When you’re going for that six-pack, leaner abs, a tighter tummy, or whatever you want to call it today, there are some obstacles that lots of us generally encounter on the way to muscle tone.  It’s important to remember that building muscle tone is its own goal with its own applied strategy.

One problem is that cardio training is not the recipe for muscle tone.  In fact, with a lot of cardio and no weight training, the eventual results can be “muscle poverty” where a body is lean but not toned, and this impairs the body in some ways.  The winning combination is a lean body with muscle tone, and that means blending cardio workouts and weight training.

Another related error is in trying a starvation diet in tandem with the kind of workouts that build muscle tone.  You don’t want to cut food out of the program, and it’s not enough to take a black and white approach to dieting.  Too many Americans starve themselves in desperate efforts at certain kinds of weight loss, and then fall back on junk food if they relapse.  

The key is high energy foods with healthy fats like nut butters, certain kinds of fish, vegetables and other protein-rich foods.  Sure, they’re expensive, but that’s just part of the problem.  Looking to save a few bucks with a lot of junk food isn’t going to help out in a fitness goal scenario.  But, going with controlled portions of quality food; that’s another story.  It definitely takes planning, but the right use of bulk foods, you can balance cost and effectiveness in this kind of diet, and with the right details, it’s going to produce great results.

Another general oversight that happens to a lot of new fitness enthusiasts is in overlooking how results come from your own personal motivation and endurance inside the gym.  Will power and endurance have everything to do with your final results.  When you are able to push yourself to go that extra mile with weight resistance in training, you’ll feel it: you don’t have to be grunting, straining, and exhausting yourself completely (actually, you shouldn’t be) but, on the other hand, if you’re not breaking a sweat, you probably aren’t working quite hard enough.  It’s important to remember that just stepping inside of the gym and staying there for an hour is not going to do the job without applying yourself to the various machines.  Think of the gym as a fast-paced environment like a restaurant kitchen (if you’ve been in one, you know what I mean) and keep on going to get an actual workout that will give you your abs and whatever else you’re going for.