How To Train For Muscle Tone Instead of Muscle Mass

The key to gaining muscle mass is a sufficiently high volume of lifts to cause some degree of damage to your muscle tissues. 

Following the damaging of the muscle tissues it's essential that you rest the muscle long enough for a fully good recuperation. Ideally, whenever the muscle is recovered, it will become of a slightly bigger size. 

Eventually, over time this will build a larger muscle. The key to achieving muscle tone is to do less volume of sets, but make your work outs more frequent.

How Many Sets Do You Need to Do For Muscle Tone?

Don't forget, for muscle tone your aim should be to avoid damaging the muscles. Should you become sore the next day, back off a bit the next time that you work those same muscles.

I always do 3-4 sets of anywhere between 3-10 reps for muscle tone. I choose 2 exercises per body part.

How Many Reps in Each Set?

Not much individuals understand the effectiveness of low reps for achieving muscle tone. Low reps result in harder contractions and over time, your muscle will show better tone.

Feel free to include medium to high reps, but make sure you do not neglect heavier low rep training as well. Becoming stronger while your body fat is at a low level is a terrific way to look ripped!

Make Sure and Work the Muscles Often When Going for Tone!

This tip is overlooked but will quickly accelerate your ability to increase tone in a worked muscle.

Muscle tone is essentially a muscle contracting partially in a relaxed state, hence your muscles are contacting a little by themselves even when you are completely relaxed.

The right way to boost this is to contract the muscles hard by working out on a frequent basis. For another time, you need to avoid causing damage to the muscle, otherwise you will over-train the muscle if you work it soon.

An additional problem with working a damaged muscle is the fact that it would not contract as hard, therefore the workout will have less toning benefits.

Do NOT Train to Failure or Use Forced Reps When Going for Muscle Tone

If you do a set to failure you are essentially "training your muscle to fail". This will cause a large amount of damage, which is great for when you're aiming to build muscle mass but not good for achieving muscle tone.

Training for muscle tone is similar to training for gaining strength. Elite power-lifters rarely train to failure for the reason stated above. The problem is that your muscle will not contract as hard the following set.

You want hard contractions when going for tone, so don't train to failure and don't even think of doing forced reps.

Here is a Common Mass Building Split Routine

The "3 day split" is a common routine for muscle mass because it works well. A 3 day split simply means that all the muscles in your body are worked in 3 different workouts.

So what a lot of people do is work chest, shoulders, and triceps on one day, back and biceps on another day, and legs and abs on the third day.

The great thing here is that since you are working only a few body parts in each workout, you can focus on blitzing each muscle group. You can really do a high volume of lifts for each muscle group which is the key to mass.

The 2 Day Split Muscle Tone Workout Routine

Since you want to work each muscle group more often when going for tone, you should try to split you workout over two days instead of three.

The great thing here is that you don't need much recovery time when you don't damage the muscles.

Note: So you should have a good idea on how to setup a great workout routine. Remember, if you are going for tone, keep the volume of lifting low and work each muscle frequently.

Since your time in the weight room should be brief, spend the extra time hitting cardio hard to burn off all that excess body fat to reveal your toned muscles.