Are You Wasting Your Beginner Gains?
Takeaway Points:
“Beginner Gains” aren’t a one-time phenomenon - it’s a process that happens whenever you start practicing a skill or exercise your body is unfamiliar with or change up your training programming.
Hitting plateaus generally happen when people meet their body’s natural point of diminishing returns or when they’ve exhausted whatever program they’re using that wasn’t necessarily made for longterm progress.
Diminishing returns will happen to everyone. Although the progress will not be as dramatic as what you see during the beginner gains period, the most reliable way to keep growing is putting in more time and effort working out.
A well known effect is that of the “beginner gains”. When you first start out training, you see very rapid results for the first few months.
This is especially noticeable with strength gains, which can become apparent very quickly - you might see, for example, a 30% jump in strength in your first month with a proper program. This is because a large chunk of the results come from neurological adaptations to learning the movements - essentially, your brain getting better at coordinating muscle mass to work together - meaning that adaptation can happen relatively rapidly compared to the slower process of building muscle mass.
Muscle mass generally takes a little bit longer to become apparent. Research supports that in the first few weeks of training, your body is a bit overwhelmed by the new stimulus of exercise, and as a result, can’t make much progress. It’s only when you’ve had a few weeks to get more accustomed to the stimulus, that your body can really get over that initial difficulty and start to begin seriously growing.
Even then, an average rate of muscle growth for a beginner is about a 0.1-0.2% increase in muscle cross-sectional area each day - meaning, it can still take a very long time for things to become apparent. Still, this is way better than the rate for expert lifters, who would expect to see an even slower increase due to their bodies’ much greater level of existing adaptation.
Over time, we begin to experience the effects of diminishing returns. In order to keep growing, we have to continually provoke a greater and greater training stimulus - spending more and more time in the gym, putting in more overall effort - to see smaller and smaller increases in muscle mass and strength. This is a normal part of the process, and sooner or later, someone will approach something that approximates their “genetic limits” - the practical limit at which continuing to grow would be difficult within your current circumstances.
That said, I often see a lot of myths and misconceptions about beginner gains - which I want to clear up here.
Expected Effects
Beginner gains are a wonderful thing. The rapid pace of development is very meaningful for beginners, who need that encouragement and excitement in order to enjoy and fall in love with the process of lifting weights. Hell, I only got excited about lifting weights because when I started messing around in the gym, I was shocked to discover that I had visible triceps after a few months of training.
The rapid pace of development also means beginners can “get away with” training that wouldn’t work as well for more advanced lifters, and this can be a double edged sword.
For example, recomposition - the process of simultaneously building muscle and burning fat - is not generally very possible or practical for advanced lifters, who often require bulking and cutting phases in order to maximize their physiques. Recomposition, in contrast, is a slow process which doesn’t necessarily work very well. But for a beginner, who is seeing such rapid gains, recomposition is a lot more possible - and this is generally how most people start first seeing their gains, because no one is ready to really leap into significant bulking and cutting phases right out of the gate.
Since beginners can grow in response to virtually any kind of training pretty robustly, this also means that they’re more likely, especially if getting into lifting without any guidance, to fall into the trap of an objectively bad program. When you see results even from bad training methods, you don’t feel much cause to improve your training methods - until, of course, the beginner gains are over and you start to hit a wall.
Commonly, the concept of a “plateau” is used to define a phase in someone’s training when their progress levels off. In many cases, people plateau for one of two reasons - one, that they’re simply running up against the natural process of diminishing returns and don’t like it, and two, that they’re running programs that aren’t actually designed to keep them gaining in the long term.
For beginners, both of these can hit you at the same time - if you’re used to beginner gains on a crappy program, then you can hit both your standard point of diminishing returns where gains slow, and also already be on a bag program that’s not being progressed properly in order to ensure long term progress. This is an easy recipe for hitting a wall, unless that lifter then gets guidance and learns how to follow a better program.
Misconceptions
One question I’ve seen asked a lot, is whether one can “waste” their beginner gains.
The idea here is that since beginner gains are a phase of rapid progress at the start of your training journey, you have a limited time window to take advantage of. You could use a crappy program, see decent results, and have wasted your beginner gains, or you could pick up an awesome program, see optimal results, and progress much further, much quicker, than otherwise. Unfortunately, this just isn’t true, and is a misunderstanding of how beginner gains work.
“Beginner gains” as a phenomenon refers specifically to the body’s specific tendency to act during the early phase of an adaptive process which can be endlessly repeated. It is simply about the 80/20 of fitness, and the fact that you’re grabbing the “low hanging fruit” that comes easily. It’s just the very beginning of that diminishing returns process, and the fact that diminishing returns haven’t set in yet.
Let’s say that you were used to training in one particular way, and then started training in a new way - you’d start to see beginner gains all over again, because your body isn’t used to this new stimulus. A bodybuilder who decides to become a marathon runner after doing no cardio for a while, would see a very rapid growth in their running ability due to beginner gains - even though they’re well trained in a different domain. Likewise, a runner switching over to bodybuilding would see a rapid growth in muscle mass and strength.
There is an entirely separate conversation to have about whether or not the runner switching to a bodybuilder (or vice versa) would be a good idea - after all, if you’re really good at one sport, you tend to have selected the sport which you like and which jives with whatever natural physical talent you have. At the same time, however, it’s very possible to switch sports and train differently and discover that you actually prefer, or are better at, the newer sport - but of course, none of this is really relevant to the discussion of beginner gains.
Another phenomenon is the phenomenon of returning from a break in training - for example, due to injury or life issues getting in the way. When we stop training, the process of detraining begins - we start to lose the qualities we built. At first, it’s not much, but over time, it can become significant.
If you then return to training, however, you essentially get to experience beginner gains all over again. This is a phenomenon known as muscle memory - we tend to build muscle and strength (or by extension, any fitness quality) much more quickly a second time around. There are a lot of potential physical mechanisms that can explain this, not to mention the fact that you’re simply more experienced with that kind of training and know what to expect as well as the optimal ways to train.
Another thing I can note anecdotally, is that I have seen many clients who essentially plateaued on a given program, only to see significant “beginner-like” gains when switching to a better program.
Very often, mass-market programs (I won’t name names!) aren’t really designed to progress smoothly or intelligently, but instead simply to be widely applicable to a lot of potential lifters. This makes them popular and widely useful, but it doesn’t make for good long term progress. The end result is that people get very frustrated when they hit a wall with these programs, only to experience shocking progress when they switch over to a better-designed program.
The same thing generally applies to beginners who switch from crappy training to good training. I myself experienced this exact phenomena many times over. When I first started out lifting, I saw great results, but I ultimately spun my wheels for a few years because I didn’t know what I was doing and was constantly mixing up training styles, following whatever I had currently seen running around the internet.
Then, of course, I got myself into a serious powerlifting program for the first time, and saw my strength skyrocket within a few months. Later, I got into a serious hypertrophy program for the first time, and saw my body composition improve significantly as well. Later, I got into a proper cutting diet for the first time, and saw a significant improvement in my body composition.
The same thing can even happen on the basis of an individual exercise. I’ve gone through plenty of phases where I was really good at a particular lift for a particular muscle group, then switched over to something I was relatively inexperienced at, just to see rapid gains again.
In one training phase, I got really into front squatting. I had been used to back squatting as my primary leg exercise, had never really front squatted much before, and decided to see what front squatting was like. So, I switched over to a front squat for a few months, saw very rapid gains in that lift, and eventually switched back to the back squat when I got bored. It wasn’t that I had seen any huge overall increase in my leg strength or size - I had simply been abusing the process of constantly swapping exercises in order to feel good about the appearance of rapid progress.
The Reality
In short, “beginner gains” are not a one-time thing. They’re a continuous process that will happen whenever you start training for something you haven’t trained before, take some time off and return, use a better training method, or significantly realign your diet to suit your goals. You can often see relatively rapid changes due to any change in your training.
This is part of the reason why program hopping, and the allure of “muscle confusion” can be so alluring. When you can see rapid results from switching over to something new that you haven’t done before, it can give you the illusion of continued rapid progress when the reality is just that you’re gaming the system a bit.
Beginner gains are, in this way, something to be cautious about just as much as they are to be praised.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.
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