How to Gain Muscle, No Matter Who You Are:
Muscle growth takes time, persistence, and a long-term commitment to the process.
While gaining large amounts of muscle may seem daunting, with proper training programs and adequate consumption of certain foods, serious muscle building is possible for most people.
This article breaks down everything you need to know when it comes to building muscle, including how to work out, what to eat, and recovery protocols.
Anatomically, skeletal muscles are a series of parallel cylindrical fibers that contract to produce force. This muscle contraction allows all external human movement to occur.
Your body is in a constant process of renewing and recycling the amino acids, or protein building blocks, in your muscles.
If your body removes more protein than it adds, you’ll lose muscle mass. If the net protein synthesis is even, no measurable change in muscle size occurs. Finally, if your body deposits more protein than it removes, your muscles will grow.
The key to building muscle is to increase the rate of protein deposition while minimizing the rate of protein breakdown.
This process of increasing your muscle mass is known as muscle hypertrophy, and it’s a primary goal of resistance training.
The muscle building process is driven by several factors, including hormones like testosterone and growth hormone, as well as the availability of amino acids and other nutrients.
To build new muscle tissue, your primary tools for increasing your body’s rate of protein synthesis are performing resistance training and getting sufficient amounts of protein and overall nutrients.
The correct amount of resistance training drives your body’s hormonal response toward building muscle, but it requires sufficient protein and energy availability to ensure the process results in muscle gains as opposed to muscle losses (
While researchers and experts continue to study the science of optimizing muscle gains, performing resistance training using moderate to heavy loads, combined with relatively high protein intake, remains the only tried-and-true training method for increasing muscle mass
While many types of exercise offer health benefits, the only way to reliably drive muscle growth is by using your muscles against moderate to heavy resistance. In addition, muscle growth is specific to the muscles being used.
1. Decide your target number of repetitions
The repetition continuum is a useful concept when designing training programs for muscle building.
Stimulating muscle growth requires performing weight training exercises with an amount of weight that only allows you to perform 1–20 repetitions.
In general, the repetition continuum states that weights you can only lift for a few repetitions tend to build more strength, weights you can lift for 6–12 repetitions tend to build more muscle, and weights you can lift for 12–20 repetitions tend to increase muscular endurance.
Understand that these ranges will have some crossover, meaning that 3-repetition sets with the respective weight will cause some muscle growth, 8-repetition sets will build some strength, and 20-repetition sets will build muscle as well.
Additionally, recent research suggests that different individuals may respond better to lower or higher repetition ranges when it comes to building muscle (3).
To put it simply, depending on who you are, your muscles may grow more with lower reps using heavy weights, or with high reps using lighter weights.
2. Choose the right amount of weight
In all cases, the weight must be heavy enough that performing much more than 20 reps is impossible.
The weight you choose to use should leave you at or near failure on your specified number of repetitions.
For example, if you’re performing a set of 10 repetitions, by the tenth repetition, you should be unable or nearly unable to perform another repetition. You should rarely have more than “two reps in the tank” by the end of a set if your goal is building muscle.
The overall implication of the repetition range continuum is that you should go through different phases of training using different repetition ranges to see what gives your body the most muscle growth.
3. Choose your exercises well
As mentioned, muscle building is specific to the muscle being worked.
For example, to build bigger biceps, you need to perform exercises that work the biceps. This could be an isolated bicep exercise, such as a bicep curl, or a compound movement that uses the biceps, such as a pullup.
In terms of the best exercise type for muscle building, compound and isolation movements can be equally effective at causing muscle hypertrophy (
Nevertheless, for the best long-term fitness results, you should include both compound and isolation movements in your training.
Compound movements like a barbell back squat effectively stimulate multiple large muscle groups in a single exercise and provide more functional movement for real-life activities. This leads to both more efficient workouts and more practical muscle strength.
Isolation movements are an excellent way to target specific muscles, and beginners may initially find them safer and easier to learn than compound movements.
Additionally, isolation movements are typically easier to perform when you’re fatigued, as you’re not stabilizing your entire body. This may allow you a few extra targeted sets at the end of a workout when you’re otherwise too exhausted to do another compound exercise.
4. Structure your workout to avoid overtraining
A good rule of thumb is to perform 3 sets of 3–5 compound movements, followed by 3 sets of 1–2 isolation movements per workout.
Generally, you do your heaviest sets using compound movements and perform higher repetition ranges on your isolation movements.
Assuming you’re performing three working sets per exercise, limit your total combined compound and isolation movement exercises to 5–7 movements per workout.
This allows you to benefit from each type of exercise while maximizing the overall muscle building potential of your training program and avoiding any symptoms of overtraining.
While many types of exercise offer health benefits, the only way to reliably drive muscle growth is by using your muscles against moderate to heavy resistance. In addition, muscle growth is specific to the muscles being used.
1. Decide your target number of repetitions
The repetition continuum is a useful concept when designing training programs for muscle building.
Stimulating muscle growth requires performing weight training exercises with an amount of weight that only allows you to perform 1–20 repetitions.
In general, the repetition continuum states that weights you can only lift for a few repetitions tend to build more strength, weights you can lift for 6–12 repetitions tend to build more muscle, and weights you can lift for 12–20 repetitions tend to increase muscular endurance.