Today, I want to answer a question sent in by a reader: “I read a book called The 4-Hour Body saying that you can put on 34 pounds of muscle in twenty-eight days. Is this a realistic goal? I’ve always heard that 25 pounds of lean muscle is as much as you can build in a year. How long to build muscle?

In answer to your first question, if you leave muscle memory and fluid manipulation out of the picture, the claim that it’s possible to build thirty-four pounds of lean muscle in 28 days by following the 4 hour body workout is total nonsense.

Most people would be doing remarkably well to gain thirty-four pounds of muscle over the course of a year, let alone one month.

As for your second question, I would love to give you a simple answer. Alas, there isn’t one.

The speed at which you can put on muscle depends on a number of factors, including genetics, training age, diet, the effectiveness of your training routine and so forth.

If you want a general idea about how fast it’s possible to build muscle, the average beginner will build somewhere between two and five pounds of muscle per month in their first few months of training with weights. That said, building muscle is not a linear process, and you won’t keep gaining size at the same speed forever.

Over the course of a year you’re looking at gaining somewhere between twenty and twenty-five pounds of muscle. This averages out at approximately 1.5-2 pounds of muscle per month.

The speed at which you can put on muscle also depends on how close you are to the upper limit of what you’re capable of in terms of muscle mass, also known as your ceiling of adaptation. The closer you are to this upper limit, the slower the gains will come. Someone who’s been working out with weights for 10 years, for example, will take longer to add muscle than someone who’s just starting out.

The speed at which you can gain muscle is also going to scale up based on how much muscle you have to begin with.

For example, let’s compare two guys, both with a body fat percentage of fifteen percent. The first guy is six foot 4 inches and weighs two hundred pounds. This means he has around 170 pounds of lean muscle. The second guy is five foot 6 inches and weighs 150 pounds, which means he has around one hundred and twenty eight pounds of lean muscle. All other things being equal, the taller man with more muscle will gain muscle mass more quickly than the shorter guy, primarily because he’s stimulating more muscle fibers every time he trains.

The quality of your diet is also going to have a big impact on your results. A lot of guys try to put on muscle and lose fat at the same time, which invariably leads to a slower rate of muscle growth than if they’d focused solely on gaining muscle.

Although you can use some form of cyclical dieting strategy to gain muscle while losing fat, such as Tom Venuto’s Holy Grail Transformation Program, it’s a system that’s best reserved for guys with two or three years of serious training behind them.