This is the new way to build muscle in about 5 minutes a day, and if you understand this, this will change the way you approach fitness for the rest of your life. I’ve trained for less than 40 minutes a week total for the last 5 years. In that time, I made some of the best muscle gain, strength, and physique changes in my life, and it’s the exact process that I’ve taught to all my students who have made even faster, crazier transformations than me, being earlier on in their fitness careers.
Are You Training Hard but Not Seeing Results?
If you feel like you’re currently doing a lot of work training, putting in the hours but not getting the results that you could be in terms of muscle gain and strength for that effort, or if you’re just feeling like at some point the approach you’re taking is not going to be sustainable, then it’s time to realize that if you can dedicate 5 minutes a day, 6 days a week to strength training, then you have more than you need to build all the muscle possible about as fast as possible. I’m going to show you right now exactly what it looks like to do that so that you can do it too.
Muscle gain does not need to be this big, complicated, time-consuming exercise, and it’s the very act of making it this big, time-consuming ordeal that is very likely stopping you from getting results both on a consistency behavioral level and on an actual physiological training level.
The Long-Term Time Frame of Muscle Growth
The thing with muscle gain is that regardless of how you go about it, if you do a good job, it takes years. It’s a slow process, and you want to be doing it forever anyway. We want to get short-term results as fast as possible, but we don’t just want to get 3 months or a year’s worth and then stop. Most people I speak to want to be able to do this all the way into their old age so they actually continue to perform, function, and look their best their whole lives.
Maintenance Is a Myth
If you’re not moving forwards and improving, you’re going backwards. Maintaining is not a realistic thing as a human. Even if the protocol we took to build muscle wasn’t the most effective one in the world and we were leaving 10–20% of gains on the table—which, with the method I’m going to show you, I don’t think we do—but even if that were the case, we still need a protocol that is effortlessly sustainable long term purely from that perspective of longevity.
The Secret to Full-Body Muscle Growth in 5 Minutes a Day
Considering this, it’s your lucky day because it really does happen that with 5 minutes a day, six movements total, you honestly have everything you need to maximize full-body muscle growth, functionality, strength, and mobility. That is how I have trained for nearly half a decade now. It’s how I teach all my students to make the best progress in their life in terms of muscle gain and those other things, and this is basically how we do it.
The Six Strength Goals You Need to Focus On
Training protocol aside, our goal with strength training is just to build to six big strength goals. There’s only so many patterns our body can move in, and if we can build up our strength on those patterns to a high enough degree, then we know that in order to perform them, our body is going to have to have built crazy amounts of muscle mass in order to have the strength to do them. That muscle mass is going to be comprehensive, proportioned, and functional because it’s muscle that our body has built in order to perform, as I said, at an elite level on all our basic planes of motion.
The idea with the goals is that they represent an elite level that is going to take years of training and growth to get to, but goals that are also achievable with enough time training and with a lean enough body composition—which is another thing that most people want to get sorted anyway—so it’s an extra incentive to make sure we’re not only building muscle mass but staying lean.
When achieving those strength goals, we know that we’ve attained both. With just six strength goals, we comprehensively sum up everything that we want to get out of our training and nutrition, and we know if we get there, we’ll have achieved those things. In this method, the six goals that we work towards are:
- A straddle planche
- A front lever
- A handstand push-up
- A one-arm chin-up
- A single-leg squat loaded with 75% of our body weight
- A Nordic curl
The Strategy
The strategy for actually training towards those is really simple: we want to train each of them once a week and do whatever we can to stimulate as much growth on those movement patterns as possible. This means developing strength and maximum strength capacity in each of those movement patterns so that, as fast as possible, we progress our strength towards the end goals.
That’s the theory. That’s what we’re going to try and do. The idea here is that it leaves us ample recovery. We have a week between efforts of training the same movement, and in that time, our body goes and does the recovery—builds the muscle mass—so that we can actually progress and be stronger next time we come back to train that movement, meaning we’ve literally built more muscle mass.
The Proven Training Method for Rapid Strength Gain
The method to do this—I’m going to skip for you the years of trial and error it’s taken to figure out what is the most effective way of training for those movements. What we have found to work incredibly effectively—and I will never go back to doing anything but this approach—is just so incredibly simple, easy, and consistent in the results that it has delivered me all the way up to my sort of end-goal-level physique and strength levels.
It’s not just beginners that this has worked for (which it does incredibly well because people who are primed for growth as beginners just transform so, so quickly with this), but it’s also able to take me and a lot of my more advanced students through intermediate stages up to advanced levels.
This is the protocol. This is the cream of the crop that you can take now and use to build your own muscle mass.
Train at Maximum Strength Capacity
The method is basically this: take your movement that you’re training that day, train it only at your maximum strength limit, and find failure from the first centimeter of your training of your rep—where you basically are stuck and can’t move, like you would be at the end of your final set of maxing out a sort of bench press or something where you actually need a spotter to help you get the bar.
Find that point where you need a spotter, and you’re stuck—that is how you train from the start of your rep, from the first centimeter of movement, all the way to when you stop your set. That’s all you ever do: failure, max effort. On the negative, rather than lowering yourself, you actually crank the difficulty up so much that you start to be forced down as you try to push back up.
So it’s at maximum, it’s at failure throughout all the range of motion of positives, and through the negatives, it’s actually trying to continue doing positives but then make the difficulty more than 100%—more than your maximum capacity—and actually be forced down all the way through the range of motion to the bottom.
Why Bodyweight Training Beats Traditional Weights
How do we do this? Well, that’s the beauty of using bodyweight and the reason that I’ve completely converted to using calisthenics and bodyweight training rather than weights or machines at the gym. What bodyweight training allows you to do is adjust the difficulty based on your body positioning rather than external weights or load, which means simply by changing your position—like how much of your weight you put on your arm when you’re training a one-arm chin-up—you can determine exactly how difficult you make the movement.
By getting feedback from your body, finding when it’s failing, and then titrating the difficulty accordingly, you can find the perfect slot to challenge yourself at maximum capacity and keep it there. You just keep on adjusting the difficulty in tiny increments as you do your reps.
A New Training Paradigm for Muscle Growth
This is a completely different paradigm to all gym or fixed-resistance training. It’s a bit weird when you start, but it literally allows you to, in one single set of like 2 or 3 minutes of training one of these bodyweight movements, get the equivalent stimulus for your body to grow muscle that would take 10–20 sets to do with a lat pulldown machine or a bench press or deadlifts.
Your Simple 5-Minute Per Day Training Plan
That is literally the entire protocol. You have your six movements. At one point each week, train each of them. If you wanted to split them over six days, you would just do one movement a day and have a day off.
Know When to Stop: Listening to Your Body
You show up and train, starting at failure and staying there the whole time, and you basically just train until you can’t do that anymore—until you can’t give it 100% effort. This is much more a psychological thing. You listen to your body’s biofeedback through your emotions and think, Okay, when this isn’t fun anymore, when I’m not able to attack this with everything I’ve got and give it real gusto and honestly voluntarily attack this with all my strength, then you stop.
Another way of thinking about this is just, I’m not having fun anymore, or I’ve got to motivate myself now to do the next rep. Then don’t do the rep. You’re done.
This might take you one rep to achieve—it depends how long you train for. It might take you two; it might take you three. The reps don’t really matter. What matters is listening to your body and not letting an amount of work get in the way of the intensity.
Stop Overtraining: Less Is More
The biggest risk to doing this well is actually trying to do more. Honestly, 5 minutes is much more than you would need. I find most of my sets go for 1 to 2 to 3 minutes, and by the time we’re getting to that sort of duration of a set, I’m almost always finished and having a rest and sit down. That is literally training for that move of the week—done.
Achieve Maximum Muscle Growth In Just 5 Minutes A Day
In less than 5 minutes a day, 6 days a week, you can get all the effective work done to stimulate your body to grow all the muscle of your body and build all the strength that you could practically ever want. Doing this over a full range of motion, you’re also building up great mobility and functionality to do whatever you want to do with that body.
It seems simple in theory—yes, it is. Applying it is another thing, especially when we’ve got so much baggage that we bring with us of thinking we need to do more, thinking more sets and reps and exercises are necessary. But I can honestly tell you, this is what’s gotten me the results that you see, and it’s worked even better for people earlier on who have so many more beginner strength gains to make.