How to increase strength in 'GTA Online': Tips, tricks and guide to upgrade your character

Increasing your strength in real life is as easy as repeatedly raising and lowering heavy objects, but in Grand Theft Auto Online, there's slightly more to it. In between all your snowball fights, you should work on upgrading your strength stat so you can climb ladders more quickly and take more damage in combat without dying. Just don't skip leg day.

With GTA 6 still several years away, you have plenty of time to beef up in GTA Online. Here's how to do it.

How to increase strength in GTA Online

The truth is that, as far as we can tell, there isn't one surefire, speedy way to fill out your strength stat in GTA Online. This is an online game that needs to be balanced so that some players don't dominate others, meaning you won't find any easy cheat codes to get the job done. In other words, you'll have to actually play the game to increase your character's strength.

Well, that's not strictly true. You can game the system a bit for faster results. According to IGN, the strength stat increases by one for every 20 punches you land. They recommend punching a car driven by another player (preferably a friend of yours) to increase the stat.

Reddit user ADozenDone recommends starting the Gerald contact mission called "Pier Pressure," which causes cops in the game to not activate when you commit crimes. You can then find an area with a ton of pedestrians and punch them until the stat increases.

In another Reddit post, user Dannyg86 recommends going to the in-game creator and starting a deathmatch. Set the kill count to 50, keep the spawns close to one another, add in a high time limit and go to town punching AI characters. Rinse and repeat when it's over.

It's possible some of these tricks for increasing strength in GTA Online have been mitigated with updates since those posts were made, but without testing them, we don't know for sure. Get out there and try it for yourself!

GTA Online tips, tricks and guides

Bulking up isn't all there is to do in GTA Online. Check out Mic's guides for the GTA Online winter event, the new Import/Export DLC, how to make money fast and becoming a CEO in the online game.