If there's one design decision that separates a high cash value policy from a sluggish one, it's the split between base premium and paid-up additions. Get this mix right and your cash value shows up early. Get it wrong, or let a default design pick it for you, and you've bought the slow version of a good idea. So let's make it concrete.
Base premium is the core cost of the whole life policy. It buys the guaranteed death benefit and builds guaranteed cash value, but it's front-loaded with the policy's costs, so early on a lot of your base dollar goes to expenses rather than cash value. Paid-up additions, or PUAs, are extra dollars you pour in through a rider. They buy small chunks of fully paid-up insurance that carry very little expense, so a much larger share lands as cash value fast.
The action item is that a policy designed for cash value tilts the mix hard toward PUAs, within the limits that keep it from crossing IRS lines into a modified endowment contract. A common shape is a modest base with a large PUA rider on top. That's the structure to ask for by name when you're building. If the proposal in front of you is nearly all base premium, that's a red flag, and it deserves a direct question.
Now the honest limits. There's a ceiling on how much you can put into PUAs before the IRS reclassifies the policy and you lose the tax treatment that makes it attractive, so this is a design conversation with someone who runs the numbers, not a knob you crank to the max yourself. And the mix has to fit a premium you can actually sustain, because a policy you can't fund helps nobody.
A word of caution: this is general education, not individualized advice, and MEC limits and tax treatment depend on your specifics. When you're ready to build, the design page walks the decisions, and the deeper why lives at Lifetime LOC.