Gain 30 pounds muscle in just six months!

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Gain 30 pounds muscle in just six months!

How can you gain 30 pounds muscle in 6 months? You cant! Anyone telling you that you can is either a drug dealer, which is illegal, or they are lying to you just to get your money which isn’t very nice.  Several people have ended up in my Fitness Hall of Shame for this very reason.

Building muscle is a very slow process, period.  Unless you are a newcomer to weightlifting or a teen in puberty, adding 10 pounds of muscle a year is about all you can expect. Many people seem to confuse weight gain with muscle gain.  When you gain weight it can be from added muscle, added fat,  or added water.  Many people believe what they desperately want to believe, and that is the weight added is from muscle.  Unless you measure your body composition with a skinfold caliper though, its just wishful thinking. I hate to be the one to tell you but the 10 pounds you gained the first week you were on creatine is not muscle, its water.   The 5 pounds you gained since last night is not because of your awesome squat workout but because of the salty pizza with extra anchovies that made you retain water.  Just because you are genetically fortunate enough to have your fat deposited evenly all over rather than in a beer belly does NOT make it muscle.  It might *look* like muscle when under clothes but shirt-off it will bounce like jello – muscles wont bounce when flexed.   You can pack on weight very quickly but its FAT or water, not muscle. Most programs promising insanely fast gains gloss over the distinction between weight gain and muscle gain.

Please check out my muscle gain calculator to see what reasonable expectations are for your age and experience level.  If you want to help make this muscle gain calculator a LOT better, consider participating in the Sweat4Health muscle gain research project

gain-30-pounds-muscle-in-6-months

Of course that is a morphed picture, I do NOT have 25 inch arms! :) I did it to indicate how ridiculous the whole premise of naturally gaining 60 pounds a year of muscle is.