How Long Does It Take For Muscles To Grow
"May I know how long does it take for my muscles to grow visibly?" Well, as a professional fitness personal trainer, I get variations of this question from almost every new client.
So how can I answer that question because there are also many variable factors like for instance, if you are fat, you can't see your muscle growth unless you take the fat off or what is being visible is subjective from person to person.
For the hardgainers (people who have difficulty in gaining weight), gaining weight or muscles can be very a difficult and tedious process without professional help. For the genetically endowed, muscle growth can be very fast while some others may make only little progress or even no improvement at all (the latter being lack of muscle building education).
Therefore, if you are wondering how long does it take to grow muscles, then I must be forthright with you and tell you that there is just no direct answer.
However, the good news is that if you eat and exercise correctly, your muscles will definitely grow, even for hardgainers.
Unknown to many people, muscles do not grow in a linear process but in a series of spurts and as such, no matter how hard you workout your muscles and how much you eat, your muscles will probably not grow at predictable pace. I know that this fact will surprise many people.
There are many more reasons influencing your muscle growth and not everyone will build muscles at the same rate even if they are working out with the same weight, exercises and eating the same food.
Some people are genetically predisposed to growing muscles and will see amazing results after only just a few months. We all know that the Mesomorphs (sporty body frame) will grow muscles faster than the Ectomorphs (slender body frame).
Your rate of muscle growth will also depend largely on how close you are to the upper limit of what you are naturally capable of in terms of growing muscle mass. This phenomenon is known as the adaptation ceiling.
What this means is that closer you are to this upper adaptation limit, the slower your muscle will grow. To put it in simpler terms, someone who has been working out with weights for a few years will grow muscles much more slowly than a novice who is new to weight lifting.
Another fact is that it is not uncommon for people to gain body fat when they are growing muscles. The amount of fat you gain will depend on how much you eat, what you eat and also on how lean you were when you first started to fuel your muscle growth with what you eat. Eating to propel muscle growth is commonly referred to as "overfeeding".
Numerous studies have shown that during a period of overfeeding, you will gain more muscle and less fat if you are the lean body type. During the cutting phase to get rid of body fat to show muscle definition, it is known that fatter people tend to lose more fat and less muscle when they cut, but the leaner ones will find it harder to lose fat without losing muscle.
Why does this happen? Well, it could be merely be psychological.
Take for example when you have worked very hard to get your well defined six-pack abs, then you will not want to put the fat on again and obscure your hard earned abs and thus you may be reluctant to eat the amount of food necessary to gain significant muscle growth. Make sense?
Another reason could be hormonal imbalances as some studies do show a correlation between low body fat and low testosterone (male hormone) levels. If your testosterone is low, it is also difficult for you to grow muscle mass.
So how long does it take to see muscle growth will depend very much on your genes and many other factors besides merely exercising with the proper workouts and eating correctly.
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