Your workouts must be intense if you want to build muscle, there’s no way around it. Sure, you can tone up and get stronger with a consistent workout, but if you really want to add muscle weight to your frame, you need to workout hard. Not long, but hard. A frequent mistake is to workout too often or for too long. In truth, if you work out at high intensity, you can build muscle lean in 40 minutes, 3 times per week. That’s a total of 2 hours per week, no kidding.

But you must also allow the proper time for your body to recover from a strenuous workout. That’s why working out five days a week, or two or more hours per day, is counterproductive for most athletes. Especially after an intense workout session, your body needs a day or so to recover. During this time, your muscles repair the damage done to them during the workout. This repair process is how the body adapts to the stress of the workout — and it adapts by building more muscle. So don’t skip your rest!