very effectively. While this isn’t the same thing as form, it’s closely related because most of the time, the better your technique is, the more you should feel the right muscles being activated. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, I’ve written another post that goes more into depth about this concept of training with a focus on muscle activation.
With all that being said, guidelines for proper form can only be applied broadly and can’t account for the fact that everyone’s body works differently. In some cases, even if you have good form, you still may need to tweak certain angles, positions, and motions to optimize an exercise for you. This will make your workouts significantly more effective and lead to quicker and better muscle development.
How Hard You Train
Assuming you’re working out regularly and successfully directing tension to the desired muscles with any given exercise, the next component in determining how quickly you can build muscle mass is the extent to which you challenge your muscles.
Muscles don’t grow based on how many total reps of an exercise you do; they grow based on how heavily they’re exerted. You can do tons of reps, but if you’re using a light weight and you’re not exhausted by the end, none of it will be meaningful in increasing your strength and muscle mass. Therefore, when performing an exercise, don’t just aim to hit a certain number of reps; try to find a good balance between using a heavy enough weight and doing a sufficient number of reps in order to fully activate and deplete your muscles.
How Well You Take Care of Your Body
To no surprise, what you do in the gym plays a significant role in how quickly you gain muscle. However, what you do to take care of your body outside of the gym matters just as much.
This includes things like sleep and hydration, but most importantly, I’m referring to nutrition. Proper nutrition allows you to perform at your best when working out, but it also provides the body with enough energy and nutrients to recover and build muscle. If you want to increase your strength in the gym as quickly as possible, make sure you’re getting enough calories and protein on a daily basis.
On its own, eating enough doesn’t contribute to muscle growth at all. Yet, it’s a crucial aspect when combined with a proper workout routine because without proper calorie and protein intake, it’ll be incredibly difficult to build muscle no matter how well you address other factors related to your training, so your diet is something you certainly want to pay close attention to.
A Better Way to Measure Muscle Growth
As you can see, maximizing your rate of muscle growth requires managing quite a host of factors. Even then, I can’t guarantee that you’ll make a certain amount of progress in a specific amount of time, but at least you’ll be giving yourself the best chance you can.
Although what you do will largely determine how successful you’ll be, it’s also important to define what success actually looks like in this context. If you’ve been following the guide above for a while and still aren’t satisfied with your progress, it’s also possible that your expectations may not be completely realistic.
Even with proper training and nutrition, it can still take several months to achieve discernible muscle growth; you can’t look at yourself in the mirror and expect to see changes by the day.
Instead, a better way to tell whether or not you’re gaining strength and building muscle is if you’re able to gradually increase the weights you use, number of reps you can perform, and overall intensity of your workouts. This is something that I cover in more detail in my post 4 Signs of Muscle Growth to Track Your Progress in the Gym.
