Some people have always said that the maximum amount of muscle you can gain in a month is 1-2 pounds. That’s a lot of lean tissue to gain for someone just starting out in bodybuilding.

Imagine if you gain 2 pounds per month in a year that’s 24 pounds. Muscle gain claims like this often encourage the new bodybuilder to really hit the gym hard in their first few weeks.

Usually, the first five pounds come extremely quickly for the young bodybuilder’s body. The body adapts, hardens and begins to take shape slightly.

The lifter feels the difference and continues training. After 2-3 months, the novice lifter usually stops gaining weight and becomes frustrated. The promise of endless muscle growth from supplement companies confuses you. He watches his suffocating progress and eventually gets discouraged. He then stops lifting weights altogether.

As with many things in life, the beginning bodybuilder forgets the principles of patience, dedication and perseverance. In a way, this is the fault of the popular media. Gains of huge amounts of muscle in just a few months are promised on every newsstand and bodybuilding website on the internet.

Twenty to twenty five pounds in 8 weeks are common claims. But in reality, the amount of lean muscle someone can build over a period of time is not consistent.

In the first 12 months of lifting, gains of 20 to 30 pounds are commonly heard. Although they usually forget to mention that these people were actually already starting to fill out even if they never lifted weights. Consider a skinny teenager who weighs 145 pounds at a height of just over 6 feet and claims to have gained 20 pounds of muscle in 6 months. He forgets to mention that this happened during his growth phase.

So how much lean muscle weight can someone really gain if their training, sleep and diet are correct? Probably 10 to 20 pounds per year for normal people. Genetic monsters can gain up to 40 pounds of muscle. Earnings in the second year will be half of that. Earnings for the third year were cut in half from the second. And quite possibly it will stop at the end of the fourth year. Gaining 40lbs of muscle naturally in 4 years is amazing and would be a good goal, especially for the young trainee.

Older lifters know that things go much slower as we get older. Without the help of steroids, it would be easy to maintain your weight and reduce body fat. Older lifters often have too much body fat anyway. The gains are half that of a younger lifter, which is tremendous for more mature lifters.

To summarize, teenage weightlifters can expect 20 pounds of muscle in the first year, 10 in the second, and 5 by the end of the third. After that those gains will plateau and become increasingly difficult to come by. Of course, you can constantly train, eat and sleep all the time in those first four years.

Which, my friends, is the truth about how much muscle you can naturally build.