How Much Stronger Can You Get in a Month? 1 month is not a lot of time in the grand scheme of strength training, the progress you make in a single month will depend on a range of factors with training level being the most important. Beginners can expect to see strength increases of up to 10% in a single month.
Getting stronger in the gym is a primary goal for the majority of people for a number of reasons, there is the goal of getting stronger just to get strong, those that are building muscle and a physique so need progressive overload and even those who just have an ego at play and want to up the plates of a lift.
Whatever your reasons are for pursuing strength you will eventually come across the question or desire of just how quickly can you get stronger. A 500lb deadlift does not come overnight for most people which raises the question of just how quickly can you get stronger.
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How Quickly Does Strength Increase
The answer to how quickly does strength increase will always come down to the timeless answer of it depends. Training age, ability and other characteristics will all play a part however there are some general trends that you can extrapolate from.
Beginners – This is the easiest one to predict, in an untrained individual you can see strength gains of up to 10% of total body strength in your first month of training and this is known as newbie gains.
Untrained individuals have the most potential for strength progress early on because of the ability to adapt to the new stimulus. Most people have a base strength potential based on a range of factors like muscle fibre makeup and bone size/strength.
Therefore once you start weight training and stimulating these latent factors then this is where muscular and neuromuscular adaptations occur. The reason this is 10% and not higher in 1 month for beginners is because your recovery capabilities will be much lower to begin with.
Whilst the weight won’t be heavy enough to cause serious fatigue to your muscles and central nervous system you still won’t be primed to recover from this optimally in the start. For most beginners DOMs can last for days if not a full week.
This will impact your training and ultimately slow down your initial strength gains. A beginner a few months in to training however has potential for strength progress up to 20%. By this stage your rest and nutrition should be of a high enough standard to support your weight lifting and this is the period of real newbie gains.
Intermediate – Once you’ve been training consistently for 8 – 12 months then strength gains will start to be harder to come by. Now you’ll be incorporating dedicated training blocks based around periodisation in order to peak and then deload for strength progress.
Here strength gains will be 5%-10% per training cycle which are usually 8 – 12 weeks long in length and you’ll be starting to focus on specific lifts to progress on. As a beginner you can see progress in a range of exercises from compound movements to isolation exercises.
Advanced – Once you get to the advanced stage of training 5+ years then strength gains are minimal and difficult to come by. I’m personally intermediate in terms of training experience and reaching my maximum muscle potential so I can’t claim to understand this from first hand experience.
What I do know however is how to research these topics from accomplished writers (particularly from T-Nation and EliteFTS) so If you are at an advanced level then you are better placed to be searching these sites for training methods.
For the beginner that is interested however, an advanced level trainer could expect to see strength increases in a year of 5% at a maximum. In absolute terms though if you are an elite level and 1% to your bench press then this is a significant increase compared to the beginner adding 50% to a 100lb squat. (Sources)
Where Do Strength Gains Come From
Something that people new to the gym might not be aware of is that muscle size does not directly equate to a stronger individual. There is of course a strong correlation but just so you know the biggest guy (or female) in the gym is not necessarily the strongest.
Weight training is mostly used to get stronger and for the most part larger muscles so the muscle groups of course contribute to strength gains however there is a second more dominant factor at play and that is your nervous system.
Neuromuscular Strength
Incorrect form on exercises and inefficient movement patterns are a limiting factor in terms of strength progression because of the key role that your nervous system plays when lifting weights.
Your nervous system is what actually sends the electrical transmitter to the muscle to allow muscular contractions and muscle fibre recruitment. The muscle is of course the subject that is contract against the external force however the nervous system plays a key role in triggering this. (Source)
It’s not uncommon for someone to see rapid strength gains in a short space of time because their CNS has become more efficient in the movement. Your nervous system also adapts much quicker than your muscles, tendons and ligaments do.
From personal experience I have seen huge jumps in my 1 rep max for the deadlift and squat when I trained it specifically for 4 – 6 weeks. At the time I couldn’t really attribute this to anything in particular, I certainly hadn’t grown in size a great deal.
The reason for my rapid strength gains was more to do with my motor patterning and becoming more efficient in my execution from a neuromuscular standpoint. This meant that I could quickly and maximally recruit my muscle fibres which meant more explosive strength.
This issue with jumping up in weight too much and abusing the CNS system however is that your actual structure (muscles, joints and ligaments) do not adapt, recover or grow it anyway near a similar speed. Therefore even with the ability to make large jumps in weight you should always take it at a more steady and long term approach.
Muscular Strength
Muscular strength is of course the more well known aspect of strength and the potential for this comes down to a few factors.
Muscle fibre type proportion – a higher number of fast twitch muscle fibres (responsible for explosive contractions) lend themselves better to strength training and muscle growth than the slow twitch muscle fibres which are more suited to endurance training.
Muscle size – it’s true that smaller individuals can be a lot stronger than a lot of people pound for pound and this can demonstrate the importance of the neuromuscular involvement however there is no denying that more size also equates to more strength in a lot of occasions.
More muscle size means a greater quantity and density of muscle fibres to contract, this is the reason there are weight divisions in powerlifting and Olympic weightlifting.
A combination of the two strength systems are needed however in order to maximize your strength potential. Some bodybuilders as an example are huge but don’t have the CNS optimized to lift heavy weight (though they of course lift heavy weight in comparison to the average gym goer).
You also see smaller individuals that can deadlift 3 – 4 x their own body weight as a result of neuromuscular strength.
Therefore it’s important to know that any short term strength gains are more than likely to come from your nervous system rather than muscular.
How Much Stronger Can You Get in a Month
Strength gains are not linear which means that you will face plateaus in your training.
It’s worth mentioning that before you embark on a 1 month phase of getting as strong as possible that strength progression is not linear and constantly upwards.
In the long term your strength gains will appear to be a straight line progression however in actuality you progress in waves. I mentioned earlier that an advanced lifter will train to peak at a certain time and then deload afterwards.
Most strength programs are not based on lifting as much as you can as often as you can. Most will train at a percentage of their 1 rep max based on current training goals. Someone might train at 50% of their 1 rep max in order to work on the speed of a lift in order to have quicker activation of their fast twitch fibres.
Some might train in the 80% – 90% of their 1 rep max for a phase in order to get accustomed to the high weight without overloading the CNS and fatiguing. In any circumstance your strength progress will come and go in periods of time.
A lot of factors come into play including rest, hormonal balance and CNS optimization, one day you might feel great whereas the next you are tired and plateau on your training for the next few weeks.
Either way the focus should be on long term strength progress instead of the quick gains so whilst you can see strength increases of up to 10% in a single month this is not a sustainable standard. A focus should be on dedicated training cycles of 6 – 12 weeks with a specific strength goal in mind.
How Much Muscle Can You Gain in 1 Month
Unfortunately the rate of muscle growth for the average person is a lot lower than what you might expect or be hoping for. It’s not uncommon to hit the gym hard for a month straight and see fractional movement on the weight scale at the end of it.
Muscle growth is a slow process, any rapid fluctuations that you see on a weight scale from week to week are likely the result of water and fluid retention or loss and fat gain or loss. It is much more common to see fluctuations daily for these markers, muscle growth will take much longer.
So, how much muscle mass can you gain in 1 month if your training, diet and recovery is all at an optimal level? The answer is that you can likely gain 1lb/0.5kg – 2lb/1kg per month at the most and this is typically the rate for beginners.
If you are an intermediate lifter this could be a maximum of 1lb/0.5kg per month and for the advanced lifter you will be hitting the upper limit of growth if you can gain 1lb/0.5kg – 2lb/1kg in 1 year!
The more advanced you get in your training and physique development the slower the rate of muscle growth and harder it becomes to add size to your frame. Humans have genetic limits (you can push these limits with the use of performance enhancing substances) and the body cannot function properly at extreme ends of the spectrum.
To see where you fall on this spectrum a handy tool that has been developed is the fat free mass index (FFMI), this shows your genetic potential for muscle growth based on a range of factors from height, weight, body fat percentage and bone structure.
Menno Henselmans has an excellent calculator on his site and it’s worth checking this out, if for nothing more than general intrigue.
It pulls data based on averages so It won’t be 100% accurate however as far as an indicator it’s an excellent tool to see how close you are to your genetic potential for muscle growth. There will always be genetic exceptions so use this as a guide only.
Also check out:
How to increase weight with progressive overload
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