Body Recomposition: How To Get Toned Quickly

Personal trainer Elisi Wolf explains how to cut straight to it:

As easy as 1-2-3

Many women say they want to “get toned,” which really means they want a body recomposition; looking leaner at the same weight is due to gaining muscle while losing fat—not weight.

Elisi says the sweet spot for effective recomposition is around 25% body fat, allowing for noticeable muscle gain and fat loss simultaneously, ending up with more like 21% body fat as a reasonable healthy end point to the recomposition phase (i.e., the point at which you’ll stop recomposing and start maintaining), though of course you might prefer more or less than that; that’s up to you.

How to do it, her way:

1. Calculate maintenance calories: use a calorie calculator and subtract 400 to find your true maintenance; eat this amount for a week to confirm the scale doesn’t change
2. Progress your workouts: consistently increase effort by adding weight, improving control (an oft-neglected factor that Elisi focuses on a lot in her training), and/or increasing movement (e.g. daily walks)
3. Enjoy a high protein diet: protein is essential for muscle building, fat loss, and satiety; it also burns more energy to digest and keeps you full with fewer calories

About the progression: she recommends to, for example, start with 20 lb hip thrusts and increase weight every second week; eventually, this builds visible muscle without changing calories. Adapt the same model for your preferred exercises, of course.

About the protein: she also notes that we should not just increase protein intake, but also prioritize protein over carbs and fats; it’s not used for energy unless absolutely necessary, so most of it supports muscle gain. She advises that this works whether you still eat meat or enjoy a vegan diet—just ensure your protein intake is high and “clean” (i.e. unprocessed whole foods, or minimally-processed where some kind of processing is necessary—for example, cooking lentils is indeed a process).

About maintenance: once you’ve got to the body composition you want, you should find that your newly recomposed body is actually pretty easy to maintain, because muscle has a thermogenic effect, helping you burn more calories at rest and aiding fat loss (i.e. muscle “costs” calories just by being there—unlike fat, which triggers the body to slow down the metabolism to survive the famine for which we were surely preparing when we put the fat on).

For more on all of this, enjoy:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

Want to learn more?

You might also like:

Can You Gain Muscle & Lose Fat At The Same Time? ← we got this question in our Q&A day a little while ago, and here was our answer. We went for a less numbers-based approach, and a more principles-based approach. Both ways work, so by all means pick whichever method you personally find better suits how you like to do things!

See also: Can We Do Fat Redistribution? ← the answer is “yes” and this article explains how

Take care!