Muscle Definition

[BSHC]

The Best Muscle Definition Workout Is Not The ‘Old-School’ High Reps & Light Weights Approach

February 15, 2011 by Kevin McMillian

 

You cannot increase your muscle definition if you don’t have your workout setup to do so. After building the size of your muscles, do you continue doing the same workouts in hope that your muscles are going to get more defined? Have you built some decent muscle mass and then switched to high reps & light weights in an attempt to define your muscles? If so that is not going to work. In order to make your muscles more defined you need to do specific muscle definition workouts.

It used to be that high reps & light weights was believed to be the best muscle definition workout. It turns out that is not going to give you the hard, angular look you’d expect.

The “old-school” mentality of what a good muscle definition workout should look like is a little hard to let go of at first. Once you let go of that mentality and start working out the right way you will start to see good results.

The Common Misconception

It seems that for years everyone thought that if you wanted to get toned, defined muscles you needed to lighten up on the weights you lift so that you can do more reps. That is actually not the case at all.

The best way to increase the muscle’s definition is to increase it’s strength without increasing it’s size.

When you look at traditional style bodybuilders they focus much of their workouts on producing “the pump” in their muscles. By doing this they look great in the gym and even somewhat defined, but afterwards the muscle deflates and ends up looking soft and rounded.

When you train for the pump by doing high reps you are unable to focus on contracting the muscle. The harder you can contract your muscle the more defined it will become.

Effective Muscle Definition Workouts Train Your Muscles To Stay Slightly Contracted

By strengthening the muscle without it ballooning up it will become dense and full — giving you greater muscle definition.

A dense muscle will look and feel partially contracted all the time. When you look at someone who looks ripped, toned, cut, etc., they look hard. When you look at a big bulky guy he has a soft look. This translates directly into how hard and dense their muscles are.

Your workout and the amount of reps you do plays a HUGE role in creating a hard muscle vs. a soft muscle. When shooting for muscle definition, you want hard.

In order to achieve this, you must focus on your form and movement throughout each rep. Each rep should take about 4 seconds. That gives 1 second for the positive lift & 3 seconds for the negative. Your muscles should stay under tension during the entire set.

Essential Piece To Looking Great: Losing Fat

It doesn’t matter how ripped your muscles are; you won’t be able to see your muscles until your body fat percentage is low enough. For the best muscle tone, I like to work in cardio, like HIIT, with just as much emphasis and priority as the muscle definition workouts themselves. Also, a good diet is essential.

Don’t worry, you will most likely look a bit better than this guy. I must say though — he’s actually quite ripped

Muscle Definition Workouts: Sets, Reps & Days

In order to get solid, dense muscle fiber you need to train a certain way. Again, the traditional ‘train to failure’ method is not going to work for creating defined muscle.

For this workout, we’ll focus on doing 8-10 sets of only 3-5 reps for each muscle group. You should stop 2 reps short of failure. You are actually trying to avoid “the pump” the “burn” and fatigue for these workouts.

Focus on form & quality. By focusing your lift on contracting the muscle as hard as you can you are training your muscle to stay in a flexed and solid state.

You can graduate to heavier weights once you’ve mastered the rep, but you still do not want to over-fatigue your muscle by lifting to failure. The goal is to wake up the next morning and not be sore.

What A Common Muscle Mass Workout Looks Like
Bodybuilders know how to get huge. They traditionally preform some variation of a 3 day split routine that looks something like this.

• Day 1 – Chest & Triceps
• Day 2- Rest or light cardio
• Day 3- Back & Biceps
• Day 4- Rest or light cardio
• Day 5- Legs & Abs
• Day 6- Rest or light cardio
• Day 7- Rest or light cardio

The main benefit to this is that by training a muscle group only once a week they are able to blitz each muscle group for an hour or so and then allow sufficient time for recovery. This is good for bodybuilding but not good for muscle definition or tone.

What Muscle Definition Workouts Look Like
Since you don’t want to fatigue the muscle, you aren’t going to spend as much time blasting them. You will be able to rest less between each workout and lift more often.

Do a 2 day split but spend less time working out. By lifting 2 days on and one day off you can limit the actual resistance training to 25-30 minutes and hit cardio for another 20-40 minutes. An example of this would look like this:

• Day 1 – Chest & Back
• Day 2 – Shoulders & Arms
• Day 3 – Abs
• Day 4 – Chest & Back
• Day 5 – Shoulders & Arms
• Day 6 – Abs
• Day 7 – Rest / light-medium cardio

Each of these workouts are followed by HIIT which blasts the legs and melts fat. If you really want burn extra fat, do HIIT for 10-15 minutes followed by 20-30 minutes of steady state cardio.

There are many different approaches that you can take when working out for muscle definition. The one outlined here is a slightly conservative approach. For a full blue print on more advanced muscle definition workouts as well as strategic muscle building workouts, checkout my Visual Impact Muscle Building Review or Visual Impact for Women Review.

This is one of the most unique approaches to building an awesome physique and it teaches you how to add muscle, tone the muscle and strip the body fat away so that you get the most out of your workouts. Here are a few free videos from Rusty Moore that talk about the process of creating ultra defined muscles.

 * There is no such thing as "training for definition."

There is Only training for muscle mass throuth the short intensive exercise.

Muscle definition, or "getting ripped," refers to having your muscles appear more visibly and dramatically.

A guy with a twelve-inch arm can have much more noticeable muscles than a guy with an eighteen-inch arm because he has better definition.

Muscle definition is a function of two factors:

1) percentage of body fat and

2) muscle size.

If you want better definition, you have to work on both elements.

First, reduce body fat simply by burning off all the excess fat you can.

The way to do that is with lots of very low intensity fat-burning exercise like slow jogging, for example. The key here is to make sure the intensity really is low.

Running hills with a 40-pound backpack is not pure aerobics. The higher intensity will cut into your recovery ability and your weightlifting workouts will have to be pushed further apart.

Fat loss is a matter of calories in versus calories out and your objective is just to burn a ton of calories over time, not to burn them all in one day or week.

The second factor is increasing muscle size.

And let me dispel a common myth right here. There is no such thing as "training for definition."

A muscle can only do three things in relation to size: it can get smaller, it can get bigger or it can stay the same size.

There is no way to specifically train it to be "more defined" apart from making it bigger!

And the way to make it bigger is to force it to engage in very high intensity overload.

High intensity is defined as "a great amount of work in a short unit of time."  So it is better to do six reps with 300 pounds than it is to do 20 reps with 150 pounds.

Yet the common gym mythology is "high reps for definition." Bull! High reps means you have to use low weights and that won't pack on new mass.

Sitting on a bench curling a dumbbell all afternoon won't burn as much fat as the treadmill. And when you pick up a weight, make sure it's a very heavy one.

If you pay attention to these two principles, soon you'll have the ripped look you desire.

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Learning how to build muscle definition is important to understand before you embark on a bodybuilding program.

Once you understand the basic principles of how muscles grow and work, you will be able to go on and build muscle definition.

Why Do Bodybuilders Look So Good?

Is it their extremely low body fat percentage that makes them look so amazing?

Well despite the fact that good bodybuilders do have very low body fat, so do many skinny people.

Of course it’s the huge amount of solid lean muscle mass that creates such an impressive site.

Learn How to Build Muscle

This leads many people to wonder how to build muscle definition in such an impressive fashion. Of course, the average person is not interested in packing on fifty pounds of muscle like a professional body builder, however, the means in which the average person will build muscle definition is basically the same as a professional body builder will with the only major difference being the fact that the average person will simply work a routine that is significantly less intensive.

How Muscles Grow

Muscles grow when they are overworked. That is to say, when you lift weights you are overloading the muscle. Because the muscle does not particularly like the idea of having to work super hard to lift the weight it grows to make the process easier. So by lifting heavy weights properly your muscles will grow.

Bear in mind, however, that the muscles do not grow while you are lifting weights. Instead, they grow while the body is at rest. So, in reality, you build muscle definition while you sleep provided that you worked out that week.

Now, what needs to be understood here is that if you workout too often and do not give your body the proper rest then you will not build muscle. Instead, your muscles may actually get smaller and that is hardly the look you are going for!

So, if you workout about three or four days a week for a reasonable length of time (say one hour) and you are consistent, then you will build muscle definition.