Generally speaking, your body's largest muscle groups, such as those in your back, chest, and legs, are likely to respond most quickly to strength training. Increased strength and mass come from forcing the muscles to work, and it is easiest for you to overload these muscle groups with heavy weights.
Upper body muscles that tend to grow faster include the biceps, triceps, chest, back, shoulders and neck. In women, genetically, the lower body seems better equipped to grow muscle than the upper body.
Here are the most common examples of what that means… Exercises for bigger muscles should come before exercises for smaller muscles. Examples: Chest or back before shoulders, biceps or triceps.
I'm my experience as a weight lifter, calves, neck, and forearms are the slowest to show significant growth. Easiest would definitely be chest for males.
Glute Muscles
Perhaps the most neglected muscle group in the body, the Glutes are also one of the most important muscle groups for proper biomechanics and optimal sports performance. They're also connected to your spine, so weak Glutes muscles can lead to back pain and injury.
What muscles develop the fastest? Phasic muscles like the pectorals, rhomboid muscles, glutes, and the trapezius muscles.
They found that guys between 35 and 50 years built more muscle than the young college going men. For middle-aged men, the muscle gains were 1.13 kg, whereas for the college going men it was 0.9kg. Late teens and early twenties are the perfect age to start bodybuilding.
You can build muscle at any age. It just gets a little more challenging later in life. “Old and young people build muscle in the same way,” explains Roger Fielding, PhD, a professor of medicine at Tufts University. “But as you age, many of the biological processes that turn exercise into muscle become less effective.
Newbie Gains Are Greater and Come on Sooner
As a newbie lifter, you make bigger gains in less time. Period. Moreover, the rate at which newbies make gains is greater than the rate at which non-newbies make gains. This comes down to muscle protein synthesis and how it gets activated to a greater degree for beginners.
The Stapedius, the smallest skeletal muscle in the human body, which is about 1 mm in length, is regarded to be the weakest muscle. It originates from a prominence known as the pyramidal eminence at the posterior edge of the tympanic cavity.
Progressive overload and overload in and of itself is pretty difficult to achieve with the biceps. You need to do something dramatically different in your arm workouts to stimulate those muscles, and that is to vary the way in which you're performing your biceps curls!
The strongest muscle based on its weight is the masseter. With all muscles of the jaw working together it can close the teeth with a force as great as 55 pounds (25 kilograms) on the incisors or 200 pounds (90.7 kilograms) on the molars.
Conclusion: As you can see, the pecs are easily the muscle group that should be trained with the least frequency. This theory is supported by the finding that the pecs are the slowest muscle group to recover following training (11).
Remember, weighted squats trigger a flood of growth hormone into the body because of the sheer amount of muscles being activated. It's one of the reasons your legs are likely to grow faster than your arms.
Training your delts and traps will add much needed width across the top. Especially if you're a taller guy, width is going to be a major standout feature to dictate whether you're deemed “skinny” or “big”. Putting beef on your shoulders and neck are a good place to start.
In summary, Women are the strongest between 26 and 37 years of age. Men are the strongest between 26 and 35 years of age. But of course there are individual differences between athletes and some people peak before or after that age window.
Building Muscle After 40: Tips and Ideas to Get Strong at Any Age. As we age, our muscles start to decline, making it harder to build and maintain muscle mass. But the good news is that there is always time to start building muscle, regardless of age.
You can put on muscle after 40, but you will have to take a completely different approach than when you weight trained and dieted as a youth. Below I will discuss the training, cardio and nutrition you will need to focus on in your pursuit to a more muscular physique.
No matter what your age, you can improve your fitness.
If it's been a long time since you've exercised and you're feeling less than fit, you might think that it's too late to make a change. But you're wrong. You can improve your fitness at any age.
Typically, muscle mass and strength increase steadily from birth and reach their peak at around 30 to 35 years of age. After that, muscle power and performance decline slowly and linearly at first, and then faster after age 65 for women and 70 for men.
Did you know that people over the age of 40 may lose up to 8 percent of their muscle mass per decade? And the rate of decline may double after the age of 70. Advanced muscle loss, or sarcopenia, affects nearly 1 in 3 people over the age 50.
Typically, it takes around 6-8 weeks for you to start noticing changes in the appearance of your arms. At around the 12 week mark, this is typically when you can expect to see more significant changes, especially if you didn't already have a large amount of muscle mass in the area!
As for the amount of muscle you can gain within a week, it's also important to be realistic. We're talking about your health here. So don't expect, from a standpoint of safety, that you'll gain more than one pound of muscle per week, says Jones. Genetics play a role.
Choosing compound exercises like squats, deadlifts, lunges, step ups, presses, pull ups and rows will make your workouts more effective. Sure, you can add things like bicep curls and calf raises to your workouts, but these won't get you the fastest results.