How to Build Muscle and Get Ripped in 10 Steps
Everyone wants to know how to get ripped, quickly and easily. This want is magnified ten-fold when there’s a holiday coming up. Why? Because who doesn’t want to look good on the beach! As you probably know by now with health and fitness, there are thousands of contradictions, thousands of ideas, and thousands of perspectives. However, let us help you.
Here we cut through the crap and give you 10 necessary steps that are essential in any man’s (or women’s) journey to getting ripped and looking hot on the beach. They cover the essentials – training, nutrition and getting results! You may know a lot more than this, you may know a lot less, but what is undeniable is that if you act on these 10 important points, your body will become ripped and beach ready, faster than ever!
1. Train your muscles with resistance. Whether it is at a gym, at home, or in a park, you have to put resistance through your muscles to cause them to develop. This can be as simple as bodyweight exercises for beginners or weighted exercises for the more advanced.
2. Accompanying this resistance training, you must up your protein levels and lower your carbohydrate levels, while aiming for an overall calorific deficit. Aim for 1g of protein per lb. of bodyweight. For a 90kg man, this would be 198 lbs. 198 lbs. means 198g of protein every single day! TL:DR In real layman’s terms, don’t eat crap, eat more protein, and don’t eat crap!
3. To burn body fat fast, you need to mobilise fat stores. This means hard, high intensity interval training (HIIT). Ditch your laborious jogging or pedalling pointlessly for hours on end and start doing hard 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off training as many times as you can muster. For fitter trainees you may need to go for longer. Try 1 minute on and 30 seconds rest.
4. You need to do exercises that send your heart rate sky high. Much like the point above, you need to work your body to raise your heart rate. (And to subsequently burn fat.) Therefore, doing endless bicep curls won’t cut it. (How many times have you heard that by now?!) Squats, deadlifts, and explosive jumps will get your body working hard and promote muscle growth as well as fat burning.
5. For a HIT circuit with no weights or external resistance, think burpees, explosive jumps and sprints. Also utilise full body movements wherever possible. If you can ‘sprint’ for a minute, you’re not sprinting, you’re just lying.
6. Don’t snack on crap food! When you’re training for something, (in this case, looking good on the beach), being a baby simply doesn’t cut it. No you can’t have those chocolates, or that junk food, because if you don’t put some work in, you won’t see any changes. The easiest way to not snack on crap food is simply, DON’T BUY IT. We are creatures of habit. Don’t buy those cookies and keep them in the cupboard, if they are there you’ll want them, simple as that.
7. Buy and eat fresh produce without a label on as much as you can – no one ever got fat eating vegetables.
8. Don’t use an effort/reward system, at least with food! Going to the gym DOES NOT mean you can have that chocolate bar. If you form a habit of training, and then rewarding yourself with bad food, you’ll probably end up in a worse position than when you started.
9. Drink a lot of water! If you can drink between 2 and 3 litres a day, this is ideal. Water keeps you hydrated, meaning your cognitive functions are sharper, you feel fuller and are less likely to snack, and it is beneficial to both your skin and your muscles!
10. Be consistent! This is the rule to end all rules – all of your efforts are futile unless you bring some sort of consistency to the table. Train with consistency, eat well with consistency, live with consistency and you’ll see better, and quicker, success.