Build Muscle and Tone Up: A Complete Training Guide
- Nick T
- Sep 22
- 8 min read
How to train to build muscle, tone up and make consistent progress, week after week.
Building muscle and toning up is a goal shared by many gym goers for a variety of reasons. Looking good naked may be one of them. Having better functional and metabolic health may be another.
I personally believe that training with muscle building principles in mind should be a goal for anyone, regardless of whether you want to:
bulk up with as much muscle mass as possible
have a lean, toned physique
preserve/gain as much muscle in later decades of life
Even if your goal is simply to tone up, what you’re actually aiming for - believe it or not - is to build muscle through well-planned training, and reduce body fat. In a moment, we'll explore why bulking and toning use the exact same training approach.
In this Training Guide to Muscle Growth, we’ll explore evidence-based concepts and strategies that will optimise your gym program for muscle growth.
Understanding and applying these principles will allow you to plan your training with confidence, stop second-guessing your progress, and just get into the gym & TRAIN.
This article includes the beginning chapters of my complete (and FREE) ebook: Maximise Muscle Growth - The Ultimate Guide to Muscle Growth. You can download the full version below to keep learning exactly how to structure your training for long-term muscle growth and toning.
Chapter 1 – CONSISTENCY
The best gym program is the one you can stick to over the long term.
You’ve probably heard the saying:
“An average program done consistently is better than the perfect program hardly done.” Or something like that.
And it’s absolutely true! Take a look at the muscle-building pyramid below, Coined by Eric Helms PhD.
Consistency is the base of your our pyramid. It’s the foundation that everything else stacks upon.
As we work our way up this pyramid, each layer becomes slightly less important. You could say that the base layers are your non-negotiables - the things you must do to get results. The layers above? That’s where there’s a bit more wriggle room.
The pyramid in practice:
Exercise selection should be determined by whether they can be progressed over time.
Exercise selection can be determined by enjoyment and equipment availability, to maintain training consistency. As long as they are progress-able, and can be done with sufficient intensity.
Tempo & rest periods may be determined by how much time you have to train. There are strategies to manipulate these variables to suit your needs & thus... stay consistent
Toning = Muscle Building The goal of muscle toning means having somewhat generous muscle size and low enough body fat to show that muscle off. Historically, it's been believed that toning requires specific exercises, often with light weights and high repetition. There's some reason this could be true, but really, to tone up you want to: - Follow the muscle building principles in this guide, to develop muscle size, and - Follow energy balance principles to burn body fat, allowing that muscle to show through.
Chapter 2 – VOLUME, INTENSITY & FREQUENCY
How many sets? How heavy? How often?
Volume and intensity are two critical components of any muscle building training program, and understanding how they interact is important.
Volume
Often calculated as Sets × Reps × Weight, volume represents the total work performed during a workout, or a week.
There is a tight connection between training volume and muscle growth. More volume means more muscle growth.
However, there is a threshold, where going beyond has diminishing returns, and possibly stifling effects on muscle growth if recovery is inadequate. We'll discuss this shortly.
The 3 mechanisms that cause muscle growth through resistance training are:
Mechanical Tension (stretch and contraction under load)
Metabolic Stress (build up of bi-products)
Muscle Damage (micro tears to the muscle fibres)
It's thought that higher training volumes influence all of the above, thus influencing more muscle growth.
Intensity
Intensity refers to how much weight you lift during an exercise. Not to be confused with relative intensity (how hard you push relative to muscular failure).
Higher intensity (weight) sets can stimulate muscle growth primarily through high levels of mechanical tension, and lower weight sets may stimulate growth, more so, through metabolic stress. Moderate loads may tap into both. As with many things, there's more grey here than black and white.
The amount of weight lifted can directly influence the volume that can be performed during exercises, and across the whole program.
Very high weights, whereby <5 reps per set is performed, often require more sets to reach enough volume for muscle growth.
Heavy loads is not the optimal strategy for muscle growth. Consider this:
Higher weight requires being VERY on-point with form. Not only does form influence injury risk, it influences effective tension on the target muscle.
Higher weight over longer periods can stress connective tissue, leading to potential joint overuse injury
Higher weight require more rest between sets, thus more time required for training
Sets & Reps
Mentioned a moment ago, sets and reps make up part of the equation for training volume. If low reps with heavy loads have downsides and impacts overall volume, lighter to moderate loads may be a better choice.
Reps
Technically, muscle growth can be optimally stimulated anywhere between 6 and 30 reps per working set. The main thing our body cares about is the Proximity To Failure.
The closer you get to failure, whereby you can hardly move the weight any longer (with good form, of course), the more muscle growth you will stimulate.
So whether it's heavy or light, getting near failure is the key. Bear in mind, we don't have to go completely to failure on every set, and every gym session. But we need to get close (within 2–3 reps from failure).
The Evolutionary Lens A simple way to think of proximity to failure is through an evolutionary lens. Muscle is metabolically expensive tissue, so having more of it makes no real evolutionary sense. If our body didn’t know when the next meal was coming, having biceps was way lower on the priority list. Therefore, our body needs a very good reason to put on extra muscle, and it's through stressing the system very close to its limits, consistently, that it has no choice but to lay down more muscle tissue.
What's the sweet spot for reps?
Generally speaking 8 to 15 reps is a good ballpark to focus on for most exercises. We know that close proximity to failure is our main driver and that we can be more flexible with reps and weights.
Here are some considerations that might determine weight / reps selection
Compound lifts, like bench press, squats and leg presses could be done closer to 8 - 12 reps. Higher reps could bring on cardio fatigue before local muscle fatigue.
Isolation exercises like biceps curls, calf raises and leg extensions could be done closer to 12 - 15 reps. Higher weight on small muscle groups and at single joints could over stress tissues.
You may determine your reps based on the equipment you use.
eg:
Leg press may be safer to lock in for 8 hard reps at heavier loads
You may still be learning the Barbell Squat, so 12 reps at a lighter load may be better.
The only way to know is to try it out and see what suits you best.
Learn before you fail While learning a new movement, training close to failure is NOT your goal. Strength training is a skill. Train sufficiently hard, but make exercise form your priority, no matter how long it takes to master the skill.
Sets per Week
Although volume is technically measured as Sets × Reps × Weight, a more practical way to track it is by looking at your sets per week per muscle group.
In sports science research - where exercises are performed close to failure - the number of weekly sets is one of the strongest predictors of muscle growth outcomes.
Mounting evidence suggests that performing 10 to 20 sets per week, per muscle group is the sweet spot for maximising muscle growth.
Generally speaking:
someone with less than 2 years of consistent gym training can target the lower end of this range
an advanced lifter, closer to their genetic potential for muscle gain, may need to get closer to 20 sets per week.
Plan for your set volume
Start at the lower end and assess muscle "pump", next day soreness and progress.
At the end of a session you should feel you have some muscle pump. The day after most - but not necessarily all - sessions, you should feel a little reminder of having trained.
Within 48 hours, you should feel you could train the same muscle group again.
Use the above feedback to determine whether you add an extra set to your exercises the following week. Then regulate along the way.
If soreness is high, your body is slow to recover, and/or progress plateaus, your set volume may be more than you can recover from, and lowering may be needed.
How many sets per session?
Between 3 and 8 sets per muscle group seems to be most optimal. This gives rise to how we structure our program over the week.
For example, you could accumulate 10 sets of Chest exercises over 2 - 3 days rather than all in one session. Here are a few reasons why this might be optimal:
Hitting a muscle group twice per week, at a minimum, creates more opportunities to "signal" the muscle building machinery.
The quality of work stays higher with less sets per session - allowing for more overall work (Reps × Weight).
Beyond six to eight sets per session, we enter the realms of "junk volume" - accumulation of more fatigue than can be recovered from.
Training Frequency
As mentioned above, optimal muscle growth could be driven from multiple growth signals per week. Two to three signals seem best.
After a hard workout (the signal), repair & growth processes occur for up to 72 hours. Training chest once a week on a Monday means missing golden opportunities to signal more growth.
For example:
You split chest volume over two days (2 exercises, 6 sets per day = 12 sets total)
This could be through 2 x upper body days, including back exercises as well
You keep work quality high, and trigger muscle growth twice throughout the week (every 72-ish hours)
This still doesn't answer the question of "How many times per week should I workout?"
This brings us to...
The Perfect Workout Split
We need to reverse engineer your program by starting with how many days per week you can definitely train.
"Three days for sure" is more helpful to me than "Three days, but I'll try my best for four".
Start with what you can definitely achieve. From here you can split your total workout volume (eg; 10 sets per muscle group over 3 days).
Here's how you can split your set volume based on your available days: - 2 days: Full Body, Full Body - 3 days: Upper Body, Lower Body, Full Body - 4 days: Upper Body, Lower Body, Upper Body, Lower Body - 5 days: Push, Pull, Lower Body, Full Body, Lower Body - 6 days: Push, Pull, Lower Body, Push, Pull, Lower Body - 7 days: Take a rest day, mate.
If all you have is two days per week, you can be very effective in building muscle. At some point, if (or when) progress slows down, a third day and a program re-shuffle may be needed.
If you just love training – get after it. Remember, more is not always better, so adjust the number of exercises and sets to keep weekly set volume reasonable, and recovery in check.
Chapter 3 - How to progress your training
Is it better to add weight? Or add reps? Or both?
Go ahead and download the full ebook, Maximise Muscle Growth, to keep learning exactly how to optimise your training for muscle growth and toning.
Inside, you'll get much more practical guidance on:
Chapter 3 - How to progress your training over time
Chapter 4 - Which exercises are best and why
Chapter 5 - Machines vs Free weights. Compound vs Isolation
Chapter 6 - How fast to do your exercises & how long to rest between sets
These next chapters bring the all the KEY muscle building principles together, helping you train smarter without the guesswork.
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