Many people don’t realize that you don’t need fancy gym equipment to build muscle — in fact, standard bodyweight exercises like pushups can be effectively used to build muscle up.

It’s easy to underestimate just how effective pushups can be at building your chest, shoulders, back, and arms. At a glance, pushups appear plain and almost boring: down up, down up, down up — that’s it. And that’s true to an extent. But most people outside of fitness enthusiasts are only familiar with the standard pushups that they were taught in their high school phys ed classes.

There is a wide variety of pushups that you can perform to isolate different muscle groups, but we’re going to concentrate on five types in this article. These are not necessarily the best five for all people, but they will open your eyes to the variety available in basic bodyweight exercises.

Wide pushups: traditionally, pushups are performed with your hands being placed at shoulder width.  Wide push ups, sometimes called “wide-stance pushups”, require you to extend your hands beyond the width of your shoulders. Wide-stance pushups work your chest muscles more heavily than military-style pushups, so if chest definition is what you are looking for — wide pushups are one exercise that will help you meet your goals.

Fist pushups: Sometimes referred to as “knuckle” pushups, require the use of your fists, instead of the palms of your hands, to bear your body weight during the pushup. Fist pushups are beneficial because they target different areas of your body than traditional pushups, and may actually increase the effectiveness of your workout.

Fly pushups: adding another layer to wide pushups, fly pushups require you to begin the pushup with your hands a normal width apart at the top position. When lowering your body to the ground, you should slide your right hand out roughly 12 inches, and then slide it back to normal width on the up rep. On the next repetition, you would perform this motion with your left hand. Hint: place your hand on a towel, piece of cardboard, or similar ietm to assist with the slide, or “hop” your hands in and out.

Decline pushups: Instead of placing your feet on the floor, or using your knees, place your feet on a platform so that your head is lower than your feet.  You can use a chair, a stepstool, or a bench — pretty much anything that will allow you to raise your feet up so that they are higher than your head. These types of pushups work your upper chest muscles.

Stacked pushups: with stacked pushups, one arm is spread wide to the side as in wide pushups, and the other is tucked in tight like military pushups. After 5 repetitions, the hand positions are switched.

Here is a more detailed listing of styles you can consider to achieve muscle weight gain: fly, wide, diamond, military, fist, yogi, decline, incline, stacked, deep, prison cell, and inchworm pushups.

Tips to increase the effectiveness of your pushup workouts: remember to add some weight once the pushups begin to get easy. You don’t want to push out 50 easy repetitions. Rather, struggle with 20 or 30. Also be sure to add variety by varying your hand position for each of the above types of pushups.

Push ups are a great way to strengthen your upper body and exercise, build muscle at the same time. If you keep it interesting by mixing up your hand positions and trying a few different styles of pushups you can increase the effectiveness of your at-home exercising and relieve the boredom!

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You want to build muscle up quickly and you want to accomplish it yesterday. You’ve probably heard how much hard work it will take, and you’re getting mentally prepared to get to the health club five times a week for 60 to 90 minutes per workout.

You’ve been misinformed. Conventional wisdom is dead wrong.

With a carefully-constructed workout, you can achieve 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 quite a few additional benefits:

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

These techniques are not secrets, but aren’t widely used. These short workouts are based on intervals, which is nothing new. Interval training been used successfully for quite a few years. But how you apply those intervals will determine your success. That’s why it’s vital that you choose a proven workout if you want to achive muscle weight gain.

The two primary types of interval training you’ll focus on are Tabata training and high intensity interval training (HIIT). HIIT sessions are generally used for the aerobic workouts, and 15 minutes will replace 45 to 60 minutes of traditional cardio exercises.

Tabata training is just one form of strength training using intervals and compound exercises that will have your muscles screaming in 20-second sets. You can also generously sprinkle in bodyweight exercises, sports-specific exercise, kettleball training and more to keep your sessions interesting. 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 squeamish. 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!

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If you want to get 100% better at something, what would be the best way to go about 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 first 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 alter 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 minor lifestyle changes you can make to help you build muscle up.

1) Replace Aerobics with Interval Training

Aerobic activities have a negative impact on muscle building because it burns branched chain amino acids (BCAA) and glycogen. Rather, concentrate on interval training for fat burning, e.g. 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 repetitions, concentrate 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) 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 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.

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While kettleballs have been used for over 100 years in places such as Russia, their popularity was not widespread until recent years. In America, kettleball training is virtually exploding, thanks to some very unique results that you can achieve with kettleballs. For anyone looking for muscle weight gain, kettleballs make a compelling entry in your workout routine.

Kettleballs resemble mini bowling balls with large, thick handles. They come in diverse weights from around 4kg to 35kg, but the heavier weights aren’t used often, as kettleball training is more focused on conditioning, explosive strength, and movement, rather than brute force.

The beauty of kettleball training is their versatility. In one quick session you can achieve a number of objectives. Some of the numerous benefits you’ll obtain from kettleball workouts include:

• Strength increases
• Explosive power increases
• Increases in your conditioning level
• Improved flexibility and range of motion in your muscles and joints
• Anaerobic conditioning gains
• Core strength increases
• Balance and stabilization improvements

And I’ve saved the best for last: kettleball training will boost your metabolic rate for almost a full day after your workout is complete, making them ideal candidates to help you build muscle up and shed fat.

Kettleballs do have drawbacks, however, but they can be overcome. The drawback cited most frequently is that kettleballs only work for upper body and core conditioning, and not your lower body. To supplement you’ll need to complement your kettleball workout with a solid lower body routine, or maybe even a short high intensity interval training (HIIT) routine.

Keep in mind that ketteballs are considered most effective in interval-based workouts, so traditional body building routines aren’t a wise fit. However, if your goal is to build muscle up and you pay attention to advances in exercise science, you’re likely already aware that traditional strength training exercises aren’t the most appropriate option.

With the many advantages that kettleballs offer, they should be added to your workout session, provided that it already emphasizes recent discoveries in fitness science and is a good fit for your body type and goals.

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I bet you’ve heard it over and over again: it’s not possible to build muscle up and melt fat concurrently. You’ve been told that building mass requires an increase in calories, while fat burning involves a decrease in calories. This conventional wisdom is partially accurate, but the beliefs are being disproven with insights into interval training. The truth is, you can achieve muscle weight gain while you burn fat if you add intervals to your sessions.

Interval training isn’t entirely new, but it’s more widely understood, accepted, and used in recent years. While traditional cardio activities were considered the only reliable ways to shed fat, and the only acceptable workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has proven to be beneficial to athletes in all sports, and for folks with wildly varying goals.

Old school cardio activity is referred to as “steady state,” which essentially means that you work up to a fixed intensity level and continue working out at that level throughout the training session. During the training session, your body obtains half of its fuel through your fat stores, and gets the remainder through your oxygen system, and by dipping into your muscle and glycogen deposits.

HIIT sessions, conversely, involve quick maximum intensity intervals followed by lower intensity recovery periods. HIIT sessions are muscle sparing and are quick, but are killer. A 15-minute HIIT workout can raise your metabolic rate for almost 24 hours, enabling you to keep burning higher levels of fat for up to a day.

In addition to this, because your muscles consume calories during every minute of the day, the more muscle 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 sessions can help you improve your overall fitness level with very short sessions. Even better, if your goals include muscle gain and fat loss, adding HIIT to your workout schedule is a no-brainer.

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