5 simple rules of an effective toning exercise

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In order to make toning exercises as effective as possible, follow these simple rules:

Train to tone your body: When you train to sculpt your body, your major goal here will be to lose as much fat as possible to reach a certain ideal body fat percentage. And with decrease, there will be an increase in how quickly the muscles firm up. To accomplish this, perform at least 20 to 30 minutes of aerobics, exercise three to four times a week first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. This will be very effective since your body will be sourcing the required energy from your body reserve, which will therefore make you lose fat as fast and tone even fast. Also do three to four strength and endurance sessions by doing weight training 20 to 40 minutes per week. Make sure you fully utilise the basic exercises such as lunges, squats, arm, chest, back and tummy exercises.

Rest between sets: Keep your resting time between sets and exercise to a minimum of 90 seconds or less. This will not allow you to do as much within a given time frame but this rest interval will also promote your muscular voluminising effect i.e. the rate at which water goes inside your muscle cells making your muscles look more firm and toned. The rest period will also improve your cardiovascular system.

Short and well organised: Keep your toning session at a maximum of 60 minutes. It should last this long because after 60 minutes, the level of fat burning hormones begin to drop and the stored energy source (glycogen) in the body that fuel exertion is depleted. This is to say that if you continue training for more than an hour, you will not actually gain much from the workout since your body will no longer have enough hormones or the fuel necessary to burn fat and firm your body accordingly. What you will get instead is impaired recovery, a condition that leads to loss of strength and painful muscle recovery due to over-training.

Vary your training: This is very vital to ensure continuous muscle tone, gain in strength as well as preventing boredom. It can occur by using different techniques to stimulate your muscles, set parameters, change repetitions of your workout or even changing the exercise as a whole.

Focus on progression: Progression here means one more repetition than the last one, one more set than the last one, a little bit more weight than the last one or one more exercise than last time. The overall goal of the whole training routine is to ensure that your progression brings out your continuous improvements in the way you lose weight, tone and define your body.