Is 20 minutes really enough? Will two 20-minute workouts a week help someone get toned?
According to the scientific definition, toneness refers to the level of tension in a muscle at rest, but most people refer to being toned as being lean. In that regard, strength training will absolutely help you get leaner and build firm muscles.
One misconception about toning is around spot reduction. Often, when people talk about toning their body, they are talking about making a particular area of their body leaner by targeting it with exercise, but that isn’t how the process works. Effective strength training is about getting whole-body results that impact your metabolism and decrease body fat throughout the whole body.
Strength training is the most important thing you can do for health, longevity, quality of life, and reducing body fat. Whole effort strength training is the best way to achieve the best body leanness, definition, or tone that you can.
IS TWICE PER WEEK OFTEN ENOUGH?
One of the most common questions we get at The Exercise Coach is, “Is exercising twice a week really often enough?” Below we will explore why whole effort exercise twice a week is not only enough, it’s the optimal amount you needto achieve the best fitness results for your body in the shortest amount of time possible. Exercising twice a week is more than enough. In fact, exercising more often can actually be counterproductive.
The most important thing you can do as you age is to address the health of your Type 2 or fast-twitch muscle fibers. To stimulate and improve the quality of your fasttwitch muscle fibers, the exercise needs to be intense, brief, and at a sufficient intensity to force adaptations. When we work our muscles in this way it forces adaptations, which are the end results that we are seeking from an exercise program. The flip side of this intense exercise is that you need to give your body enough time to fully recover and super-compensate, which takes at least 48 hours.
All the results we want from exercise, like increased muscle mass, strength, neurological efficiency, and improved insulin sensitivity, are not actually caused directly by exercising. Our bodies produce the results we want once we have achieved adequate recovery.
If you exercise more frequently than twice a week, all you are doing is interrupting and disrupting the body’s innate ability to produce the very results you want. Overtraining can cause people to stall out and even go backward in terms of their fitness improvements or worse, lead to overtraining and possible injury. The answer to getting the best possible results is never just exercising more. The key is combining whole effort exercise and whole-food nutrition to get all the results we want.
MEASURABLE RESULTS
We should be able to measure the results of any exercise program, which is why this idea is built into every program at The Exercise Coach. If you’re not seeing results from your exercise routine, question whether your exercise is intense enough and whether or not you are giving your body enough time and resources to recover properly.
During a workout, you are depleting the stored energy in your muscles so that they will build themselves back up over time. Your recovery time is just as important as your workouts. The consumption of your muscle’s fuel is a major metabolic signal that triggers these kinds of transformations.
Today, more than ever, we need to maintain our physical and mental health for our overall well-being. The workouts at The Exercise Coach change everything for our clients.
See for yourself how you can improve your muscle quality using our unique hi-tech process that helps our clients get the results that matter most to them at The Exercise Coach. Visit exercisecoach.com/north-mesa or call (480) 716-6080 for two free sessions.