Bulking Up Fast Or Slow

When I first started out I was very young and impressionable and as a result was taken in by a lot of the stories that were published in the bodybuilding magazines. I used to read advertisements about people who had literally transformed their body in as little as 8 weeks and it really got me down because I wasn't achieving the same results. I now realise that the majority of the publications on the subject of muscle gain and fat loss are sponsored by the very company manufacture sports products and supplements. It's obvious now that the articles were incredibly biased in an attempt to get people to buy their products; they were sponsored ads and articles. Having spent the last six years training hard and trainging with others to figure out a tried and tested methodology for gaining muscle, I now understand how long it takes for changes in physique to take place and what a healthy natural trainer should aim for in terms of bodyweight changes and strength increases on a weekly and monthly basis. In this article, I'm going to quickly discuss my thoughts on timescales and give a few pointers to new trainers.

The important thing to realise when training to gain muscle is that the rate of improvment at any given time is i) subjective and ii) dependant on the level of the athlete in question. That means that if your friend is growing faster than you, that doesn't mean you're necessarily doing anything wrong and that if you're a beginner in the weight room you should be able to progress much faster than if you had 5 years training under your belt.

For a beginner who is looking to pack on serious amounts of mass in as short time frame as possible I suggest taking a logical approach of 1 to 1.5lbs per week in progression on the scales. That should equate to roughly 500 calories in excess per day of what you require to maintain. It is extremely important for you to realise that if you start to eat way in excess of your body's requirements, the process for building muscle doesn't speed up beyond a certain point. In other words, if you stuff your face, you'll get fat, not muscly.

It is possible for a newbie to put somewhere in the region of 2 stone on in the first three months of a training regime if everything is spot on and optimal. That means clear and logical weekly progressions in weight for each exercise on a weekly basis, incremental calories per week to equate for the new weight added from the week before and sufficient rest for your body to recover. At the end of a three month period, you should definitely take a week off to let your body recover from the beating it's just taken. Remember you don't grow in the gym, only out of it.

An advanced athlete may only gain in terms of strength and muscularity once a month or even less. I run what's called a dual factor periodised routine because this is the only way I can now make consistent gains in strength and consequently muscle mass. The dual factor routine lasts for a period of 9 weeks, which means I supposedly make a strength increase of somewhere in the region of 10lbs every 9 - 10 weeks (the extra week accounts for the deload at the end of the training cycle).

If you read about people gaining more than the figures that I have quoted, you should be extremely sceptical. It is possible to gain more, but I'd suggest that the trainee in question is either assisted (anabolic steroids) or has incredibly genes packed that give him/her a more than average percentage of fast twitch muscle fibres that are condusive to maximum muscle growth.

I hope that clears up the timescale matter for you. See you in the squat rack!