HOW TO GET TONED HEALTHILY AND KEEP CONSISTENT
One of the hardest health and fitness goals can be to get toned. As a coach, women often come to me after a yo-yo weightloss journey but they still don’t have the muscle definition they want to support that toned look they desire. To achieve a toned body one will need to cycle through multiple phases of building muscle (one phase) and losing fat (a separate phase).
Let’s start by sharing two clients and what they’re journey’s have looked like. The client on the left, Kacey, instead of going into fat loss, took 6 months to focus on building muscle, this was the end result of focusing on ‘building’ her physique, let’s see what’s to come with her fat loss phase! On the right is Sarah. Sarah focused on building muscle first, but a shorter phase than Kacey, and went into a fat loss thereafter. This is 4 months into her fat loss phase and she’s not done yet!
This is often why a well rounded health, fitness and nutrition coach (like our coaches) is important. The journey takes building strong foundational lifestyle habits and then partnering proper training and nutrition to the phase of physique transformation that one is focused on.
Do You Know What Getting Toned Actually Means?
It means that you have spent a significant amount of time building muscle.
It’s not rare that I hear someone compare themselves to someone they see with a fit, strong, shapely physique only to feel discouraged about where they are at currently. Listen, the only thing different between where you are now and that someone is what you might be doing and T I M E.
What stands in most people’s ways of achieving THAT look is taking the time to build muscle. Building muscle takes months and years. This is why it’s so important to find enjoyment in the process.
Most people focus so strongly on losing weight, eating less, cardio focused routines that ‘burn calories’ as they try to build a physique using extreme weight loss tactics. These are all methods that are short lived and actually take away from your physique. Losing weight does not mean you will have a lean physique.
A lean and shapely physique requires muscle. To build muscle you need to eat enough calories and protein while using a strength training plan with progressive overload.
When you talk about your shape and what you want, try breaking it down into what it takes to achieve that look: diet, fitness and consistency.
Love Your Diet
Now, when we work with clients, we do not just put them on a standard blanket diet plan that leaves them hungry and with cravings that lead to guilt. We work on an individualized basis, delving into health history, lifestyle, gut health, hormones and digestion. We build a nutrition plan that will change throughout each person’s journey to achieve sustainable results. We want everyone to have the tools to continue solo; it’s a lifestyle change not a fad.
We want to give each of you the foundations to understand your bodies. With the knowledge from these blog posts you could thrive on your own, or you might find you still need a helping hand from our coaches; we offer nutrition consultations if this is the area you are struggling with.
First off, you’ll want to start by first understanding how much you are currently intaking. Logging your food can be helpful to streamline your approach and make it more strategic and less of a guessing game. It will take time but once you get used to the process it will naturally become a part of your day and can be enjoyable to see your progress. (It could replace that 10 minutes of scrolling you keep trying to reduce!)
Steps might look like:
Log your intake without changing anything (Be accurate! Weigh your food and log it all!)
Take the average calorie intake of your first week of logging and start to eat to that calorie amount every day. The consistency will help to begin adapting your habits and body to see just how it feels. If you are hungry, GREAT! The next step will be to increase intake so this is a positive. If you find you are stuffed, we’ll want to do some detective work surrounding why.
As you are eating at your average calorie intake day in and day out, start to align your training plan. This will help you see if your energy in is supporting your desired energy out.
Begin to align your protein intake to where it needs to be. Slow and steady with increasing**. If you are consuming 60g a day and want to eat 130g per day, don’t jump all the way up there, you’ll likely find that doesn’t feel very good, increase 15g every few days.
From here, start to slowly increase overall calories by ensuring micronutrient status is solid. I like to have my clients focus on getting in their fruits and veggies which will often bring up carb intake a bit and support wellness.
As you are doing this, you’ll want to monitor how your energy is in your workouts, and day to day. As you continue your daily consistency you help your body adapt to the level of intake you are consuming on a regular basis. Note - appetite can change due to sleep, stress and hormonal fluctuations so you want to monitor these components.
** I know, eating MORE food scares a whole lot of you. But the crazy thing is, you might not actually be eating enough.
If you have been on a diet for 10+ years and are still fighting to lose weight and be your goal shape, your body is trying to tell you something.
And if you’ve spent those last 10+ years…
- Intentionally or unintentionally under eating
- Restricting calories, carbs or food groups
- Eating 1500 calories or less
- And/or never intentionally taking periods of time to eat. more. Food.
Then it’s time to consider a different plan. Think, if you had an exam, you wouldn’t go into it with zero preparation, just expecting your brain to know it all, right? Your body is the same. If you want to be toned, your muscles need fuel.
If you have been trying for these 10+ years you might be feeling exhausted from trying and overwhelmed at the advice out there, why not fill out a coaching application? We offer a free obligation-free chat to begin with, even just this call could give you insights into what needs to change.
Enjoy Your Workout
It takes time to build muscle which means you want to make sure you first work on building consistency in your workouts.
What days always seem challenging to workout? Make it easy at first, a sure fire win.
Set an appointment with a friend and schedule your workouts on your calendar.
Once you get the consistency down, then you’ll want to start to apply progressive overload principles to support muscle strength and growth.
Progressive overload means that you will improve in strength over a time period of executing an exercise. For example, you may have listed 3 sets of 8-10 repetitions for your bicep curl. You are able to perform all 3 sets of 8 reps at 10lbs the first week, the next week you are able to perform 10 repetitions for all 3 sets so for your third week performing that exercise you increase the weight to 12.5lbs and you can now do 8 rep again. Staying within the rep range but increasing weight over time proves strength is increasing which means muscular growth is happening!
Our our coaching packages we tailor workouts to the individual in these phases ensuring that you align nutrition and training together to support your goals.
Focus on Consistency
What's easier today was harder last week. And what's hard today will be easier next week.
Consistently facing the challenge is what turns hard into easy.
Remember this next time you're feeling discouraged.
Time will pass, and you'll either get better at the things that are required to achieve your goal, or not and stay right here. Invest the time now, or invest the time later. But you'll need to invest it somewhere in order to turn hard into easy.
Consistency is a huge obstacle clients come to us with. It often will feel easier to be consistent when you have a time-sensitive goal. A trip to the beach, your wedding or an event, however what about after the event or even those goals that are not time-sensitive? We help our clients utilize intrinsic and extrinsic motivators to build self accountability and get good at learning how to be consistent.
"The journey IS the goal."
In order to get that toned body, you'll need to travel the bumpy road so you can unlock the GROWTH that makes the success and achievement meaningful and able to SUSTAIN.
So when you think, "I just want to look like that already", think about what you're really saying. You want to skip the growth, skip the lessons, skip the character building that you need.
I see far too many of you trying to scoot around actually learning and implementing the steps to achieve your goals and ending up more frustrated than you started.
Coaching is not just about your nutrition and fitness, so much is about your mindset and we are dang good at helping you change your thought patterns. Consistency is about habit change, if you struggle with this, get in touch for a free chat and we will see what’s best for you.