Fastest Way to Build Muscle

Building muscle, without too much effort…

There are many exercise recommendations out there, things like 5 hours of sports a week and so on. But is this really true? When it comes to health, and especially muscle-building, the recommendations usually include hours of weight lifting, loads of and if possible some or. The protein is apparently most effective after the actual lifting (not true by the way, but that maybe later) and one should lift as heavy as possible. But is that really the best option?

MED – My Five Kilo’s in Two Weeks

Over the past two weeks I have gained five kilos (11 lbs) of lean muscle mass, nice right? So what if I told you I exercise only 1 hour a week, impossible you say? Enter “Minimum Effective Dose” otherwise known as MED. Imagine a pan of water, this water will boil at 100 degrees Celsius as every kid knows. Everyone also knows that making the water hotter than 100 degrees is not going to make it “more boiled”. The same principle applies to lifting weights to build muscle, by doing hours of sports a week you are just trying to make the water boil harder…

Colorado Experiment

In the Colorado experiment Casey Viator gained 28 kilos (63 pounds) of muscle in 28 days, with four hours of style="text-decoration: underline;">total gym time. Now that was a man who devoted a month to purely exercising and eating under controlled conditions. Most of us don’t have that opportunity, however the same biochemical effects are still at play in the rest of us. This means that we too can make use of this technique to gain seemingly impossible amounts of muscle with quite a small investment of time.

So How Does It Work?

As I outlined in my earlier post, there are some simple steps to take into account. As long as you stick to these you should be fine (and with that I mean FINE ‘wink’).

1. Stick to a proper diet (ideally paleo diet)
2. Eat breakfast as soon as you wake up, make it protein rich (eggs + protein shake)
3. Eat plenty, but make it healthy stuff (again, try the paleo diet)
4. When you exercise/> - Lift the weight to the highest point without fully stretching your joint (maintain pressure) and hold that for 5 seconds/> - In five seconds, slowly bring down the weight but don’t let it touch the ‘base’ position (again, maintain pressure)/> - Lift the weight in a five second frame again to the starting position/> - Practice this ‘set to fail’, meaning you keep going until your muscles give out
5. Have no breaks between your exercises, each exercise should last no more than a minute or two, if it does lift heavier.
6. Take exercises that strain a lot of different muscle (no isolated muscle groups)
7. Maintain a proper diet on resting days

Just exercise two times a week and you should be fine, I certainly am… For any questions you can always mail me at, good luck!

class="note">Editor’s note: The results of the Colorado experiment are considered controversial.  They’ve never been published in a peer-reviewed journal.