How to Increase Your Muscle Definition

A few weeks ago, I received a voicemail on the Get-Fit Guy hotline from a listener named Erin. She had a great question of muscle definition. This is what she asked.

Hi Brock. My name's Erin. I've been listening to your podcast for a long time and I find it really helpful. I'm a woman in— well, close to 50, and I've been working out with free weights, kettlebells, and battle ropes pretty consistently for about three years. I'm finding that it's like running to stay in place. I'm reasonably toned, but I never seem to be able to develop real muscle mass or definition. Should I be taking a lot of protein? Should I be trying to lose a bunch of weight? My weight is actually quite normal, quite good—but if I want definition, should I be increasing my weights by quite a bit? I'm hesitant to do that because my recovery time is not what it used to be. What are the most impactful things you can do in terms of muscle definition and gaining muscle mass when you're in midlife?

This is a question I bet many listeners are interested in. 

Body composition

What Erin is really asking about is how best to change her body composition. She's not that interested in losing body weight; she simply wants to shift the composition of her body from fat tissue to muscle tissue.

Increasing muscle definition is really just a simple idea of increasing muscle mass and decreasing body fat

Increasing muscle definition is really just a simple idea of increasing muscle mass and decreasing body fat, especially the fat between the skin and muscle called subcutaneous fat. Doing these two things in concert is what creates defined muscles that you can see. 

While muscle definition isn't an actual measure of better fitness or health, I understand the desire to show off the hard work you've done. While I don't encourage anyone to lower their body fat to extremes, there's a healthy way to accomplish reasonable body fat loss and muscle mass increases. 

Now, I said that the idea behind building muscle definition was simple, but like many ideas, simple doesn't necessarily mean easy. Increasing your muscle definition requires some patience and something called periodization. 

What is periodization training?

Generally, periodization training is a way to keep an athlete from overtraining by deliberately moving through periods of high and low intensities or volumes of training. But it can refer to any deliberate division of training that leads to a specific outcome. 

In this case, we're going to periodize the fat loss first and then concentrate on...

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