How do I know what is the limit of muscle mass I can gain? How do I know what is the maximum number of lean kilos I can gain? These are questions that appear very frequently to gym lovers, who want to make a physical change at a muscular level.
If you are a person who has a very clear goal, which is muscle hypertrophy, it is important that you know what level you are at to know how much muscle mass you will be able to gain .
The physiological ceiling or maximum adaptive potential.
Gains in muscle mass, strength or anything, are not always going to be linear, but little by little it will cost you more and more to gain muscle mass, gain strength or lose fat. This always depends on what your objective is.
Basically, if you are a beginner and have just started training , with less effort you will have a huge improvement in your muscle mass and everything. What happens is that little by little, and as you gain experience, it will be very difficult for you to achieve great results .
The importance of planning our training.
In fact, when we talk about planning our training, about planning it, we have to understand that at first the difficulty will be low but as we become more expert we have to combine each of the variables more and more.
At first, when you have little experience, what happens is that the difficulty in programming your routine is small . But as you gain more experience, everything becomes more complicated, since the difficulty increases because the number of variables to take into account is greater: nutrition, rest , number of series, weight, technique; You have to spin much finer.
The key is in the beginning.
The good thing is that at the beginning you have a lot of potential to improve very quickly, the problem is that we make the mistake of wanting to use the stage we are in, that is, a stage in which we can improve very quickly, to use the most complex resources which we would use at the expert stage , which doesn’t make any sense.
In the beginner stage , you have to do things in a simple and gradual way, because it is very easy and very simple to achieve the results you expect.
How to know what stage we are in of the physiological ceiling?
You can’t make progress in something you can’t measure, but there are different ways to know where we are. One of them is to make a certain impact on what is called the muscle-bone ratio, it is not important to go into it but it is important to make it familiar to you. Basically, you have to take 22 anthropometric measurements, and depending on your gender, the ratios are different .
There are other measurements that consist of measuring the thickness of your joints and, with this, we can have different references to know where we are.
Another element is the FFMI, which is the most used, which is a set of equations to estimate where you are from the physiological ceiling and how far you are from that ceiling .
Another very interesting measurement is the skeletal muscle index , which basically links the person’s height with their lean muscle mass.
The answer to how much muscle mass you are going to gain naturally.
You will see that you will gain around 1-1.5% of body weight per month, but we want you to keep in mind that as you progress, the results will take longer to see.
In the case of an advanced person, the value is around 0.5% per month, with the time that passes between progress and progress being greater, with results being seen even after several months .
Completed Certified Personal Fitness Trainer Course from American Council on Exercise with 10 years of experience. Know More.