The science of beginner growth
Having looked at what exactly beginner gains are in the first part of this series of articles and looked at three models that can be used to make a relatively good prediction of potential gains during the first year of training (and beyond), in this second part of this series of articles I will look in more detail at why many exercisers report larger gains during their beginner phase and why beginner gains end after about a year.
Why do the calculated values for possible beginner gains seem too low compared to what many claim to have achieved?
Depending on who you follow online, the values for beginner gains given in the first part of this article series may seem low. It's not uncommon to read of people claiming to have gained over 20 kilos of pure muscle mass during their beginner phase. Even though these people are probably not lying - i.e. they really have put on that much weight - they have not built up those amounts of muscle mass. The reason for this is that much of the weight you build during a mass-building phase is not muscle.
A good example of this fact comes from a study conducted by scientists at the University of São Paulo (2). The scientists had 10 untrained men aged 27 complete a two-day-a-week lower body strength training program for a period of 10 weeks.
The training sessions consisted of 3 sets each of leg presses, leg extensions and leg curls with 9 to 12 repetitions each until muscle failure. The subjects were told to avoid any other training for the duration of the study and to maintain their normal dietary habits apart from consuming a whey protein shake after their training sessions.
The scientists measured the muscle circumferences of the exercisers and used ultrasound measurements to determine muscle thickness. In addition, blood tests were carried out for various markers of muscle damage.
The scientists found that muscle thickness had increased by 17% above baseline after 3 weeks, but was only 14% above baseline after 10 weeks of training. How could these exercisers have built more muscle after 3 weeks than after 10 weeks? Had they lost muscle during the last 7 weeks of the study?
No, of course not. The most likely explanation for these bizarre results is that most of the increase in muscle thickness at the beginning of the study was due to increased inflammation and water retention in the muscle, not true muscle growth.
The scientists also found that blood markers for muscle damage and inflammation were significantly higher after 3 weeks than before the start of the study and that they had dropped back to normal after a further 7 weeks of training. For this reason, they hypothesized that the short-term greater increase in muscle thickness after 3 weeks of training was due to inflammation, swelling and fluid retention rather than an increase in muscle fiber size.
As the exercisers got used to the workouts, swelling, inflammation and fluid retention disappeared and a clear picture emerged of how much muscle the young men had really built up.
Another reason that many novice exercisers experience rapid weight gain is that they consume a lot more calories than usual. This also increases body weight through increased water retention, which is especially true if they are eating a lot of carbohydrates and a lot of sodium (salt). Simply eating more of any type of food will cause you to gain weight because you are carrying more food around in your digestive tract.
All in all, this increase in calorie intake can easily make you gain 4 to 5 kilos of body weight within days, and this body weight will disappear just as quickly when you go back to your normal eating habits.
You will also hear people claim to have gained 10, 15 or even 20 kilos of muscle after years of training with weights.
There are two plausible explanations for this:
- They did more or less everything wrong in the gym and kitchen before and experienced an insane growth spurt after optimizing their training and diet (more on this shortly)
- They started using steroids.
The bottom line is that you can expect beginner gains to last for about a year, with most of those gains coming during the first six months. As a man, you can expect to gain about 10 to 12 kilos of muscle during your first year of training, while women can expect to gain 5 to 6 kilos.
Why do beginner gains end?
It's clear that you can't keep building mountains of muscle forever, but...why not? Why do beginner gains plateau so quickly after just one year? Why can't you expect to build muscle at more or less the same rate until you eventually reach your genetic limit?
The answer can be found in a concept called the stress-recovery-adaptation cycle. This process describes how your body becomes stronger in response to different stressors such as strength training. The following diagram illustrates this concept:
As you can see, each stressor causes a temporary decrease in your performance, which is followed by a period of regeneration during which the body adapts to the stressor by becoming stronger to better cope with similar stressors in the future, resulting in increased performance. This pattern applies to all types of scenarios. If a particular activity is new to you - whether it's driving, playing golf or training with weights - your first attempts will be stressful.
It will feel unfamiliar, you will feel weak and you will probably be exhausted by the end of the session. If you take your foot off the gas for a while and allow your body to adapt, you'll recover and get better at your new endeavor. In order for your body to continue to adapt and continually get stronger/better at something, you need to continually expose it to increasing levels of stress.
Once you have reached a high level of skill, competence or muscle building, it becomes harder and harder to recover/recover and adapt to the increasing stress. Finding the ideal balance between enough stress for continued growth and enough recovery for adaptation will become increasingly difficult and the rate of your progress will shrink from giant strides to baby steps.
If you want to understand why your beginner gains will eventually come to an end, replace the word "stressor" with "training with weights" and the word "adaptations" with "muscle gains" and you'll know what I'm talking about.
Your body can only handle a certain amount of stress before it can't adapt any further. Let's dig a little deeper and look at what this process looks like within the body.
One of the ways the body adapts to training with weights is by ramping up a process known as muscle protein synthesis, which is responsible for building new muscle protein from amino acids. Amino acids are small molecules that make up all proteins in the body and these body proteins are continuously broken down and rebuilt in the body.
These processes of synthesis and degradation are active simultaneously at all times, but their extent varies. For example, when you are in a state of fasting, the rate of protein breakdown increases (3) and when this rate exceeds the rate of protein synthesis, this results in muscle breakdown. This state is also known as a negative nitrogen balance.
If you eat protein, your rate of protein synthesis increases (4) and if this rate exceeds the rate of protein breakdown, this results in muscle gains. This state is also known as a positive nitrogen balance.
In this way, your body moves back and forth between anabolic and catabolic states every day. If you want to build muscle, then over time the rate of protein synthesis needs to be higher on average than the rate of protein breakdown. The best way to increase the rate of protein synthesis is to subject your muscles to stress by moving heavy weights.
After a strength training session, the rate of protein synthesis remains elevated for up to 72 hours (5). During this time, your body's muscle-building machinery is running at full speed and will do everything in its power to build new muscle tissue and prepare your body for the next training session. Assuming you're eating enough protein and carbohydrates and getting enough sleep - the "regeneration" part of the stress-recovery-adaptation process - the net result of this will be muscle gain over time.
However, over time your body will also become much more efficient at repairing the damage caused by training with weights, and the increase in protein synthesis rate after a training session with weights will become increasingly short-lived.
A good example of this phenomenon comes from a study conducted by scientists at the University of São Paulo (7). The scientists combed through studies that looked at the rate of muscle protein synthesis after exercise in trained and untrained men. They only considered studies that looked at the extent of actual muscle protein synthesis and not body-wide protein synthesis, as the latter also includes protein synthesis in the liver, blood and other organs.
Based on the five studies that met their criteria, the scientists found that there was a much greater and longer-lasting increase in muscle protein synthesis after exercise in novice exercisers compared to experienced exercisers. The graph below, taken from this study, illustrates this.
The broken line, marked by squares, shows the percentage increase in muscle protein synthesis rate after training in untrained men. The broken line, marked by triangles, shows the corresponding percentage increase after training in experienced exercisers.
As you can clearly see, the rate of muscle protein synthesis in untrained men initially rises steeply immediately after training, before continuing to rise at a lower rate for around a further 10 hours, after which it remains significantly above baseline for a further two days. The scientists found that in several studies it took three days before muscle protein synthesis in novice exercisers dropped back to baseline after exercise.
In experienced strength athletes, on the other hand, the muscle protein synthesis rate reaches its zenith around 5 hours after training, drops rapidly shortly afterwards and returns to its initial value around one day later.
When evaluating the overall increase in muscle protein synthesis experienced by both groups during the hours following their training sessions, untrained athletes experienced a 4,000% increase in muscle protein synthesis, whereas this increase was only 1,500% in experienced strength athletes.
One way to overcome this problem of decreasing increases in muscle protein synthesis in more advanced exercisers is to increase your training frequency and volume. Instead of training each muscle group once or twice a week or once every three to four days, train them two or three times a week or every two to three days. This way you can increase your muscle protein synthesis rate more often per week, which will lead to more muscle growth over time.
Another way to increase protein synthesis as a more experienced exerciser is to give your muscles a stronger growth stimulus. In other words, this means performing more sets (7).
However, both of these techniques - increasing frequency and volume - will only work up to a certain point. You can only train a muscle group more often and with more sets to a certain extent before you will experience symptoms of overtraining.
In addition to this, each additional unit of effort you put into your training will produce smaller and smaller results the closer you get to your genetic potential.
A meta-analysis conducted by James Krieger concluded that you can expect an increase in muscle growth of roughly 40% if you perform two or three sets per muscle group per week instead of one (8). If you were to increase your workload to 4 to 6 sets per muscle group per week, you could expect a further 30% increase in muscle growth.
In other words, you could expect about 70% more growth if you do four to six times as much work. This pattern continues as you become more advanced, with each additional set resulting in a smaller additional growth spurt.
This is the fundamental reason why your beginner gains will end after about a year:
It takes about the same amount of time for your body to adapt to training with weights, and once it does, the rate of your muscle gains will be significantly lower for the rest of your training career. After this 'honeymoon phase' is over, the hard, arduous work begins and the best you can hope for from this point onwards is small, incremental gains in muscle mass year on year.
If this has taken some of the wind out of your sails, don't despair now. Nothing of real value has ever been easy to achieve and everyone who has naturally built a great body has had to go down the same path.
In this final installment of this article series, we'll look at whether it's possible to miss out on those beginner gains and how you should proceed once the beginner gains period is over
Source: https://www.muscleforlife.com/newbie-gains/
By Amistead Legge