Hi! I'm new here. I've got the New Rules of Lifting for Women and I think it's a great book.
Now for my question. I was having an argument/discussion with some women on another board about how much muscle mass women can gain. Their claim was that women have to work out a long time to gain any muscle mass. I agree somewhat, but they claimed that a month would not be long enough to gain any muscle mass. I disagree with that. I'm having a hard time finding hard numbers either way though.
I did find one article (it's actually a summary of research that was presented at a conference) where they compared lean muscle gain in women working out 3x a week. Half were on oral contraceptives and half were not. According to the research the women who were not on contraceptives gained 3.5% lean muscle mass after a 10 week workout regemin (while those take contraceptives only gained 2.1%). That article is here: http://www.healthnews.com/family-hea...gain-2988.html
Surely there is more research than this out there and I'm just not finding it? When I search I mostly get sites promising me that I'll gain lots of muscle weight in a very short time if I buy their product/book/video/protein powder, etc... LOL!
I'm a molecular biologist. My husband (who is a chemist) and I have recently lost about 64 lbs each. We both work out 3-5x a week doing strength training and cardio. We have been tracking our food intake during weight loss and continue to track it during maintenance. Our goals now are to maintain our weights and continue to build muscle.
So, because we are both scientists we tend to be kind of nerdy in wanting to know all the details. Since I'm a biologist I like to know all the physiology stuff.
There are no absolute numbers, because every woman is different, depending on her genetics, body type, circulating testosterone levels, etc.
Basically, the more testosterone, the bigger/faster the muscle gain.
Check out PubMed. Being a scientist, I assume you and your workplace have subscriptions to many on-line journals. The research is fairly new, so you won't find lots of publications, but there is a lot of interesting research in the new science of Kinesiology.
Comparison of linear and reverse linear periodization effects on maximal strength and body composition.
Prestes J, De Lima C, Frollini AB, Donatto FF, Conte M.
Physiological Sciences Department, Exercise Physiology Laboratory, Federal University of São Carlos, São Paulo, Brazil. jonatop@gmail.com
There are few studies that have compared different periodization methods for strength and hypertrophy. The aim of this study was to verify the effect of a 12-week strength training program with different periodization models on body composition and strength levels in women ranging from 20 to 35 years of age. Participants had a minimum of 6 months of experience in strength training, and they were divided into two groups: linear periodization (LP, n = 10) and reverse linear periodization (RLP, n = 10). Intensity was increased weekly; LP began with 12-14 maximal repetitions (RM), reaching loads of 4-6RM, and RLP began with 6-4RM and finished with 12-14RM. In all exercises, three sets were accomplished; number of repetitions and rest between sets and exercises were in accordance with weekly prescribed intensity. Training was performed 3 days per week. The evaluations were baseline evaluation (A1), after 4 weeks of training (A2), after 8 weeks (A3), after 12 weeks (A4), and after 1 week of detraining (A5). Fat mass and fat-free mass, maximum strength (bench press, lat pull-down, arm curl, and leg extension) were evaluated. There was an increase in fat-free mass and a decrease in fat mass in A4 compared with A1 only for the LP group. Both the LP and RLP groups presented significant gains in maximum strength levels in all exercises analyzed. However, for LP, the increases were greater when compared with RLP. In practical terms, LP is more effective for strength and hypertrophy as compared with RLP, and 1 week may be an adequate period for application of detraining without causing decreases in the performance of the parameters analyzed.
Hunh! I wonder why I wasn't finding anything. Maybe the 'lean' in there was limiting my results. Thanks! The kinesiology term is turning up some hits too.
If I was looking for this info, I'd ask Lyle McDonald - either with an email or on his site in his forums. If anyone would have already scoured the literature (and kept the references) and also distilled it into some form like 1% per month for trained athletes, 2-3% for untrained beginners (and I made those up), it would be Lyle.
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Now for my question. I was having an argument/discussion with some women on another board about how much muscle mass women can gain. Their claim was that women have to work out a long time to gain any muscle mass. I agree somewhat, but they claimed that a month would not be long enough to gain any muscle mass. I disagree with that. I'm having a hard time finding hard numbers either way though.
You're a bit unfortunate in this regard because the vast majority of research examining this is done in men.
There's a study from 1994 done by Khouri and Pope that compared a pretty large sampling of guys, some drug-users and some natural, which established a pretty good limit of muscle mass for a given body size. It's a good starting point.
There are also several meta-analysis of strength research (three notable by Rhea and Peterson's team, one from Wernbom) that tend to show rate of muscle-mass gain is very mild for any given session, in a rough range of 0.1 to 0.2% per session. Again, most of the studies examined were in males.
Sadly there's just not a lot that directly examines this in females; however we can reasonably extrapolate that a female will have a lower threshold both for maximum mass-per-height (FFMI) and for any given body size, along with a lower rate of muscle gain per session.
Sorry I can't give better hard numbers, but the research just isn't there. If you wanted a guess a ballpark of 50% of the male values for rate of gain would probably be about right, and there would be a lower upper limit for FFMI score as well, though I can't give exact values.
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Yep, there's not too too much out there about women. A lot of the stuff I'm finding on pubmed is done on specific subsets of women, like post-monopausal, or obese, or older AND obese.
Heh, now I'm wanting to switch the focus of my research. I was doing vision research before I started staying home with the kids. There's an obesity research program in Cincinnati, and I've been thinking of checking them out when I decide to go back to work. See if they'd have any use for me.
That's because there's very little interest in it, research-wise. Special populations are about all you're going to find. Women athletes have scant data wrt muscle growth, and I'll give you one guess as to why.
To answer the original question, muscle gains will occur in women rapidly, at the onset of a training program, just like in men. They just aren't as noticeable because the effect is of a lower magnitude than in men (though this will vary between muscle groups - lower body mass doesn't seem to show quite as limited a response as the upper body, thus explaining "my legs got huge after two weeks").
In a sense both viewpoints are right. Women do start gaining mass immediately (or rather, the related protein-synthesis and remodeling chemistry switches on), but the effects that modulate real gains mean that muscle is going to accumulate rather slowly.
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That's true (re: little interest) there's a ton of interest in obesity research though.
I read a couple of abstracts that noted the different response of the lower body as compared to the abdominal muscles and the arms. Pretty interesting!
Thanks Jane, that figure is similar to the one in the previous link on the same site that I found. The only thing that bothers me about it is that there's no references. He doesn't mention where those numbers came from. I'd assume they were gathered from various sources and personal experience. Happily, they do agree with the numbers from the first article that I posted.
Quote:
That's because there's very little interest in it, research-wise. Special populations are about all you're going to find. Women athletes have scant data wrt muscle growth, and I'll give you one guess as to why.
I just remembered what I was going to say about this... It still surprised me that there was so little info that I could find. Since it does seem to be that 'special populations' are being studied, you'd think that average 'non-special' women would be included as a control or baseline or something. I mean if you are looking at ability of older obese women to build muscle, wouldn't you want something to compare it to? Of course, I haven't read the actual studies, and the information may be there, just not in the abstract. Since I'm not working at a university now I'll have to get a friend to access the articles for me.
I see you haven't discovered the joys of experimental design in exercise science yet.
Weak validity doesn't begin to cover it. Half of what I have to do is make educated guesses to fill in the blanks that the research methodology leaves out.
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I see you haven't discovered the joys of experimental design in exercise science yet.
Weak validity doesn't begin to cover it. Half of what I have to do is make educated guesses to fill in the blanks that the research methodology leaves out.
Ah no! That's too bad. No, I haven't read through too many of the papers yet. I've read through quite a few weight loss studies, and those are hit and miss. Of course the methodology is going to be more problematic than what I'm used to because they have to work with real people in real life situations. Compliance isn't much of an issue when you're working with fruit flies or frogs, but I assume it's a big problem with humans.
Aside from that weak design is a big problem. Lots of variables involved here. Hopefully, as the field gets more mature the experimental protocols will become more defined and stronger.
Question re lean muscle mass gain for women
Linear Mode
