Introduction

The first year of gym life will change your life completely. It’s not unreasonable to put on up to 25lbs of lean muscle mass before the first year is over.

As hard as it may sound, the process is much more simple than you’d think. The difficulty comes from maintaining the consistency needed every single day without fail. Once you can get the first three months down, you’ll have established a good habit that will see you achieving that goal.

Newbie Gains

This is the first period in the gym where you’re just starting out, learning and familiarizing yourself with how things work. This is the period where you can expect to see the most gains.

You can expect the first 6-12 months to be your biggest period of newbie gains where you’ll see muscle growth acceleerate—along with your ability to burn fat at the same time.

For this period—let’s assume 12 months—you are likely going to put on 40-60% of the toal muscle mass you can genetically achieve naturally.

The reason for this acceleration in muscle growth is you are untrained and all these stimuli are new to your body which will readily overcompensate in order to adapt to this lifting reality.

The Science

Now before getting more into the science aspect, we need to go over Muscle Protein Synthesis (MPS). The idea is MPS competes against Muscle Protein Breakdown (MPB) to determine in what way your body will adapt. If you have a higher MPS than MPB you will build muscle. Conversely, a higher MPB versus MPS will cause you to lose muscle. All of this assumes that everything else is equal.

When lifting weights with a proper level of resistance, this triggers a process which causes the cells of the muscles themselves to increase MPS, then repair and adapt to the stresses of the lifting session.

As a newbie to lifting, the MPS response to a workout will be much much higher and will last much longer—up to 3 days.

What this means is that there will be more time to synthesize or grow the muscle after every workout session. More importantly you’ll end up needing less time in the gym as your MPS will be elevated for 2-3 days.

As you spend more and more time in the gym, you’ll start experiencing the Repeated Bout Effect. The basic idea is you’ll adapt less to stimulus the longer you’re exposed to it. In other words, your body will get used to lifting those weights and any gains you’d hope to see plateau.

Taking Advantage

Without the appropriate knowledge and discipline. It’s especially difficult not to show progress during the newbie gains period. However, the better your training regimen and the better your diet—your eating habits—the better the results will ultimately be.

This is really useful if you want to maximize the holy grail—losing fat and building muscle at the same time.

You can also accelerate stimulating muscle growth fast enough without a massive amount of volume (reps), intensity (weight), or effort (time). Now I should point out that there is some effort required. Reading this article won’t in itself help you take advantage of this unique window of opportunity. There is still at least some effort required on your part.