Over the past few years, I’ve started and stopped training at the gym several times.

I start because I’ve look at my body and think: “God, Pete, you could do a little better, couldn’t you?” And I stop… out of frustration usually. I get annoyed that, despite all the effort I put in, I don’t seem to change much. It looks like exactly the same person staring back in the mirror. I reckon that the lack of a ‘visual yardstick’ to reassure the gym-goer that he’s making progress has got to be one of the major reasons for quitting. It was certainly behind the many false-starts I’ve had at the gym. If only I’d known this then, I might have hung in a bit longer.

I don’t know about you but I need feedback. Even if it’s just to tell me just how well I’m doing, and to make me feel good. If I’m training on my own, I have to provide this all by myself.

The best feedback is to be able to look in the mirror and go: “Bloody hell – where did those muscles come from?” But the harsh reality is that this almost certainly will not happen for the first few months of any training program. For some, even longer.

So anyone who starts training must tough it out for quite a while, almost blindly, trusting that they’ll start to see results three months down the line.

Why is this so? I’ll try to explain in a moment.

Many people don’t have the patience to wait all this time to get visible results. They will stop and say simply that the gym just doesn’t work for them. Usually around the start of February! Well, if they knew just why it was taking so long to show, maybe they’d be a little more persistent. It all happens soon enough, I realised.

I’ve seen the reasons explained in books before but it didn’t really register. It was probably presented in geek-speak and didn’t stick in my mind. I only understood it after a little study and so I will try to render what I learned more simply and more digestibly….

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Everyone’s body is different, so all times and measures will vary according to your own body. But not as massively as you might think.

FACT: The number and types of fibres inside your muscles are predetermined and fixed.
Before you were even born, your genes had already decided just how many fibres you were going to get in  your muscles, and what types they would be. No amount of training or good diet will ever change this, whatever people may tell you.

But bloody good training and diet will improve the size and strength of these muscle fibres.

I’m not going to go into the whole training thing – you can find this out for yourself using a whole host of information available in books and on the net if you really want to – but I will explain why you don’t get immediate results.

When you train hard, you are putting your body under stress. And your body’s response to having to being made to lift heavy weights is to try to adapt itself quickly so that it can do this more effectively.

“Great! So why am I not getting bigger? Cos I’ve been lifting heavier and heavier weights for two months now and I can’t see any difference.”

This statement hits the nail square on the head. You are lifting heavier weights, and so your body is getting stronger. It is just that your body gets stronger by two separate mechanisms. You are observing just the first one at work. The first mechanism is not visible, as it is only the second that results in muscle growth.

Your body is only really interested in the bottom line: performance. It needs to be strong above everything else. Survival of the fittest and all that. Muscle bulk is just a fortunate side-effect of this increase in performance. You want it, but your body sees it as hard bloody work – especially when there’s an easier and less energy-costly way to make you stronger. This is the invisible first mechanism which I was talking about.

When you’ve never trained seriously before,  your body is pretty poorly prepared for serious muscular exercise. It simply isn’t fully wired. The infrastructure is all there but, a bit like the phone lines in new-build apartment, the sockets are all there but you’ve got to get it all connected up properly before it works at full throttle.

For example, to flex your biceps your nervous system triggers the nerves attached to millions of individual fibres inside the muscle strands causing the whole muscle to contract powerfully. What you may not realise is that, in an untrained state, your body uses only a small fraction of its available muscle fibres because only a limited amount of “wires” (nerves cells) are actually connected. When your brain says “flex” – this limited number of nerve cells go ping and those muscle fibres that are plugged in contract.

In the first couple of months of training, your body seeks first to improve it’s internal wiring. This doesn’t cost much from a biological point of view, so improving your nerve-muscle connections means that your muscles can work harder without getting bigger.

Only when your muscles are fully wired in, and there is no further scope for improvement here, does your body start to properly put muscle mass on.

So – the bottom line? Stick at it and don’t give up after just two months. You’re probably nearly there by that stage!