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Co-authored by Pete Cerqua and Jennifer Mueller, JD Last Updated: January 8, References. Part 1. Use high-intensity interval training HIIT for the best fat-burning results. With Tabata training, aerobics, or a fitness boot camp, you push your body to maximum speed for 1 to 4 minutes and then rest for 1 to 4 minutes.

HIIT workouts increase your metabolic rate, which will cause your body to burn fat more quickly. These high-intensity workouts can vastly improve your cardiovascular strength and maintain overall fitness in as little as 10 minutes a day.

However, these are advanced workouts that you shouldn't attempt if you are a beginner, and they may not do much in terms of specifically increasing your muscle tone and definition. Boot camp workouts use simple moves and often are designed for beginner- and intermediate-level exercisers.

You typically can find boot camps or other HIIT training programs at your local gym or fitness center. Work out for at least 30 minutes. Most bodies use carbohydrate stores exclusively for the first 15 to 20 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise. If you keep going after that point, your body will start burning fat.

Not only will you have lower body fat and more defined muscles, but you'll also be at lesser risk for heart attack or stroke. Good fat-burning cardio exercise can be as simple as jogging on the treadmill or outside, if the weather's nice.

If you need more variety, check out aerobics classes at your local gym or fitness center. Do cardio exercises 5 to 6 days each week. While strength training builds muscle, cardio sessions focus on burning fat.

Using cardio and strength training together is the best way to achieve maximum muscle tone and definition. For example, it might be easier for you to get your cardio in by going for a run early in the morning, and then doing your strength training after work. Another option is to plan your training sessions for an hour, and alternate between cardio and strength training in minute intervals.

Extend cardio sessions on days you aren't strength training. Consider doing 45 to 60 minutes instead of 30 minutes to lose more fat and define your muscles; however, overtraining can be very hard on your body, so take 1 to 2 days of rest each week.

You might also consider doing yoga on your off days to replace your regular weight training. While yoga will work your muscles, it's generally not considered as intense as weight training, so a light routine would be appropriate for your rest days.

Part 2. Strength train for at least 30 minutes 3 or 4 days each week. You won't build muscle definition if you only strength train for 15 or 20 minutes once or twice a week.

To get the tone you want, you must make a commitment to hit the gym on a more frequent basis. You can do the research and set up a routine on your own, but the easiest way to create your routine is to schedule a session with a certified personal trainer.

They can not only advise you on exercises to do that will meet your goals, but also critique your form and technique. Typically, you'll get best results by focusing on your upper body the first day, your lower body the second day, and your core the third day.

If you're strength training on a four day rotation, split your core over each of the 4 days and do 2 upper-body days and 2 lower-body days. Take 36 to 48 hours of rest between strength-training sessions.

If you are doing your exercises correctly, you will tear a lot of muscle fibers. Your body needs time to repair your muscles and rebuild them so they are stronger. For example, you might do upper body 1 day, lower body the next day, You typically can do core strengthening exercises with only 24 hours of rest before the next strength-training session.

Adequate rest also means getting adequate sleep. Your body is rebuilding muscle while you sleep, so make sure you get between 7 and 9 hours of restful sleep each night.

Choose the right weight amount. You should be strength training with a weight heavy enough that you can only complete an exercise with correct form for 12 to 15 repetitions. All animal sources of protein are complete proteins, as do protein powders and bars.

But plenty of vegetarian and vegan athletes can put on muscle just fine. A few plant-based foods, including tofu and quinoa, contain complete proteins. Getting a mix of protein-rich foods—seeds, beans, legumes, whole grains, nut butters, and more contain complementary amino acid profiles.

One thing to keep in mind is the amount of protein you get in one go. The body can process only so much protein at once—25 to 40 grams—so think about getting doses of protein in meals and snacks over the day. True, but the body needs to be functioning properly in all of its systems if you want to feel powerful and look muscular.

That means taking in produce. Really spend some time in the produce department and see what appeals to you. Vary up the fruits and vegetables you eat, all of which have a slightly different nutritional profile of vitamins, minerals, and micronutrients. And calorically speaking, you get a lot of bang for your buck.

Produce—and especially vegetables—are bulky but not calorie dense. Sign up for our newsletter to receive amazing, expert-backed healthy-living advice — delivered straight to your inbox. Take this as an opportunity to get back in touch with your hunger cues, which you might have started to quiet down in an effort to take in a lot of food and stoke that muscle synthesis.

Reply to the things your body is asking for, including things like sandwiches or pasta. The body needs all of the macronutrients for supplying the energy you use to function, and keeping all of the bones, tissue, organs, and systems doing cellular turnover. But you still want to properly fuel your workouts.

Have a meal with 50 to grams of carbohydrates and 20 to 30 grams of protein about one hour before a workout. And after you sweat, eat a quick snack of carbs and protein. That means running, rowing, skiing, cardio group classes, jumping rope , and more.

And maybe have some fun, too. Varying your cross-training is energy-intensive, helps to deflect injury versus doing the same thing over and over, and is just plain fun—which will keep you excited and engaged in your training.

My weight is actually quite normal, quite good—but if I want definition, should I be increasing my weights by quite a bit? What Erin is really asking about is how best to change her body composition. Increasing muscle definition is really just a simple idea of increasing muscle mass and decreasing body fat.

Increasing muscle definition is really just a simple idea of increasing muscle mass and decreasing body fat , especially the fat between the skin and muscle called subcutaneous fat.

Doing these two things in concert is what creates defined muscles that you can see. Increasing your muscle definition requires some patience and something called periodization. Generally, periodization training is a way to keep an athlete from overtraining by deliberately moving through periods of high and low intensities or volumes of training.

But it can refer to any deliberate division of training that leads to a specific outcome. Sounds simple, right? It is … in theory.

In a landmark paper published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition , researchers compared the ability to gain muscle after eating a protein-dense meal in three distinct populations of people: healthy weight, overweight, and obese.

The researchers studied the people in all three groups and monitored some key muscle-building biological factors. They measured these factors after the study participants had consumed grams of pork, which equals approximately 36 grams of protein and 3 grams of fat.

The overweight group showed a much lower ability to generate the biological activity necessary for muscle building in response to a protein-rich meal, and the obese group had even more trouble.

What the researchers saw was that the overweight group showed a much lower ability to generate the biological activity necessary for muscle building in response to a protein-rich meal, and the obese group had even more trouble.

There is a diminished myofibrillar protein synthetic response to the ingestion of protein-dense food in overweight and obese adults compared with healthy-weight controls. So what exactly does this mean for our question-asker, Erin? As simple as this sounds, the key here is a little more tricky.

And that means two things—she needs to lose weight slowly and she needs to exercise and eat in a way that supports her muscles. One key factor in losing body fat while maintaining muscle mass is the speed of weight loss.

A big reason why I co-founded the weight loss program called Weighless. Life is that most diets encourage you to lose weight too quickly. We have found that matching the rate of weight loss to one that matches the pace of actual fat loss about pounds per month is a huge game-changer for everyone, including athletes who are looking to either hit their optimal race weight or get that well-defined look.

Yes, I know, you want to lose the weight now. Cool, right? Now, I am going to defer to an article and podcast from my partner in the Weighless program, Monica Reinagel, called Diet Strategy to Lose Fat and Gain Muscle.

If you have a significant amount of weight to lose, I think your best strategy is to focus first on reducing your body weight while minimizing muscle loss. Again, incorporating high-quality protein into every meal can help build lean muscle tissue and may also help with weight maintenance.

The typical middle-aged American male eats about 90 grams of protein, which is enough to maximize muscle protein synthesis or muscle building. In the US and likely Canada, too people eat about 42 percent of their daily protein at dinner and only 16 percent at breakfast.

What the researchers saw was that the overweight group showed a much lower ability to generate the biological activity necessary for muscle building in response to a protein-rich meal, and the obese group had even more trouble.

There is a diminished myofibrillar protein synthetic response to the ingestion of protein-dense food in overweight and obese adults compared with healthy-weight controls.

So what exactly does this mean for our question-asker, Erin? As simple as this sounds, the key here is a little more tricky. And that means two things—she needs to lose weight slowly and she needs to exercise and eat in a way that supports her muscles. One key factor in losing body fat while maintaining muscle mass is the speed of weight loss.

A big reason why I co-founded the weight loss program called Weighless. Life is that most diets encourage you to lose weight too quickly.

We have found that matching the rate of weight loss to one that matches the pace of actual fat loss about pounds per month is a huge game-changer for everyone, including athletes who are looking to either hit their optimal race weight or get that well-defined look.

Yes, I know, you want to lose the weight now. Cool, right? Now, I am going to defer to an article and podcast from my partner in the Weighless program, Monica Reinagel, called Diet Strategy to Lose Fat and Gain Muscle.

If you have a significant amount of weight to lose, I think your best strategy is to focus first on reducing your body weight while minimizing muscle loss.

Again, incorporating high-quality protein into every meal can help build lean muscle tissue and may also help with weight maintenance. The typical middle-aged American male eats about 90 grams of protein, which is enough to maximize muscle protein synthesis or muscle building.

In the US and likely Canada, too people eat about 42 percent of their daily protein at dinner and only 16 percent at breakfast. To quote from another episode of Nutrition Diva, called How to Slow Age-Related Muscle Loss :. Research shows that for guys in their twenties, muscle synthesis peaks at an intake of about 20 grams of protein.

As we get older it takes a little more protein to hit that peak—about 30 grams at a single meal. So, whether you are in the fat-loss or the muscle-gain part of periodization, instead of hitting that peak dose of protein only once per day, focus on hitting it three times a day.

In terms of hanging onto muscle mass as you lose fat, this could really help make a difference. Take a look at my article about Cardio vs Weights for more info on that.

After the fat loss phase is complete, switch your focus to muscle gain. I have articles and podcast episodes that highlight some of the best ways to gain muscle. The latest is an episode about whether or not you need to lift to failure every time you do resistance training.

You can check it out for all the details, but the upshot was that the most promising approach to strength and muscle gain was to lift to failure occasionally. At all other times, lift just below failure 20 percent below, to be exact. This will help shorten the recovery time and allow you to return to your workouts sooner and with more energy and focus.

You could also try some more interesting techniques like occlusion training. There is also a great muscle-building strategy called drop sets. Your clothes will fit better, some people might consider you more attractive, and you'll feel more confident.

Those are all big reasons that drive guys to spend hours in the gym pumping iron in the pursuit of gains. There's no shame in making your aesthetic a reason to get in the gym - it still leads to all the other health benefits.

While there's so many reasons to focus on muscle building, there's more to it than just showing up to the gym, hefting some weights, and calling it a day.

You'll need to be a bit more intentional for effective muscle growth. To build muscle, you must push your muscles to the limit, then let them recover and grow stronger as they do. And to do this, you must create the proper recovery environment for them when you're not in the gym.

This means your quest to build muscle involves a host of variables over a hour period. The things you do in the gym to push your muscles to the limit count.

So does the "work" you put in during the other 20 or so hours when you're away from the gym, everything from rest to nutrition to active recovery.

All of this can affect how you build muscle. One of the best ways to get started is to understand and define what muscle-building actually is. Muscle hypertrophy is the increase in growth of muscle cells, and it's a process that's often kickstarted by resistance training.

It's the adaptation our muscles experience from continual exposure to progressively overloaded forms of resistance training, which then results in an increase in our muscle fiber size, both in diameter and length.

Essentially, you need to push your muscles hard, often by lifting heavy loads for reps, stimulating the release of muscle-growing hormones and other metabolites. Our muscles get physically larger through the act of strategically consistent and harder workouts. Remember, effort is one of the most definitive drivers of muscle gain over time.

However, it's just one of the drivers. That effort needs to be coupled with a desire to push your body farther than you might think it's capable of. This is something called "progressive overload. This doesn't mean going heavier and heavier with the weights in every set and every single workout, because sometimes, that's not possible.

Over-focus on going heavy in every single workout, and you set yourself up for injury and disappointment. No, progressive overload takes place over months and months of working out.

Sure, if you're new to the gym, you may add major pounds to the bench press, partly because you're just learning the exercise. But the longer you're in the gym, the harder it is to make gains. This is why it's incredibly important to have a plan in place and build a framework for your training and nutritional habits that coincide with your goals.

Note, your muscle building strategy doesn't need to be so rigid that it leaves no room for fun. In fact, you can still eat meals you enjoy, and you don't need to spend hours in the gym, as long as when you're training and fueling yourself strategically a majority of the time.

The goal is to create a muscle building plan that is realistic for your goals and needs. The tips below will help you—whether you're a beginner or somebody who's hit a frustrating training plateau—build muscle with a strategic and realistic means.

The more protein your body stores—in a process called protein synthesis —the larger your muscles grow. But your body is constantly draining its protein reserves for other uses—making hormones, for instance. The result is less protein available for muscle building.

Shoot for about 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight, which is roughly the maximum amount your body can use in a day, according to a landmark study in the Journal of Applied Physiology. Split the rest of your daily calories equally between carbohydrates and fats.

In addition to adequate protein, you need more calories. Use the following formula to calculate the number you need to take in daily to gain 1 pound a week.

Give yourself 2 weeks for results to show up on the bathroom scale. Biceps curls are fun, but if you want to put on muscle, you have to do more to challenge your body. And one key to doing that, says Samuel, is working through so-called "multi-joint" movements.

Instead, you want to do exercises that challenge multiple joints and muscles at once. Take, for example, a dumbbell row. Every row rep challenges biceps, lats, and core if your form is strict.

Using multiple muscle groups allows you to lift more weight, says Samuel, a key stimulator of growth more on that later.

And it pushes you to use muscles together, just as you do in real life. Make sure moves like squats, deadlifts, pullups, and bench presses are in your workout to take advantage of that. All will stimulate multiple muscle groups at the same time, and in order to grow, you want to do that.

If you want to build muscle and strength, you have to train heavy, says Curtis Shannon, C. If done right, the stimulus of heavy weight going down with control and going back up will cause greater muscle tear and rebuild.

That means not every set you do should have you pumping out 10 to 15 reps. Yes, high-rep sets can have value, but for multi-joint moves like squats and bench presses, and deadlifts, don't be afraid to do sets of, say, five reps. That'll allow you to use more weight, building more pure strength, says Samuel.

And as you progress, that new strength will allow you to lift heavier weights for more reps. One way you can approach this in your training: Lead off every workout with an exercise that lets you train low-rep.

Do four sets of three to five reps on your first exercise, then do three sets of 10 to 12 reps for every move after that. Our experts continually monitor the health and wellness space, and we update our articles when new information becomes available. Strength training is an important part of an exercise routine.

Learn how muscles are made, which foods fuel a strong body, and how to get started. Taking a break in strength training or aerobic exercise could lead to muscle loss and reduced cardio fitness, but it all depends on how in shape you….

Weight-bearing exercise not only helps to build muscle, but is key to building stronger bones. Targeting heart rate zones as you exercise is one way to maximize the benefits you get from your workouts. Learn about your different heart rate zones…. There are several causes of numbness in your toes and feet when you run, ranging from poor-fitting shoes to health conditions like diabetes.

For people who run or do other aerobic exercises on a regular basis, starting up a low heart rate training program may be frustrating at first.

The average 5K time depends on a few factors, including age, sex, and fitness level. But, you can expect to finish a 5K in roughly 30 to 40 minutes.

Thinking about using an AI tool like ChatGPT to help you get in shape? Here are the pros and cons health experts say you should consider.

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Here's an anatomy primer to help. A Quiz for Teens Are You a Workaholic? How Well Do You Sleep? Health Conditions Discover Plan Connect. Get Motivated Cardio Strength Training Yoga Rest and Recover Holistic Fitness Exercise Library Fitness News Your Fitness Toolkit.

Muscular Hypertrophy and Your Workout. Medically reviewed by Daniel Bubnis, M. Definition How to Exercise frequency Tips Health condition Takeaway Muscular hypertrophy refers to growing your muscle cells. Share on Pinterest. What is muscular hypertrophy? Muscular hypertrophy types Increases Activates myofibrillar strength and speed contractor muscles sarcoplasmic energy storage and endurance glycogen storage in muscles.

How to build muscle and increase muscle size. How often to lift to achieve muscular hypertrophy. Tips to make the most of your workout. Myostatin-related muscular hypertrophy.