What’s up, guys.
Sean Nalewayj here, www.SeanNal.com-www.BodyTransformationTruth.com and today I want to discuss one very important
principle that natural lifters really should be aware of and understand.
I did touch on this in the previous video but I wanted to expand on the concept a little
bit here.
And that is the law the diminishing returns that you’ll experience as you progress from
one year of training to the next.
In other words, it’s the simple fact that the longer you’ve been properly training
and the more muscle you’ve gain, the more your rate of muscle growth will naturally
slowed down.
And the longer it will take to continue building additional muscle.
Remember that your body doesn’t actually want to hold on to all these excess muscle
that you’re trying to build.
Muscle requires a lot of energy and resources to built and maintained, so your body has
genetic limits in place to prevent you from gaining too much.
And as you get further and further away from your natural set point, and your body is holding
on to more and more of this extra muscle, the harder and harder it starts pressing on
the brakes to stop things from going to an excessive level.
So it’s not going to be a linear process where since you gain, say fifteen pounds of
muscle mass in the first year, that you should then expect to gain fifteen more pounds in
the second year and another fifteen in the third year.
It’s not going to work that way.
And expecting that it is going to work that way is not only going to set you up for disappointment,
obviously, but it can actually be directly counterproductive to your results.
And that’s because if you’re expecting to just continue replicating your rate of
muscle growth form all the previous period up to this point, because you think that process
is supposed to be a straight line, but then the scale isn’t going up in the way you
expected or you’re not seeing a visible gains in the way you expected it makes you
liable to start pushing the envelope with your training and your diet in a way that
can actually have real negative consequences.
Getting carried away in the gym in terms of volume and intensity is one possibility which
could lead to injury, but the other more common one is that you’ll go overboard on your
food intake trying to maintain that linear rate of muscle gain.
And you’ll end up putting an excessive amount of fat as a result.
You’ll think you’re putting on muscle but the actual ratio of muscle to fat gain
will be far less than ideal, let’s say.
And this is something that happened to me personally as a beginner/intermediate because
I just didn’t understand this concept and I way over estimated how much muscle I was
actually capable of building within a certain timeframe.
So I was literally just stuffing myself with food all day long, thinking that I was supposed
to just keep building more and more muscle at the same pace all the way through.
And as you can guest, I ended up putting on a very significant amount of body fat as a
result.
And then when I did cut later on, I realize that the amount of actual muscle I have build
relative to how much weight I have gained was way less than I thought it was.
So always keep in mind that your muscle building journey will be a game of diminishing returns
and it’s very important to understand this so that you have realistic expectation about
how the process works, and so that you can stay patient and so that you don’t do anything
crazy with your training or your diet to try to excessively speed up the process and end
up fat or injured as the result of that.
Or fat and injured, which would be quite a sad combination.
When you first start out lifting, you’ll make gains relatively quickly because weight
training will be a brand new stimulus for your body and because you won’t be carrying
a lot of muscle to begin with.
And as your body becomes more and more accustomed to training and it’s being forced to divert
its resources on to building and maintaining more and more muscle, the process will naturally
slowed down.
I did cover this in another video and this just a rough approximation, but assuming you’re
following a proper training and nutrition plan and you’re remaining consistent with
it.
And you’re starting once you’re fully grown and from a normal healthy body weight
then you’ll probably reach about 50% of your noticeable genetic muscle building potential
within the first year of training.
And then from there it will decrease by about half for every year after that.
Again, this is just a ballpark figure, so don’t put too much stock in it.
It could be 40%, it could be 55%, no one can say for sure.
But when you consider that most natural lifters will max out the vast majority of the total
noticeable muscle mass your body is capable of building within about three to five years
of proper training and nutrition that would be a reasonable guideline to go by.
So in other words, out of a hundred percent of your genetic potential you’ll reach about
50% after year one, maybe around 75% after year two, 85-90% after year three.
And then after four years and beyond you’d be right up near your natural limit, which
for guys with average genetics would probably be somewhere around thirty pounds of total
lean muscle mass give or take.
Maybe twenty pounds for those slightly below average, maybe forty for those with good genetics
but somewhere around that thirty pound mark for the average lifter.
And for women, take those figures and cut them by toughly half.
It’s not that you can’t build more muscle after four or five years of training.
You certainly can.
But it’s just that the rate of growth will slow down very, very sharply.
Now, I know that some people don’t want to believe this or they think it’s just
a negative limiting believe, and you can achieve anything you set your mind to, but this is
just a fact of how the process works.
And it’s a fact of how the builds muscle.
There are genetic limits in place that influence how fast you can gain muscle and how much
muscle you can build in total as a natural lifter.
And you’re going to be far better off both physically and mentally if you maintain realistic
expectations with this.
Otherwise you just going to end up feeling constantly disappointed and you might end
up doing things in the gym or in the kitchen that are actually counterproductive to your
physique.
By all means, set big goals if that’s what you’re after and train hard and focus on
your nutrition to maximize your own potential if that’s what you’re trying to do.
But at the same time, maintain a down to earth outlook and understand that the more progress
you achieve the more your overall rate of progress will slow down.
And as a natural lifter, once you’re passed that three or four year mark, assuming you’ve
done things properly and have made a significance gains by that point, it’s best to really
allow your patience to kick into gear, be proud of what you’ve achieved and then start
thinking more in terms of a slower, gradual long term approach for continued progress
over the longer term.
So I hope this was helpful, guys.
If you want to get a complete step-by-step plan to help you maximize your genetic muscle
building potential in the most efficient way possible.
Including fully structured workout plans, meal plans, supplement guides and one-on one
coaching, make sure to head over to www.BodyTransformationTruth.com and grab my complete Body Transformation Blueprint
System.
You can do that by clicking up here at the top of the screen, or by using the link in
the description box.
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Thanks for watching, guys.
And I’ll see you in the next video.