Get Bodybuilding

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

Taken a step further, to make each of these small building blocks more effective, you could also focus on things that occur outside of your workouts. So you concentrate on changing your habits and making tiny improvements in many areas that will stack on top of one another to bring you huge benefits.

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

1) Replace Aerobics with High Intensity Interval Trainign

Aerobic activities have a negative impact on mass building because it burns branched chain amino acids (BCAA) and glycogen. Instead, focus on interval training for fat burning, for example a 400-meter sprint followed by a 400-meter recovery jog, repeated for a total of four times.

2) Increase Total Time Under Load (TTL)

Rather than concentrating 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 a neutral contraction (bottom of the exercise), and 1 second on the positive contraction. Lengthening the negative is an easy method 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) Recovery

Your body will only build muscle up by repairing it in response to your workouts. When your muscles are repaired, they are made stronger than before to respond to the higher stress levels put on them. If you don’t allow your muscles time to recover, they can never rebuild.

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 appears as a direct 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.

I bet you’ve been told a hundred times: it’s impossible to build muscle up and burn fat at the same time. They say that building mass requires an increase in calories, while fat burning requires a decrease in calories. This old school wisdom is based partially in fact, but the concepts are being tossed on their ears with insights into interval workouts. The truth is, you can achieve muscle weight gain at the same time as you burn fat if you add intervals to your sessions.

Interval training isn’t new, but it’s more widely understood, accepted, and practiced as of late. Whereas standard aerobic activities were looked at as the only efficient ways to shed weight, and the only acceptable workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has been shown to be advantageous to athletes of all kinds, and for folks with many different goals.

Old school aerobic activity is referred to as “steady state,” which essentially means that you build up to a fixed intensity level and continue working out at that level throughout the training session. During the session, your body obtains 50 percent of its fuel by burning fat, and gets the remainder through oxygen intake, and by tapping into your muscle and glycogen stores.

HIIT sessions, on the other hand, consist of brief maximum intensity intervals followed by lower intensity rest periods. HIIT sessions are muscle sparing and are quick, but pack a wallop. A fifteen-minute HIIT session can raise your base metabolism for almost 24 hours, enabling you to continue burning higher levels of fat for up to a day.

On top of this, because your muscles burn calories during every minute of the day, the more lean mass you have, the more fat you burn, even while you’re inactive. Because HIIT not only spares your muscle, but also helps you build muscle up, your future fat burning ability is increased.

The bottom line is that regardless of your fitness goals, HIIT workouts can help you improve your overall fitness level with very short sessions. Even better, if your goals include mass gain and fat shedding, adding HIIT to your workout schedule is a no-brainer.

You want to achieve muscle weight gain and you want to achieve it today. You’ve likely heard how much hard work it will take, and you’re preparing yourself to get to the gym four or five times a week for 60 to 90 minutes per session.

I have good news for you. Conventional wisdom is dead wrong.

With a properly-constructed workout, you can get better results in fewer than ninety minutes per week. By better, I mean that you can build muscle up just as fast as with the extended workouts, but you also get several additional benefits:

• You can achieve muscle weight gain quickly and shed fat at the same time
• You can burn more calories as a result of a 15-minute anaerobic workout than in a 60-minute cardio workout
• You can build your explosive power
• You can build your anaerobic threshold and your overall fitness level
• You can increase your joint strength and flexibility
• You can improve your core without doing core-specific exercises

These techniques are not secrets, but aren’t widely used. These short workouts are based on interval trainings, which is nothing new. Interval training been used successfully for years. But how you apply those intervals will determine your results. That’s why it’s vital that you research a solid routine if your goal is muscle weight gain.

The two primary types of interval training you’ll find in good plans are high intensity interval training (HIIT) and Tabata training. HIIT sessions are generally used for the cardio sessions, and 15 minutes will replace 45 to 60 minutes of traditional aerobic activities.

Tabata training is just one form of strength training using compound exercises and intervals that will have your muscles screaming in 20-second sets. You can also generously apply in functional exercises, kettleball training, sports-specific exercise and more to keep your sessions fun. But prepare for effort — you can’t build muscle up unless you put forth maximum effort during your workouts.

But these types of workouts aren’t for the faint of heart. You must already have a base level of fitness before you try them, and your joints must be healthy to start. Anyone over the age of 60 should seriously consider getting checked out before attempting interval training. When you’re ready, put your game face on and get to work. You’ll love the results!