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How much muscle can an average women put on in an year.
🕑 Added 2023-05-21 06:30:22 +0000 UTCHow long does it take to build a noticeable amount of muscle? And how big and strong can you become during your first year? maybe you’ve been lifting for a while and you’re wondering how strong you should be by this point.
Most women are trying to get “toned,” and lose some fat. You know the deal. They don’t want to get too bulky.
But what if you want to build muscle as a female? What if you want to become strong? That changes things.
•HOW MUCH MUSCLE CAN THE AVERAGE WOMAN GAIN IN A YEAR?
According to the CDC, the average woman weighs around 170 pounds by the time she reaches adulthood, which represents a BMI of about 30. According to Steven Heymsfield, author of Human Body Composition, around 30% of the average woman’s body weight is muscle mass. This means that the average woman starts off with roughly fifty pounds of muscle.
The next thing we need to consider is a woman’s muscle-building genetic potential—how much muscle mass can her frame hold? It seems like the average woman’s frame can hold around seventy pounds of muscle, meaning that over the course of her lifetime, she can “only” gain another twenty pounds of muscle. (Twenty pounds of muscle is quite a lot, but it probably pales in comparison to the amount of muscle that a naturally thin woman can build.)
During her first year of lifting, the average woman is able to get about halfway to her genetic potential, gaining around ten pounds of muscle. In her second year, that rate of muscle growth will be cut in half, and then cut in half again the next year. Like so.
This initial explosion of growth happens because when she starts lifting weights, her muscles are still extremely sensitive to this new stimulus and still have incredible growth potential. This period of rapid muscle growth is called newbie gains, and it allows the average woman to gain around a pound of muscle per month. She might even be able to lose some fat while doing it.
This rapid growth is possible because her muscle fibres are still small, making it easy for her nuclei to manage them. In fact, her nuclei are already capable of handling significantly larger areas, so her muscle fibres can simply expand, like so.
After a few months, she’ll quickly reach the point where her myonuclear domains are maximized, at which point building muscle starts to get harder. It becomes difficult to gain muscle without gaining weight overall, making simultaneous muscle growth and fat loss almost impossible.
Now she needs to bring new nuclei into her muscle fibres before they can grow any bigger. Sort of like needing to hire more managers as your company grows. It looks like this.
Admittedly, this example is oversimplified, and other known factors contribute to the slowing rate of muscle growth (such as the repeated bout effect), but the main takeaway here is that our muscles grow quickly at first, and then as we get closer to our genetic potential, our rate of muscle growth slows.
So, all things considered, most experts agree that the average woman can expect to gain around around ten pounds of muscle during her first year. And to be clear, ten pounds is a lot of muscle. That’s enough to add a few inches around her hips and shoulders, dramatically transforming her physique.
Then in the years that follow, she gets closer to her genetic potential, and it gets harder to gain more muscle and strength, which sounds like a total bummer, but keep in mind that by then she already has a totally killer physique, so there isn’t as much of a rush to keep improving.
Fight to get stronger. To gain muscle, you have to progressively lift heavier and heavier weights. If you start off doing goblet squats with 30 pounds, next week you should be fighting to lift 35. And then 40. Then you switch to a front squat with 45 pounds, and so on. That’s how you gradually work your way up to a 245-pound back squat (which how much you’ll be able to squat a few years from now).Gain weight with a calorie surplus. If you aren’t gaining at least a pound on the scale every month, you won’t be able to gain muscle mass anywhere near this quickly. This explains why most women won’t gain anywhere even close to ten pounds of muscle during their first year of lifting weights—they aren’t gaining enough weight overall.
