How to tell if you’re gaining muscle: 7 superhero strategies 🦸♂️
It’s a rare individual that trains for the sake of training.
Most of us want results when we sweat for something, and our training is no different.
So if you’ve been training for a while, how can you tell you’re building muscle?
In this article, I cover:
- How long it takes to notice muscle growth.
- How you’ll know if you’re gaining muscle or fat.
- Seven key signs you’re building muscle
How long does it take to notice muscle growth?
Beginners can expect to see pretty big changes month-to-month. After a year or so, you’ll still notice changes every few months, but they won’t be as dramatic.
After two or three years of consistent progress, your muscle growth will slow down significantly. Month-to-month changes will be too small to notice. If you’re not already taking pictures to track your progress, you’ll need to do so at this point to notice changes.
Intermediates should notice significant changes in three- to six-month stretches. If one or more training variables are poorly optimized, then progress will be even slower, or will grind to a halt altogether.
If you’re an advanced lifter, you already know that changes will come slowly, and small improvements over years will be what you’re shooting for.
How much growth can beginners hope to notice?
Beginners can add anywhere from 10-20lbs of muscle in their first year of training. Those who come in near the higher end of that range will have great genetics, and be doing a lot of things right inside and outside the gym. Either by accident or by design.
Given that most beginners have average genetics, aren’t sure what to do in the gym, or are following bad advice online, most should shoot for 10-15lbs of muscle growth in the first year. Since they’ll have gained experience, and still have room left in the ‘newbie gains’ range, they could gain almost another 10lbs in their second year.
So what’s the best way of achieving those numbers?
The best thing the average beginner can do is get on a half decent program and stick to it. Yes, they’ll make better progress with a program more optimized to their needs. But it’s more important to stick with a single program than hop around to new ones that might be better suited for you.
Consistency is key - regardless of the program. There are a few reasons why:
- When you’re starting out, every exercise is entirely unfamiliar.
- Executing just one new exercise well can take a lot of learning.
- That learning means and a lot of repetition over weeks.
During this initial phase, you won’t build any muscle. Your body’s just learning how to efficiently co-ordinate the exercise’s movement pattern.
If you change exercises every few weeks, you’ll get stuck in this cycle of learning new movements, without actually building any muscle. Make solid exercise choices, learn the movements, and focus as soon as possible on getting stronger and progressing your reps and weights safely.
How do I know if I’m gaining muscle or fat?
One thing that'll definitely get in the way of you gaining muscle as your training age (the number of years you’ve been training for) increases, is being fat-phobic. Towards yourself.
You have to eat enough to grow. That means hitting your daily protein requirements first (1g per lb of bodyweight will do), and a daily calorie total second.
That calorie total has to be higher than what you’re burning, and it either will be or won’t be. How much higher it should be, again, depends on your training age. Beginners can build muscle more quickly, but are also more capable of building muscle in smaller caloric surpluses. They’re even capable of building muscle in slight deficits.
Track your calories and your protein intake using an app like LifeSum or MyFitnessPal. It’s as simple as that. Weigh yourself once a week. Adjust your calories up until you’re adding about half a pound of scale weight a week, and then keep it there.
One fat caveat 🍽️
What you eat makes a huge difference, too. One that people love to downplay.
You don’t need a PHD in dietetics to make good food choices. Fast food that’s calorie-dense, low in micronutrients, and full of inflammatory, rancid fats is - at best - going to add nothing of value to your body. At worst, it’s going to actively impede recovery and impair your health. Whole foods, though, are rich in micronutrients, keep your gut healthier, are (mostly) easier to digest, and support your body’s ability to run well.
The simple heuristic is this: more than 80% of what you eat comes from sources that occur naturally… in nature. 🍊 The other 20% can come from anywhere, but making these choices the least worst options you can find is best. For example, if you’re after something sweet, something with zero fat is better than something with both high fat and sugar content.
So long as you’re in a calorie deficit, you’ll lose fat. So long as you’re training hard and in a calorie surplus, you’ll build muscle. The subtleties come in when you’re looking to optimize the amount of muscle you retain while dieting, and minimizing the amount of fat you gain while pushing your weight up.
Seven ways to tell if you’re building muscle
- Progressive overload
- Your scale weight is increasing
- Your appetite keeps increasing
- People are beginning to make comments
- You’re outgrowing your clothes
- Movements in the gym feel more fluid
- You feel better day-to-day
One: Progressive overload
One of the easiest signs you’re building muscle to notice is that your strength is increasing in the gym. Either your loads are increasing, or your reps are increasing.
Maybe last week you hack squatted 40 kilos per side for eight reps. This week, you might get 42.5 kilos for eight reps. Or, you might get 40 kilos per side for nine reps. Both are clear indicators that your body has made positive adaptations as a result of last week’s training.
Now, some of those adaptations might be neurological in nature, but while you’re training hard with sets of anywhere from five to 30 reps, you’re going to be building muscle.
Why it’s important to log your workouts
Unfortunately, many beginners don’t log their workouts, so have no idea what they’re doing week to week. Some don’t even count their reps, preferring to go on an intuitive ‘feel’ for effort they’ve not even developed yet.
Don’t do that. Log your lifts. On your phone, use a spreadsheet, or your favourite note-taking app. You can even go old school and bring in a pen and paper. Whatever works for you.
Here’s what a day from my own log looks like in Evernote:
Here’s the point: just like visual changes in your physique take time to notice, and photos can help you track those changes, logging your lifts makes you more aware of your progress.
It also gives you a goal to beat every time you walk into the gym. When you’re a beginner, and are capable of making ridiculously fast progress, this is arguably even more important than once you’re advanced.
If you’re a bit out of shape, too, you’re not going to want to push yourself to get more reps, or to lift more weight, every week. It’ll feel hard. But that’s the point. When you do this right, you’ll eventually walk into the gym, look at your logbook, and get scared of what you see. Because you realize the magnitude of what you’re about to go through. That thrilling feeling is a blessing and a curse, because it means you’ve started developing some serious strength.
If you ignore it, your gains will stall. You’ll also recover more slowly, and fatigue will accumulate faster.
That all stalls, though, if you’re not continuously striving to expose your body to a new level of stimulus. Without that new level, your body becomes comfortable, settles into its current level of adaptation, and isn’t forced to keep accruing muscle tissue.
As we’ve said before, muscle mass is energetically expensive. Your body doesn’t want to build more of it. You have to demand that it builds more of it. You can’t do that if you use the same weights for the same number of reps week in and week out.
When your rep numbers and weights are flying upwards week to week, so long as you’re eating enough, you can be sure you’re gaining muscle.
Two: Your scale weight and strength are increasing
Even if you’re increasing your lifts each week, it means little if the scale doesn’t move.
Alright, for complete beginners, this isn’t necessarily true. They’re one of only a couple sets of individuals capable of losing fat and building muscle at the same time. They can potentially build muscle and see the scale stay the same, or perhaps even drop.
Everyone else will need to see their scale weight increasing. Perhaps not every single week, but certainly month to month. So, if your lifts are progressing, but you’re not getting heavier, you have to ask yourself if you look like you’re getting leaner.
If you’re getting leaner, but are also getting stronger, a couple of things could be going on. Either:
- Your strength is increasing due to neural adaptations, but you’re in a calorie deficit and losing fat while you maintain your existing muscle mass.
- You’re building muscle and losing fat at the same time.
The latter is only likely if you’ve been training properly for less than a year, or, you’ve started training again after a significant lay-off during which you lost an appreciable amount of muscle.
If you don’t look like you’re getting leaner, then you’re simply not eating enough, and you need to bump up your calories. Track everything you eat for a few days and see if you’ve unwittingly dropped calories down.
Three: Your appetite keeps increasing
I’ll say it again for the people in the back: Muscle tissue is energetically expensive! Especially when you’re constantly demanding your body creates more of it through resistance training.
That means your body will start demanding more energy. It’ll do so by revving up your appetite for food. Everyone notices this after leg day; you’re ravenous on your way home from the gym, even if you ate before you went.
In the beginning, you should notice this, but might not - depending on your relationship with food. If you’ve never eaten much, and live in a household where food isn’t stocked in bounteous quantities, you might not even think anything of the fact you’re hungry.
But you should.
If you ignore it, your gains will stall. You’ll also recover more slowly, and fatigue will accumulate faster. What you really don’t want is to drift into a perpetual state of being fatigued and underfed and not realize it. I spent years in that limbo and wasted a lot of time making no progress.
Four: You’re getting comments from other people
Comments are a sure sign you’re moving in the right direction. Just be warned they won’t always be positive.
Your kids might resist their ol’ Dad or Ma outshining them a little. Don’t worry about that, give them something to aspire to.
If you’re younger, your parents might worry you’ll hurt yourself. Or they’ll fret that you’re growing up too fast.
Today, people will even shame you just for daring to try and change yourself for the better. 🙄
Early on, these comments are dangerous.
They can make you complacent, putting you under the false impression you’ve made more progress than you really have. But they can also make you question what you’re doing. Especially if you’re working hard to change your self-image.
Someone might tell you, “that’s not who you are”. Maybe not, but it’s who you’re becoming, and if that person is better than the person you’re leaving behind, leave ‘em. You don’t need anyone’s permission to improve yourself but your own.
Five: You keep outgrowing your clothes
Yeah, another obvious one, but you need to know this probably won’t manifest in quite the way you’d like it to. It takes a good while to add the inches to your chest, lats and traps necessary to move from a size medium to a size large. The same isn’t true for leg wear, unfortunately.
It’s also expensive if you like to wear nice clothes, or have to suit up for work. Business dress is unforgiving, and will really start to bunch up when those squats start to pay off. At best, it’s unflattering. At worst, it’s downright embarrassing. Especially when the seat of your trousers blows out as you go to take your seat on the morning commute.
Different cuts, fits, lengths, waist-to-leg ratios, and everything else start to skew when your legs really start to grow. Bigger clothes will fit you around your thighs, but be far too baggy in the waist. Sooner or later, all your clothes are labelled “muscle fit” or “50% elastane” because everything else either jettisons buttons like bullets or is large enough for you to parachute out of a 747.
Still, it’s another sure fire sign you’re doing great work. 😅👍
Six: Movements in the gym feel more fluid
Early on, it’s not just the big prime movers like your quads, hamstrings, and glutes that you’ll work when you’re lifting.
Every exercise that has you moving freely through space has a stabilization component. Smaller, deeper muscles, like the muscles of the rotator cuff in the shoulder, or the deep neck flexors in the neck, stabilize movements as you perform them.
When movements feel more solid, and more stable, it’s because these stabilizer muscles are firing dynamically throughout the movement efficiently and responsively. Which is exactly what you want.
While these muscles themselves won’t grow to any great degree through training, it’s another sure fire sign of progress when once-difficult movements start to flow. Your newfound neurological efficiency will also translate into moving heavier weights, closer to failure, with better form. Combined, these facets make for a better muscle-building stimulus and more muscle growth over time.
Seven: You feel better day to day
One of the greatest benefits of building muscle and strength is that you feel better day to day. Sprains and strains are common when your muscles are weak, and you demand they perform an explosive movement they’re not capable of.
Think about your average physiotherapist’s advice. To “very carefully” and “very gently” stretch things. Do “very careful” and “dainty” come to mind when you think of a bulletproof body? Or do you think of something that’s brutally, elastically strong?
When you get outrageously through a full range of motion, strains and sprains melt away. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
I didn’t train my neck for years because I was scared of injuring it. But it got injured anyway, as its weakness demanded compensation, which came in the form of scapular dysfunction. That led to a levator scapula injury, giving me pain in… my neck. 🤦♂️
In general, being stronger and more muscular will make you feel more agile, more athletic, and more energetic. By the time you notice these changes, you’ll definitely have made noticeable changes to your body.