What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, Athlean-X.com.
So if you're looking to tone up your abs then we've got to start by defining what "toned"
really is.
See, "toned" by the general definition means "Being able to see a muscle more", right?
If I have a muscle that I'm holding out here and then I flex it, it looks more toned.
Somebody might say that I have a harder looking muscle, or more toned looking muscle.
Okay, that's good, but that's not the exact definition of "toned".
Especially as a physical therapist when we deal with people that have medical conditions
that limit the amount of tone that they can have or "tonicity" they could have in their
muscles then we want to start defining it the right way.
What that is, is basically the resting level of activity, or the resting level of tension
or contraction in a muscle.
Again, if my muscle at rest looks like this – a little bit loose – it wouldn't look
as good as somebody that had a resting level of tension like that, right?
If there was a level of tone.
Now, tone could be a pathological thing.
You could be in a state of high tone and not be in a good state because diseases can lead
you to have increased tone all the time, which becomes very problematic.
But when you're training, if you want to get increased muscle tone the first way, by having
something that looks more visibly toned and in shape; that's going to be diet.
Diet always.
You're going to want to make sure that you're cutting down the level of body fat that you
have that's hiding the shape of the muscle that's beneath.
The shape of the muscle gets improved by working out, but it gets revealed by getting rid of
some of the body fat, to show more muscle tone.
If you want to increase your tone though, where you're already at a lower level, there's
two things you can do from an ab standpoint.
Number one: you want to start to get up here on the bar and doing lots of hanging leg raises
and different variations of ab movements from the bar, for two reasons.
Tone can be increased by the level of stretch in a muscle.
So when we're up here on the bar we get much more stretch – I'll turn here to the side
so you could see.
Much more stretch in the bottom than we would from a floor based ab movement.
The reason why stretch works is, you think about what tone actually does in your body.
One of its functions is to protect us.
If we're falling asleep like this and it snaps us back because it feels the stretch in front
of the neck it stretches us back to the front.
You can increase resting tone, resting level of activity in a muscle by doing more stretch
loaded exercises.
So that's the number one benefit.
Number two: go to the hard exercise.
When you're up on a bar there's a lot more activity and effort that must be exerted here
on these exercise than a lot of floor based crunches or planks and things like that.
Again, it goes back to the idea that waking up the muscles, getting the muscles to become
more activated, increasing the level of contribution of the muscle fibers to an activity makes
it more toned in the long run.
Start opting for harder versions to involve more effort and involve more activity from
all the muscles in your core and you'll start seeing more resting tone and you're got to
make sure you're working on that diet too.
If you want to look good on the general definition of "tone" then get rid of all that fat that's
covering up your hard work, okay?
If you're looking for exercises and a meal plan to kind of hit you and give you that
one-two combination then head to AthleanX.com right now and get our Athlean-X training system
that comes with our Athlean-X Factor meal plans and everything included all in one spot.
I'll be back here again in just a couple days.
Make sure you leave your comments and your requests down below and I'll do my best to
bring those videos to you here each and every week.
I'll see you soon.