Most people don’t realize that you don’t need a full home gym to build muscle — in fact, standard bodyweight exercises like pushups can be effectively used to build muscle up.

It’s easy to underestimate just how effective pushups can be at building your chest, shoulders, back, and arms. At a glance, pushups are plain and almost boring: up down, up down, up down — that’s it. And that’s true to a certain extent. But many people outside of the fitness circles are only familiar with the standard pushups that they were taught in their high school phys ed classes.

There are many kinds of pushups that you can use to focus on different muscle groups, but we’re going to concentrate on five styles in this article. These might not be the best five for all people, but they should open your eyes to the variety possible with simple functional exercises.

Wide pushups: traditionally, pushups are performed with your hands being placed at shoulder width.  Wide push ups, sometimes called “wide-stance pushups”, require you to extend your hands beyond the width of your shoulders. Wide-stance pushups work your chest muscles more heavily than military-style pushups, so if chest definition is what you are looking for — wide pushups are one exercise that will help you meet your goals.

Fist pushups: Sometimes referred to as “knuckle” pushups, require the use of your fists, instead of the palms of your hands, to bear your body weight during the pushup. Fist pushups are beneficial because they target different areas of your body than traditional pushups, and may actually increase the effectiveness of your workout.

Fly pushups: adding another layer to wide pushups, fly pushups require you to begin the pushup with your hands a normal width apart at the top position. When lowering your body to the ground, you should slide your right hand out roughly 12 inches, and then slide it back to normal width on the up rep. On the next repetition, you would perform this motion with your left hand. Hint: place your hand on a towel, piece of cardboard, or similar item to assist with the slide, or “hop” your hands in and out.

Decline pushups: Instead of placing your feet on the floor, or using your knees, place your feet on a platform so that your head is lower than your feet.  You can use a chair, a stepstool, or a bench — pretty much anything that will allow you to raise your feet up so that they are higher than your head. These types of pushups work your upper chest muscles.

Deep pushups: If you are working out at home, you can perform raised pushups with the help of three sturdy chairs. By placing each of your hands on an opposite chair, and your feet on the third chair, you can increase the depth of your pushup and thereby increase the effectiveness of your workout routine. A similar, but less intense, movement can be performed with pushup stands. The “Perfect Pushup” bars work wonders.

Here is a more comprehensive list of pushup variations to achieve muscle weight gain: wide, fly, diamond, military, fist, yogi, decline, incline, deep, stacked, inchworm, and prison cell pushups.

Tips to increase the effectiveness of your pushup workouts: add some weight once the pushups begin to get easy. You don’t want to push out 50 easy reps. Rather, struggle with 20 or 30. Also be sure to add variety by varying your hand position for each of the above types of pushups.

Push ups are a great way to strengthen your upper body and exercise, build muscle at the same time. If you keep it interesting by mixing up your hand positions and trying a few different styles of pushups you can increase the effectiveness of your at-home exercising and relieve the boredom!

While kettleballs have been around for over a century in places like Russia, their use was not widespread until recently. In America, kettleball training is virtually exploding, thanks to some very unique results that you can achieve with kettleballs. For anyone looking for muscle weight gain, kettleballs make a versatile addition to your conditioning routine.

Kettleballs resemble small bowling balls with large, thick handles. They come in various weights from around 4kg to 35kg, but the heavier weights aren’t used often, as kettleball training focuses more on conditioning, explosive strength, and movement, instead of sheer strength.

The beauty of kettleball training is their versatility. In one short workout you can accomplish a number of objectives. Some of the many benefits you’ll gain from kettleball sessions include:

• Strength improvement
• Explosive power improvements
• Increases in your conditioning level
• Improved range of motion and joint flexibility
• Anaerobic conditioning gains
• Core strength gains
• Balance and stabilization improvements

And I’ve saved the best for last: kettleball training will boost your metabolism for almost a full day after a workout is over, making kettleballs ideal candidates to help you build muscle up and shed fat.

Kettleballs do have drawbacks, however, but they can be overcome. The one cited most frequently is that kettleballs only work for core and upper body conditioning, and not your lower body. To make up for this you’ll need to pair your kettleball session with a solid lower body session, or perhaps even a quick high intensity interval training (HIIT) routine.

Keep in mind that ketteballs will work best in interval-based workouts, so traditional body building routines aren’t the best fit. However, if your goal is to build muscle up and you stay abreast of advances in exercise science, you’re probably aware already that traditional body building exercises aren’t the most fitting option.

With the many benefits that kettleballs offer, they should be added to your workout session, provided that your workout already emphasizes recent experience in fitness science and is a good fit for your goals and body type.

If you want to get 100% better at something, how would you go about it? I can think of two ends of the continuum. The approach you select will be somewhere along this continuum: doing one thing twice as good (or 100 percent better), or performing 100 activities 1 percent better. I think that most people gravitate towards the first approach, but the latter is much easier to implement.

Taken a step further, to make each of these small building blocks more effective, you could also focus on things that occur outside of your workouts. So you focus on changing your habits and making small improvements that will stack on top of each other to bring you massive benefits.

So here are five minor lifestyle changes you can make to help you build muscle up.

1) Replace Traditional Cardio with High Intensity Interval Trainign

Traditional aerobic activities have a negative impact on muscle building because it burns glycogen and branched chain amino acids (BCAA). Instead, focus on interval training for fat burning, e.g. a 400-meter sprint followed by a 400-meter recovery jog, repeated 3 more times.

2) Increase Total Time Under Load (TTL)

Instead of focusing on the quantity of repetitions, focus on the total time your muscles are under load. Try spending 2 seconds on the negative contraction, 1 second at neutral (bottom of the exercise), and 1 second on the positive contraction. Emphasizing the negative is an easy method to overload muscles and promote muscle weight gain.

3) Eat More Fish

Not only is fish high in protein, it is also a natural source of omega-3 fatty acids, which are vital for both your muscular health and your overall health. Essential fatty acids make your muscles more receptive to insulin, so they aid glycogen storage and increase the absorption of amino acids into your muscles, while also preserving glutamine storage.

4) Recovery

Your body will only build muscle up by repairing it in response to your workouts. When your muscles are repaired, they are made stronger than before to respond to the higher stress levels put on them. If you don’t allow your muscles time to recover, they can never rebuild.

5) Try Something New

If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. Commit to yourself to read a new (as in current and scientifically backed) exercise book every six months. You’ll pick up new approaches and new tips to add to your workouts.

Your goal is to achieve muscle weight gain and you want to achieve it now. You’ve likely been told how many long hours it will take, and you’re getting mentally prepared to get to the health club four or five times a week for 60 to 90 minutes per workout.

I have good news for you. Conventional wisdom has led you down the wrong path.

With a scientifically-constructed workout, you can achieve better results with just three short workouts per week. By better, I mean that you can build muscle up just as quickly as with the extended workouts, but you also get a number of additional benefits:

• You will build muscle mass quickly and shed fat at the same time
• You will burn more calories as a result of a 15-minute anaerobic workout than in a 60-minute cardio workout
• You will build your explosive power
• You will increase your your overall fitness level and anaerobic threshold
• You will increase your flexibility and joint strength
• You will improve your core without doing core-specific exercises

These techniques are not secrets, but aren’t widely used. These short workouts are based on interval trainings, which is nothing new. Interval training been used successfully for quite a few years. But how you apply those intervals will be the key to success. That’s why it’s so important that you choose a current routine if your goal is muscle weight gain.

The two primary types of interval training you’ll focus on are Tabata training and high intensity interval training (HIIT). HIIT sessions are generally used for the aerobic sessions, and 15 minutes will replace 45 to 60 minutes of traditional cardio exercises.

Tabata training is just one form of strength training using compound exercises and intervals that will have your muscles screaming in 20-second sets. You can also generously apply in bodyweight exercises, sports-specific exercise, kettleball training and more to keep your workouts interesting. But prepare for hard work — you can’t build muscle up unless you put forth maximum effort during your sessions.

But these types of workouts aren’t for the faint of heart. You must already have a base level of fitness before you try them, and your joints must be healthy to start. Anyone over the age of 60 should seriously consider getting checked out before attempting interval training. When you’re ready, put your game face on and get to work. You’ll love the results!

You’ve been told over and over again: it’s impossible to build muscle up and lose fat at the same time. They say that building mass involves an increase in calories, while fat burning requires a decrease in calories. This old school wisdom is based partially in fact, but the concepts are being disproven with insights into interval workouts. The truth is, you can accomplish muscle weight gain at the same time as you burn fat if you add interval training to your workouts.

Interval training isn’t new, but it’s more widely understood, accepted, and used these days. While traditional cardiovascular training were looked at as the only reliable ways to burn fat, and the only effective workouts for endurance athletes, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has proven to be beneficial to athletes of all kinds, and for folks with varying goals.

Traditional cardio activity is often referred to as “steady state,” which essentially means that you work up to a fixed intensity level and continue working out at that level throughout the session. During the workout, your body pulls half of its fuel through your fat stores, and gets the remainder through oxygen intake, and by cutting into your glycogen and muscle stores.

HIIT sessions, conversely, involve short high intensity intervals followed by moderate intensity recovery periods. HIIT sessions are muscle sparing and are quick, but are killer. A 15-minute HIIT workout can raise your metabolic rate for a full 24 hours, enabling you to keep burning higher levels of fat for up to a day.

In addition to this, because your muscles burn calories during every minute of the day, the more lean mass you have, the more fat you burn, even while you’re doing nothing. Because HIIT not only spares your muscle, but also helps you build muscle up, your future fat burning ability is increased.

The bottom line is that regardless of your fitness goals, HIIT sessions can help you improve your overall level of fitness in very short sessions. Better still, if your goals include muscle gain and fat loss, adding HIIT to your weekly workouts is a no-brainer.