If you’ve been hitting the gym hard but just don’t feel like you’re building the superhero physique you’re aiming for despite your best efforts, it may seem unlikely that just an extra five or ten minutes each day can completely transform the look of your chest, back and arms. But given that we only offer five to ten minutes, our fitness editor asks: what do you have to lose?
Lifting heavy vs. Lifting often
I’m a big fan of lifting heavy – a big fan. I’ve competed in strongman competitions, deadlifted triple my body weight, and regularly take hundreds of pounds for a walk in the form of various deadlifts. I’m also a firm believer in progressive overload, the ironclad rule that states that in order to build bigger muscles, we must subject those muscles to increasingly difficult work, and that usually means bigger, heavier weights.
But long, hard weightlifting sessions take a toll on your body, meaning it takes days of recovery before you can hit those body parts again. This is not necessarily ideal, especially with new research suggesting that training each body part more often is optimal for adding size to your frame.
High frequency training
When it comes to quickly adding mass to specific muscle groups, especially in the upper body, I’m a firm believer in the high-frequency approach. This is where we hit the target muscles with a huge amount of volume (sets and reps), but instead of concentrating that volume into one giant, heroic workout that leaves us sore for the next few days, we spread it out throughout the week.
But if we’re going to do that, we have to be smart. As I mentioned above, spinning around heavy iron requires an even heavier recovery. So hitting your chest with a heavy leg day after day is a recipe for slow gains at best and injury at worst. Add to that the fact that we only have a limited amount of hours in the week – if we’re already smashing our weights, accessories, conditioning and cardio, do we really have time to spend in the gym focusing on dozens of extra reps each day to pump up our chest and back?
No, what we need is a handful of moves that we can perform daily, that won’t break us in half with heavy weights, and that we can perform quickly, almost anywhere.
What we need are push-ups, pull-ups, and their extended family of bodyweight movements.
What movements should I do every day for bigger breasts, back and arms?
Pull-ups, bodyweight rows, push-ups, and dips are perfect for adding extra muscle-building bulk to your already existing workout regimen. And not just because their inherent lower resistance allows you to recover from them faster, but because they’re also easier to perform outside of your regular gym sessions. Plus, they require much less of a warm-up than equivalent barbell movements, meaning you can squat straight before going out again.
Adding a simple pull-up bar or parallel bars may only set you back a few pounds, but it can potentially add inches to your torso. The first time I experimented with this type of high-frequency training, I was living from scratch in a top-floor apartment without being able to afford a gym membership. I removed the skylight to perform my pull-ups on a ceiling beam and, most incredulously, picked up a bargain Zimmer frame from a thrift store to perform my jumps.
When choosing which movements to lose each day, it’s important to be realistic about what you can really recover from. With this type of high frequency training, we want to avoid movements that feel “heavy” from the first rep. For example, if you can only do 5 pull-ups with a gun pointed at you, then endless sets of daily pull-ups probably aren’t the answer. However, pull-ups using a band can be. If, on the other hand, push-ups are too easy and you’ll need to perform time-consuming sets of 30-40 reps to get any benefit, then resistance band push-ups may be the solution.
A good rule of thumb is that we want to use movements that we can achieve 10 or 20 reps with, then do sets of about half that. I’m personally a fan of pull-ups and pull-ups as they also hit the biceps and triceps quite effectively. But you should experiment and pinpoint the exercises that make you feel pretty pumped after low-rep sets that won’t make you want to train the next day. Or, even worse, they start to lead to joint pain.
Longevity is the father of consistency, and consistency is king here.
Frequency training: How many reps and sets should I do each day?
Once you’ve found the best moves for your body, the next thing to do is keep exploring until you find a sweet spot or “minimum effective dose” that allows you to get a decent amount of daily reps without overwhelming the rest of your training sessions and making you suffer for days. While studies regarding the “optimal” amount of sets to perform each week for muscle growth are often controversial, somewhere around the “20-30 sets per body part” range seems to be Goldilocks’ zone. Broken down by day, that’s somewhere between 3-5 sets of each movement each day. Not the biggest investment in the world for a potentially big return.
In the beginning, try to only take each set to about 50-75% of what you think you can complete. For example: if you can do 20 dips, work in sets of 10-15 at most. Do you have 15 pull-ups in your locker? Work in the 5-8 rep range. The first few sets may feel easy, maybe even ineffective, but keep your rest to a minimum and the difficulty will set in. Also, remember that your goal here is to get a lot of work done during the week, not to crash into the ground in the first five minutes.
One of my personal favorite protocols involves simply doing 5 push-ups and 10 push-ups every minute, for five minutes every morning. Whenever I spend just a few weeks on this regimen, I’m always amazed at how quickly visible changes occur.
If this is too challenging, try using resistance bands to help with your pull-ups and use regular push-ups or narrow-grip push-ups instead. The key here is consistency. In just one week, you’ll have racked up around 500+ chest and back pumping reps in exchange for just five minutes a day.
How long should I do frequency training?
Einstein joked that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” But when it comes to building muscle, doing the exact same thing over and over again will eventually lead to no results.
As I mentioned earlier, “progressive overload” is the inevitable key to building muscle size. So while this type of training will very quickly overload your muscles and lead to growth, doing the same thing day after day will quickly lead to stagnation. Of course, you can add a few extra reps to each set or wear a weighted vest for a few sessions during the week – and I would advise you to do so. But eventually, you’ll reach a point where you either don’t have time to do the mounting work all the time, or you just can’t recover from it. The law of diminishing returns eventually catches up with us all.
I would advise you to use an approach like this for four to six weeks or until you notice a plateau in your gains (or some excruciating joint pain). At this point, your best bet is to take a deload week, reducing your volume significantly so your body can recover from the barrage of pull-ups, push-ups, dips, and chin-ups you just put it through and come back bigger and stronger than ever.
Is there anything else I should think about to increase my earnings?
While this type of high-frequency approach works well on its own, and it certainly did for this author, the real magic comes in using it as a concentrated period of “extracurricular” work. If you can continue your regular lifting sessions at the gym alongside this approach and still recover adequately, then you have a ticket to ride the gains train.
However, to avoid overuse injuries, you should reduce or even eliminate any movements from your fitness regimen that are too similar. If you’re already doing 200 dips every week in your garden, heavy dip sets in the gym probably aren’t necessary or even recommended. Listen to your body – if certain movements in the weight room are interfering with your daily ritual of push-ups and pull-ups, consider eliminating them.
Remember that this is only a short phase. Your love affair with heavy bicep curls isn’t over, it’s just on hiatus.
In order to build muscle optimally, regardless of the style of training you perform, you need to focus on getting adequate rest and fueling your body flawlessly. This becomes doubly true when you only have 24 hours between sessions, even if they are only five or ten minutes long. So, make sure you’re moving the big stones of muscle-building recovery:
- Get at least 8 hours of sleep a night.
- Aim for 1.5-2g of protein per kg of body weight.
- Consume enough calories to fuel your training sessions. At least 30-40 calories per kg of body weight is a good goal.
So what do you think? Do you have ten minutes to build the best body of your life?