Spending hours in the gym to build muscle up and not making progress? Great news! There is a very good chance that you are struggling to build muscle up for one very important reason. this knowledge alone will help you enormously in your attempts to build muscle up. For a lot of people this little known truth can easily help them build muscle up fast.

So what exactly is this well kept secret? An amazing new miracle pill or something?

No definitly not. It is a hormone know as cortisol, known about for a long time but ignored by many weight lifters.

What actually is cortisol?

Cortisol is a human hormone secreted throughout the day and produced in response to weight training or other types of stress. Levels of cortisol drop slightly from their peak in the morning.

What is its role exactly?

Well it enhances your short term memory, aids in regulation of blood sugar levels and helps detox the liver. However it can raise blood pressure and decrease bone density if your cortisol levels get too high, however this would be unusual. However it will restrict muscle mass as it increases the use of muscle as energy and not fat stores. This is the primary reason why training sessions should be less than one hour duration. They will actually be reducing their progress and not increasing it after this time!

Here are a few guidelines to ensure that you are not wasting your time trying to build muscle up:

1) limit your cardio workouts, too much cardio causes the body to release cortisol which as explained is not what we need.

2) Try to not consume too much caffeine as this will increase your cortisol levels.

3) Make sure your workouts take less than an hour. Stay focussed wear headphones if you need to avoid talking to people.

4) Take it easy and relax because cortisol is produced as a response to stress.

5) Eat small regular meals because infrequent meals make the body think it is starving and will thus try and use uneccesary muscle for energy before using fat reserves by releasing more cortisol.

6) Sleep. This is when your muscle building hormones peak and your cortisol levels are highest so shot for 8 hours sleep.

With those no nonsense muscle building tips in mind you should be able to give your workouts a great boost now you know how to gain weight fast more efficiently.

 

Tags: build muscle mass, build muscle up, cortisol, how to gain weight fast, muscle building
Filed under: building muscle