Five Easy Pointers to Build Muscle Up Quickly

If your goal is to get 100% better at something, how would you go about it? I can think of two primary approaches. The approach you select will be somewhere along this continuum: doing one thing twice as good (or 100 percent better), or doing 100 things 1 percent better. I think that most people try the first approach, but the second is much easier to implement.

Taken a step further, to make each of these 1 percent building blocks more effective, you could also change things that occur outside of your workouts. So you focus on changing your habits and making fractional improvements that will stack on top of one another to bring you massive benefits.

So here are 5 easy lifestyle changes you can make to help you build muscle up.

1) Replace Traditional Cardio with HIIT

Aerobic exercise has a negative impact on mass building because it burns branched chain amino acids (BCAA) and glycogen. Instead, focus on HIIT sessions for fat burning, for example a 400-meter sprint followed by a 400-meter recovery jog, repeated 3 more times.

2) Increase Total Time Under Load (TTL)

Instead of focusing on the quantity of reps, focus on the total time your muscles are under load. Try spending 2 seconds on the negative contraction, 1 second at neutral (bottom of the exercise), and 1 second on the positive contraction. Emphasizing the negative is a simple way to overload muscles and promote muscle weight gain.

3) Increase your Sodium Intake

Sodium increases amino acid absorption and carbohydrate storage while also improving the muscle's receptiveness to insulin. Just do in it moderation!

4) Mix up your Total Time Under Load

One really easy way to add variety to a workout, confuse your muscles, and build muscle up is to switch up your repetition tempo by adding an explosive day once per week, or an explosive set once per workout. It looks like this: 2-second negative contraction, 1-second neutral, explode as fast as you can on the positive contraction and repeat.

5) Cheat on your Diet

If you haven’t yet read the Cheat to Lose Diet, you should. It’s a pretty interesting theory into how the body metabolizes food. The short story is that your body burns fat when a hormone is present in your body, and that hormone comes as the result of overeating! So once a week, cheat, and follow your cheat day with two very low-carbohydrate, high protein days. You’ll enjoy the cheat day and burn more fat to boot.