Five Great Lifestyle Changes to Gain Muscle Mass 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 performing 100 activities 1 percent better. I think that most people attempt the former approach, but the latter is much easier to implement.

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

So here are five simple lifestyle changes you can make to help you build muscle up.

1) Replace Aerobics with HIIT

Traditional aerobic exercise has a negative impact on muscle building because it burns glycogen and branched chain amino acids (BCAA). Rather, focus on interval training 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

Rather than 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. Lengthening the negative is a simple way to overload muscles and promote muscle weight gain.

3) Eat More Fish

Not only is fish high in protein, it is also a natural source of omega-3 fatty acids, which are vital for both your overall health and your muscular health. Essential fatty acids make your muscles more receptive to insulin, so they aid glycogen storage and increase the absorption of amino acids into your muscles, while also preserving glutamine storage.

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 in response to the presence of a hormone 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.