Achieving Your Natural Genetic Muscular Potential
The four limiting factors
You cannot gain muscle infinitely. This should seem like a fairly obvious statement. Typically speaking, trainees will gain most of their muscle mass in the first few years of training, and they’ll experience diminishing returns, sometimes dramatically.
Eventually, these gains will slow to the point where they are simply impossible to measure, to mere grams per year of diligent and optimized training. This could be after fifteen to twenty years of training, but it’s something that every natural bodybuilder encounters.
Even more eventually, despite your best efforts, you’ll lose muscle mass. If you start training at twenty years old, and are very consistent with it, you’ll likely peak at around late thirties to late forties…then you’ll do very well to just maintain. Most lifetime naturals at sixty or seventy are not quite as big as they were earlier in their lives, even if they optimize everything. The rate of loss is slow, but it’s there.
However, for the vast majority of people, the “natural limit” doesn’t matter. This is because for a variety of reasons, they aren’t even within sight of it anyway. Don’t limit yourself when you aren’t near your limit.
