How to Get Muscle Definition
What is muscle definition? Muscle definition refers to having your muscles appear more visible and pronounced. A person with a twelve inch arm can have a more muscular look than someone with an eighteen inch arm because he/she has better muscle definition. Muscle definition is determined by two things:
- muscle size
- percentage of body fat
Better definition is created by working on both of these things. The first thing to do is reduce bodyfat by burning off all the excess fat you can. The way to do that is by doing lots of low intensity “fat burning” exercise like treadmill, exercise bike, walking or slow jogging ect. The thing is to make sure you use as little resistance as possible. Running with a weighted backpack is not pure aerobics. Fat loss is a matter of calories in verses calories out so your goal is to burn a lot of calories over time, not to try to burn them all in one week.
The second area is to increase muscle size and I’ll clear one thing up right now, there is no such thing as “training for definition”. There’s only three things a muscle can do where size is concerned and that is:
- it can get smaller
- it can get bigger
- it can stay the same size
There is no particular way to train it to be more defined except to make it bigger and the way to do that is to force it to work against heavy resistance that it is not used to in short, high intensity overloads. It is better to do six reps with 200lbs than to do twenty reps with 100lbs. while the common belief is to do high reps with lower weight to get definition this just is not the case. High reps means that you have to use low weights and that will not increase muscle size.
Remember this, lifting weights all day won’t burn as much fat as the treadmill or other aerobic exercises and doing aerobic exercises all day won’t increase muscle size one bit so when you weight train, train on the heavier side. The muscle you build will help keep off the fat as well because it will burn fat all day.
If you mind these two principals, you will have the muscle definition you are looking for and it will come before you know it!