Why is building muscle so hard?
Q
I managed to lose a substantial amount of weight last year but why is building muscle so much harder?
A
If Instagram didn’t exist you’d probably not be asking this question. In the olden days, long before fitfluencers took seminude selfies for a living, people knew that body transformations took a long time, and a lot of effort.
Let’s start with a fairly obvious observation — the more weight you have to lose, in the absence of any medical issue preventing weight loss, the quicker it tends to come off. As you get closer to your goal weight, the rate of loss tends to taper down.
When it comes to muscle gain, the gym world likes to talk about “newbie gains”, where an untrained individual is able to gain far more muscle than a trained person. The Water Cooler honestly cannot remember these magic newbie gains — instead, the author’s memory is a collage of 25 years of lifting weights and seeing everyone else gain muscle.
However, over time, no matter how small those incremental gains are — 3kg, 2kg, 1kg, 0.5kg, 0.25kg a year — the end result is significantly more muscle than there would have been without any effort to build it in the first place.
At the risk of irritating every body transformation guru who will sell you a three-month body transformation programme for R2,000, losing fat is comparatively easier than gaining muscle, and so their programmes will do just that, with a strong bias to fat loss in their “recomposition” plans. It is what it is. Even my own “transformation” over a decade ago involved a modest increase in lean muscle tissue but a significant reduction in body fat.
Change your lifestyle — cut out the rubbish, eat lower GI carbohydrates if you eat them at all, cycle them between higher and lower days, and exercise by doing resistance training and cardiovascular exercise, and you will lose fat. You may “hold on to” muscle, and you may well gain one or two kilograms of muscle if you are lucky, but you will lose fat and look and feel fitter.
No-one is saying losing fat is easy. But getting a six pack is far easier than building a lean, muscular frame. Both require almost militant dedication and mental battles. The effort to build muscle is something else, and in frustration and overeating, the weight gained is almost invariably mostly fat and water: cue the expensive sugarpacked mass builders on pharmacy shelves.
You also have to thank your mother and father. Genetically, some people seem to be able to think muscle into existence, while others find building muscle difficult. Again, it is what it is and you have to accept it unless you go down the route of using androgenic anabolic steroids and deal with the health and legal ramifications. However, let’s not beat around the bush — competitive steroid users train longer and harder, and watch what they eat, far more militantly than most.
Many online “resources” (read: broscience blogs with a sprinkling of scientific references) claim “newbies” can expect realistic goals of half a pound of muscle a week. That’s
0.9kg muscle in a month. Most people who train without the assistance of hormones won’t gain anywhere near 11kg muscle in a year, or even a half or third of that. They may well gain that amount of weight or even more — but as gym bros may not know, weight is not necessarily muscle.
None of this is meant to put you off. Rather, it is empowering knowledge. If you are training properly, with progressive overload, and eating to gain muscle without overeating, then you probably are making progress.
The point is to manage your expectations about how much you can expect to see in a month or two. Even if you are gaining small amounts of lean muscle tissue, it will become noticeable over time, especially if you manage to keep your body-fat levels in check. The biggest gain, however, will be your overall strength and wellness.