In case you haven’t noticed, the human body has a basic shape.

By and large we are all roughly related in how we look.

If I put a person, a gorilla and a hippopotamus together in a room, chances are you would easily pick out the human.

If I was abducted by aliens right now, and was forced to describe the male part of the human race, this is what I would say:

They average about 5′10″ in height, with about 148 pounds of lean mass. At any given height they can vary greatly in weight, but this is due to their ability to store energy in the form of fat mass.

If I was asked to explain further I would say this:

Their height is normally distributed with a standard deviation of about 3 inches. This means that 95% of all men fall somewhere between 5′4″ and 6′4″ in height.

At any given height their lean mass is also fairly normally distributed with a standard deviation of about 7 pounds. Meaning, an extremely athletic healthy male can have about 14 pounds more lean mass than the average, and a man can be about 14 pounds less than the average before we begin to worry about them being in a disease state.

(or imagine the picture a 6 year old child would draw if they were asked to draw a man or a woman…it would probably be pretty obvious and pretty average looking, not too fat and not too skinny)

In other words, our physiology, much like everything else about the human body, is VERY tightly regulated. Everything is interconnected.

Yes, there are some anomalies that somehow have more muscle than anyone else, just like there are some men who are 7 feet tall. But these are very very rare cases (About 2.5% of the population).

For the most part you and I are limited in how much muscle we can add, based on the fact that we are all human beings. There are checks and balances EVERYWHERE in our bodies.

And this is for GOOD reason.

Here is something that people selling exercise programs with claims like “Add 60 pounds of muscle in 6 weeks” don’t want you to think about.

Many of the things that can cause your muscle to grow beyond its normal limits are also connected to higher than average rates of cancer.

After all, cancer is by definition, uncontrolled growth.

• Chronic high testosterone? Correlated with Increased Cancer risk.
• Chronic high insulin? Correlated with Increased Cancer risk.
• Chronic high Growth Hormone? Correlated with increased Cancer risk.
• Chronic high IGF-1? Correlated with increased Cancer risk.

The point of all this is – You are human. So be happy with your build, work towards increasing your muscle mass and decreasing your fat mass, but have REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS.

From my findings, an adult human male can expect to gain about 14 pounds of muscle through strength training, for a female its closer to 6. After that any muscle growth is extremely slow.

If you want more muscle and are willing to go the pharmaceutical route to get it, just be aware that there may be long term health ramifications.

If you want more muscle and are NOT willing to go the pharmaceutical route, and are upset about your lack of progress remember – there are good reasons why you are limited in your ability to grow.

Eat less and move more. Try your best to build muscle while keeping your body fat low, and remember you are human. This means you are probably not going to be 250 pounds and 5% body fat any time in your life unless you are also about 6′10″ tall.

BP

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I do not think that we will progress in our understanding of the science behind muscle growth until we begin to openly discuss the use of anabolic steroids.

As far I am concerned there is only 1 thing that has shown a clear, reproducible dose-response relationship with muscle size in humans (other than height).

It’s not protein or calories. It’s not even workout length, weight lifted or even Growth Hormone.

While all these things may (or may not) play a role, the only thing that has a clear dose response relationship is testosterone.

We know some athletes use it. We know some recreational lifters use it. We know some fitness models use it. We even know that some h0llywood celebrities use it. (I’m saying ’some’ to keep me out of trouble).

We also know that for various reasons a large percentage of these people lie about using it.

This skews all of our data.

Because people lie about using steroids we have no idea what the natural limitations of the human body are. It is a GIANT confounding variable in the study of exercise and muscle growth.

For instance:

Eating high amounts of protein has been a giant let down for most people, so why is it still be touted as a muscle builder? Well, maybe protein works differently for guys and girls who are on 2,500 mg of Testosterone per week.

Eating big? A great way to make you fat. UNLESS…more calories may actually mean more muscle when you are using D-bol and Trenbolone.

It always kills me when I hear big guys (typically power lifters) tell little guys that the key to getting big is to eat McDonalds 8 times a day. For some reason they leave out the side order of Anadrol.

Without mentioning the steroids, the ‘prescription’ for getting huge muscles is also the exact same prescription for becoming an obese North American.

Now, I’m not advocating steroid use, but what I am saying is that to truly start to understand what causes muscle growth, we need everyone to be open about steroid use.

This is why most fitness magazines are useless, as are most fitness websites. Having people tell you about their awesome new workout that helped them put on 30 pounds of muscle without telling you about their new steroid stack that went along with the workout is just useless information.

As is ‘muscle building advice’ from guys who have been the exact same weight for the last 5 years.

The bottom line is that we are not nearly as far along in understanding muscle growth as we would like to believe, and we are not going to move forward until steroids are openly discussed.

BP

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