Sometimes you have to shake things up to take your muscle-building routine to the next level. One of MF’s favourite tricks to work your muscles and get faster growth is to use pyramid sets. This has nothing to do with hauling blocks of stone around or wrapping yourself in bandages. It’s about increasing the weight that you lift with each set of an exercise while reducing the number of reps.

The purpose of this is to exhaust your muscle fibres, maximising growth potential and making them bigger, fast. There’s no such thing as a ‘slightly activated’ muscle fibre – they are either engaged completely or not at all. By taking the muscle through an increasing range of weight while decreasing reps, you target each category of fibres in turn, completely exhausting the whole muscle.

Doing a whole workout of pyramid sets would take a long time and could be counter-productive, overtraining the muscles and sending the body into a destructive metabolism. Instead, strategically inserting pyramid sets into a workout will give you all the benefits of this technique.

The four-week pyramid plan here is divided into a chest, arms and shoulders workout, a back and core workout and finally aleg and abs workout. The low weight or bodyweight exercises in the workouts will also target any stray muscle fibres to promote growth across the whole muscle – a technique known as post-exhaustion.

Always eat a high-protein meal (20-30g protein) within two hours of working out, and within four weeks you’ll have a brand new body.

How to do this workout

Do workouts A, B and C once a week each, leaving at least a day between workouts. Warm up with five minutes on a cardio machine and sets of press-ups and bodyweight squats to raise your heart rate and get your muscles fired up. To begin a pyramid group of sets, choose a weight you can lift 12 times and use that for the ten-rep set. Then increase the weight by 2-3kg for each subsequent set. Rest for 60 seconds between each set and for two minutes between each exercise. For the non-pyramid sets you should use light weights or your bodyweight only and concentrate on maintaining form.