How do I tone my stomach?
Every client who comes to me always has a goal of changing how they look. If you are wondering “How do I get toned arms?” Or “how do I get a six-pack?” Then you are probably wanting a quick approach to this. Well, here I will give you the quickest approach to losing body fat and what it means to “tone up”.
Every client, Even the ones who have a performance-based goal still cares about how they look. I have one client who races triathlons and he still wants to gain more muscle around his chest.
When I sit down with clients the most common goal I hear from people is, “want to tone up". Most men say they want to gain muscle, have bigger arms and have a six-pack. Most women say they want toned arms and a toned stomach. But what is meant by being more toned?
Essentially this means being able to see the definition of our muscles and see the shape of our body and the way you do this is by building muscle and losing body fat.
You see the reason that most of us can't see our Abs is because there is a layer of body fat covering them, we all have abs and muscles of our core, but they are just “hiding”. To see our muscle definition and ab separation we really need to lose body fat and build the muscles of our core.
The same goes for our arms, getting big arms is the same as getting toned arms, you have to look to build muscle. Now depending on what you do diet-wise, will depend on how much muscle you gain, as well as if you are Male or Female.
When it comes to creating the body you want, we need to distinguish what your actual goal is.
For example: Say you looked in the mirror and you were 80kg and didn't like what you looked like. Then trained for 6 months, made better choices diet wise and stayed consistent. Looked in the mirror again but this time loved what you looked like, only to check the scales to see they had stayed the same, would you be annoyed?
Is weight loss the goal or is changing the way you look at the goal? Often the two go hand in hand. When trying to lose body fat, you will lose weight but that isn't always the case.
Taking our example from above, imagine you did lose a lot of weight but looked in the mirror and didn't like what you looked like, would you be happy with the weight loss? Our guess is probably not.
So if the goal for most people is changing the way they look, getting toned, gaining muscle, losing body fat and overall looking good naked, then we need to know our goal. Our goal is to lose body fat. Not to solely lose weight.
The way we tone up and get the body of our dreams is to focus on building muscle and losing body fat. If you are someone who has never lifted weights before, then this can happen simultaneously. A similar thing could happen if you already lift weights, but the more experienced you get, the more you want to start to pick a focus, more about that here.
To lose fat you want to be in a calorie deficit (Read how to do that in this article), to build muscle you want to focus on strength more than anything. It's hard to say what the best way for you to do it is, because, well, it depends. I will explain how to pick the right exercises for you and your goals in an article in the future but for now, the basics of lifting weights are
Compound movements Come first- (Back Squats, Deadlifts, Bench Press, Overhead Press, Dips, Pull-Ups, Bent Over Rows). The reason we give this advice is that compound movements include multiple muscles having to work. So you may not be isolating a specific muscle, but you will be making the most of your time if you can only train 2x per week.
For each exercise perform somewhere between, 2 - 4 sets, 6 - 12 reps. Again these are sweeping statements to get “most of the people, most of the way, most of the time” (shout out to Mark Wood for that quote)
Pick exercises that target the muscles you want to grow, but don’t neglect anything.
Exercises are skills - treat exercises as skills. Learn how to master the exercises and perform them the way they should be performed
Progressive Overload - Focus on performance. Focus on getting stronger by either adding weight or adding reps each week.
Toning up is the combination of the two and the quickest way to do it is to just be consistent. There are so many things that go into losing weight and the reasons it's hard, some of which I have discussed in this Free Webinar. I have also spoken about them in different articles and Ebooks. Losing weight is so simple on paper, but when you add humans, with real lives to live and commitments. But staying consistent and just trying to make better choices is the way forward.
