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Building Muscle Mass: Factors and Limits
Building muscle mass is often the primary reason people engage in fitness or strength training, and for many men, it’s not fast enough. But what factors determine the pace of muscle growth, and how much muscle mass can you gain in a year if you have training, nutrition, and recovery in order? Let’s delve into the scientific background to maximize muscle mass building.
Realizing Muscle Growth
In general, the increase in muscle mass is referred to as muscle growth. Muscle growth is actually an increase in the size of muscle cells, due to strength training. Muscle growth occurs due to hypertrophy or hyperplasia. Hypertrophy is an increase in muscle size due to the growth of muscle fibers, while hyperplasia is the growth of muscles due to an increase in the number of muscle fibers. When your muscle cells repair and grow larger, your capacity to perform exertions also increases, resulting in more strength.
Strength training is responsible for the damage done to muscle cells, and as a result, the body prepares for the next training session by increasing the size of the muscle cells during recovery. This increases capacity and results in more strength and size.
Factors Influencing Muscle Growth
There are several important factors that play a major role in gaining muscle mass, namely:
- Your natural predisposition
- Your own physical testosterone level
- Structure of your bones
- Distribution and quantity of muscle tissue types
- Recovery, including sleep and rest
- Protein intake
- Carbohydrate and fat intake
- Number of reps performed during workouts
- Intensity of the workouts
- Training method applied
- Variation in your workouts
- Your own motivation
- Your age; the older you get, the less testosterone your body produces
- Number of years of training experience
- Dietary supplements
Naturally, you can accelerate muscle growth by administering anabolic steroids, but we’ll leave that topic out of this article.
Natural Predisposition for Muscle Mass
In the article “How much muscle mass can a human build naturally,” we discuss all the factors involved in gaining muscle mass. This article, as well as the article “Sorry, you just don’t have the genes for muscles,” emphasize the importance of natural predisposition. This is the decisive factor when it comes to muscle growth and indicates how much difference there is between different body types.
Maximum Amount of Muscle Growth
The human body has a limited ability to achieve muscle growth. This is because it depends on the amino acids from your diet. The muscle mass that needs to recover after a strength training workout requires amino acids, which are converted into muscle protein. It is therefore not possible to gain more than 9 kilograms of muscle mass per year naturally. Muscle cells simply cannot grow faster than 30 – 35 grams per day. If all factors were optimal, between 9 and 11 kilograms of muscle mass could be gained per year, but then all factors would have to be optimal.
Often, there is also a difference between athletes who have just started and those who have been training for several years. Athletes who have been training longer need to make more effort to gain muscle mass. This is also called diminished returns.
Muscle Growth in the First Year
When you start strength training, you gain the most muscle mass and muscle growth. The so-called newbie gains. The muscle growth that occurs is mainly due to better muscle coordination and execution of the fitness exercises. After a few weeks of strength training with the right intensity, load, and nutrition, you will notice a significant increase in muscle mass.
Average Muscle Gain for Men
Men can generally gain an average of 2 to 3 kilograms of muscle mass. When male strength athletes set the conditions optimally for themselves, an increase of 3 to 5 kilograms per year is possible.
Average Muscle Gain for Women
Physiologically, women have much lower testosterone levels, the hormone that plays a key role in muscle growth. The average amount of muscle mass women can gain per year ranges between 2 and 3 kilograms in the first year.
Accelerating Muscle Growth
The human body can achieve a greater amount of muscle growth due to hypertrophy or hyperplasia. However, this is a limited capacity. It is not the case that you can grow indefinitely if you train hard and eat well. It is important, however, that this combination is optimal, as the growth of your muscle mass depends on, among other things, the amino acids in your diet. Muscle cells recover because they convert amino acids into muscle proteins.
According to studies at the Colgan Institute of Nutritional Sciences, this is limited to 9 kilograms of lean muscle mass per year. So if you have an increase of 500 grams of muscle mass every month, you will build about 6 kg of muscle mass per year. It is important to note that you clearly measure that it is muscle mass and not other factors that can affect your total body weight, such as water and fat. And 6kg is an extremely good result for many athletes, considering that Arnold Schwarzenegger describes in his book Total Recall that he gained as much as 11 kilograms of lean muscle mass in 1 year. But whether all of this happened naturally is, of course, questionable.
Aside from training, nutrition, and recovery, the pace at which you can build muscle mass also depends heavily on several genetic factors, such as predisposition, bone structure, testosterone level in the body, age, and type of muscle tissue. You can influence this to a limited extent.
Tips for Building Muscle Mass
As you can see, building muscle mass depends on many factors, with a large part being genetic predisposition. To give you a few good tips that you can influence yourself to build muscle mass, consider the following:
- Compound exercises: Compound exercises engage many more muscle fibers and involve more muscle groups than isolation exercises</li >
- Free weights: Use dumbbells and barbells
- Train your legs: Leg exercises are often overlooked, but the legs are extremely important if you want to build muscle mass
- Use the right nutrition and possibly supplements to supplement it, such as protein
