I saw some photos of Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was 16 and he was a skinny kid, by 19 he was built almost as big as he was in his heyday.
Assuming it takes 100 pounds of skeletal muscle to go from skinny to built like a professional bodybuilder, and assuming ideal conditions of proper exercise, drugs, sleep, nutrition, etc how long would it take minimum?
I’ve heard of people building 40 pounds of muscle in a month, but that was muscle memory to rebuild muscle that already existed but was lost due to lack of exercise. Which is different, rebuilding tissue you had in the past is easier.
On a cycle with proper nutrition, sleep, exercise, post cycle recovery, etc building 20 pounds of muscle in 8 weeks is possible. But you need a rest period after, and the bigger you get the slower the gains come.
I grew muscle very fast between the ages of 18 and 21. I think it’s a much greater rate for a young growing man than an adult. Also, he has admitted using drugs during his bodybuilding period, I don’t know exactly when.
According to his model beginners can expect to gain about 2 lbs of muscle mass per month, but after a year of training this would drop closer to 1 lb/month and after 2 years of training you’d only be gaining 0.5 lbs/month.
So unless you hit the genetic jackpot, gaining 100 lbs of muscle naturally will take many years.
If the ads are to be believed, that means I have six more days of being able to kick sand in your face and laugh while I am at the beach with the girl you have a crush on before you become muscular and kick my ass. I’ll take it. I never was one for long range planning anyway.
I don’t think I agree. A newbie can probably gain more than 2 pounds a month, especially if starting from a low baseline. Plus with drugs, 2 lbs a week is possible. At least at first.
Depends a little on how old you are, but 2lbs per month for a beginner (male, anyway) is too low. If you’re a young dude and you go after it, you can do a pound per week pretty reliably. In my early 20s I went from about 135 to 160 in four months, maintaining minimal bodyfat. That was gym for about an hour six days a week, four full meals a day plus 2000 calorie weight gainer (so nasty) every day. I would have put on a lot more had I been doing squats and deadlifts, which I didn’t figure out until later. /sadface
Are we talking HUGE, or just big? You can get pretty jacked in maybe eight months. HUGE will take longer.
Professional bodybuilder size, the genetic limit humans are roughly capable of.
22" arms, 58" chest, 30" thighs, etc on a lean person with a <36" waist. There are some outliers, but no matter what exercise/sleep/drug/nutrition regimen a person undertakes, humans seem to stop growing skeletal muscle around those numbers.
Christian Bale gained 100 pounds after the Machinist to play Bruce Wayne in Batman, going from about 130 to 230 in half a year. From the looks of him after, I’d wager his bodyfat is in the teens so he probably only gained 20-30 lbs of fat.
But he was regaining muscle he had lost before. It is much easier to regain muscle you have lost than to build new muscle.
And Hugh Jackman isn’t really the kind of guy I’m thinking of. Even at his biggest, he wasn’t that big. I’m thinking how long to go from a skinny, regular guy into a professional bodybuilder type with 22" arms. I’m not so much worried about whether the guy is cut or not.
I’m thinking 2 years is probably the minimum. Unless advances in myostatin inhibitors come out, I don’t see people gaining 100 lbs in skeletal muscle in a year.
