Fitness Newbies Should Seize the Bonus Period, Understand Two Key Issues, and Rapidly Build Muscle

Congratulations on starting your weightlifting journey, because you have an advantage that I don't – the ability to quickly build muscle.

This phenomenon of rapidly increasing muscle strength after just a brief period of training is often called newbie gains, and there are many different views on it. Some people say that not everyone can experience the newbie gains period, while others say that you can eat anything and it will help you gain muscle without gaining fat during this stage.

Regardless, the fact is that if you start with the right diet and training, you can grow more muscle in one year than you can in any other year. Therefore, to fully utilize the newbie gains period to help you maximize muscle growth, you need to learn more details, and we will now discuss the specifics of the newbie gains period.

1How much muscle can the newbie gains period increase?

Unfortunately, there is little research on this topic, and there is no specific research to confirm how much muscle you can grow throughout your entire weightlifting career.

What we know is that the ability to gain muscle during the newbie gains period is different for each person. For example, in this study, researchers asked 585 untrained men and women to perform bicep curls with their non-dominant hand for 12 weeks. The subjects did 3 sets of curls from a weight they could do 12 times, then increased the weight until they could only do 6 repetitions.

Before and after the training, researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to record each person's strength and bicep muscle volume. On average, each person's biceps increased by about 19%, and their bicep curl strength increased by 54%.

However, when you look at each person's specific data, you will find that not everyone gets the same results from this training. Some people's biceps actually got smaller, while some people's biceps increased by 60%, almost triple the average. As for strength, some people didn't increase at all, and one person increased by 250%.

As you can see, some people gain more muscle during the newbie gains period than others, but almost everyone experiences strength and muscle growth after starting to lift weights.

2Why does newbie gains disappear?

Logically, it's impossible to continue gaining muscle at a large rate, so why is this happening? Why can't you achieve your genetic potential for muscle growth at the same speed?

We can answer this with the concept of 'stress-recovery-adaptation' cycle, which describes how the body responds to different stressors and becomes stronger.

Every stress causes a temporary decline in your ability, followed by a recovery phase, where the body adapts and becomes stronger to handle similar stress. This cycle occurs in all cases.

When you start any new activity, such as driving, playing sports, or weightlifting, your first attempts will put stress on your body. However, once your body adapts and recovers, you become more skilled.

To keep your body adapting and getting stronger, you must continue to expose it to increasing levels of stress. However, as you reach higher levels of skill, ability, or muscle growth, it becomes increasingly difficult to adapt and recover from the added stress, making progress slower and slower.

While newbie gains exist, you also need to maintain a balance between nutrition, rest, and exercise to achieve ideal muscle growth.