How To Get More Definition & Tone From Workouts
There are things you can do or change to be able to see more muscle tone in your body.
First of all, let’s get one thing clear…
It’s close to impossible to see muscle tone without lifting weights.
In order to see muscle tone, you have to do some sort of resistance based training because you need to build muscle.
If you are one of my cardio queens, I can’t stress enough how much you need to cut back on cardio and add more weight training.
Now, there is a place for cardio.
I do cardio, but I lift weights more than cardio.
You can add 20-30 minutes of cardio AFTER your weight workouts.
This is when your body is most effective at burning fat.
The reason is scientific….read more about cardio workouts, here.
Just know that if you want to tone up and see more definition in your body, you need to do more weight training and do a few sessions of cardio right after your weight workouts.
I find that a lot of women who are doing the weight training aren’t seeing results. The issue is that they are not training right.
Today, I want to give you some tips and guidelines to help you get the most out of your workouts. This will help you can get more muscle tone and definition.
Tips For Seeing More Muscle Tone & Definition From Your Workouts
- Workout routines must change every 4 weeks.
- You must change the rep range you do from month to month.
- The best range for gaining lean muscle is 10-12, you can hang out here more often.
- Time under tension is important and should vary according to you rep range.
- Increase volume of exercises and sets to gain more muscle.
I’m gonna try my best to not be long winded and stay short and concise with the explanations. It’s very important you understand.
Change Your Workouts
The reason for this is because it takes about 4 weeks to see the results from a certain program, for example the rep range, the amount of sets per workout, exercises, etc.
It also takes about 4ish weeks before your body begins to plateau and you wont see results. This is the biggest reason and why you need to change it up so often.
Change Rep Range
Every rep range yields a different results.
- 4-6 reps is for strength
- 10-12 is for hypertrophy (muscle growth)
- 15-20 is more for endurance and “toning”
I change my rep range every single month. There are months were I will do one month at 10 reps and then another month at 12 which is about the same and then do a month at 15-20, I even do months at 30 reps.
Different rep ranges yield different results and work the muscle fibers in a different way. There are certain muscles that do better with certain rep ranges.
For example, quads are more of a slow twitch muscle fiber so they do well with a more endurance rep range like 15-30. Hamstrings are fast twitch mostly and they do best with less reps. I like to do 8-10 for them.
If you are not changing up your rep ranges you are missing out on big result changes.
Time Under Tension
This matters.
Its the amount of time your muscle is under tension or resistance for every single rep. We use seconds for this.
For example:
A Squat with 311 tempo is 3 seconds going down, 1 second pause at 90 degrees and 1 second to come up. That means it takes you 5 seconds to do 1 rep. That’s 5 seconds of tension.
Say you do 10 reps, that is 50 seconds of time under tension.
And it has an inverse relation with reps.
Higher reps with lighter weights you can do less time under tension because you would die with say a 6 second rep times 20 reps is 120 seconds. Too much!
But a 6 seconds rep for 10 reps is 60 seconds which is great.
The longer the time under tension, the harder.
That is why the speed of your reps and how controlled you do them matters and why depending on how many reps you do is what your time under tension is.
If you want more muscle, you need more time under tension.
I know… I know… its a lot.
That is why exercise is a science 🙂
I explain it in more depth in this post .
Increase Volume
In order to gain muscle you have to increase the number of total sets you do per workout.
You can do this by increasing the amount of exercises you do per muscle.
Say you have done 3 exercises per muscle group for 4 weeks.
The next month you can increase to 4 exercises per muscle.
You can also increase the number of sets without increasing the number of exercises.
So if you have been doing 3 sets of 2 exercises per body part for 4 weeks, you can think of increasing to 4 sets of 2 exercises per body part for the next 4 weeks.
Ok, now you can start making some changes in your workouts and start to see better results. Feeling stuck in your workout routine?
Check out these 5 tips to get unstuck.
I will leave you 3 workouts here that I posted on Instagram that you can try.
Full Body Workout: Click Here
I hope you give these a try.
If you are serious about seeing more muscle definition, want to lose some fat, and feel better about yourself and you’ve tried it on your own and haven’t gotten the results you want, I’d love to invite you to join my FIT MOM FOR LIFE PROGRAM.
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Its a program you can literally use for the rest of your life and continue to learn and make more changes and see better results.
And you will never get tired of workouts or eating healthy because you will have so much variety.
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Need motivation to get started? Check out the video below!
