Why most women never get toned (and what actually works)

Most women fail to achieve their ideal physique because they avoid building muscle, fearing it will make them bulky, and instead rely on cardio and low-intensity workouts that don’t produce significant results. The solution involves understanding that body composition depends only on muscle mass and body fat—gaining muscle is essential because it enables sustainable fat loss while maintaining a healthy weight and achieving a defined, feminine physique. The process requires just 40 minutes weekly of strength training using six basic compound movements performed as heavy as possible, combined with adequate protein intake (1.8g per kilogram of body weight daily) and strategic short-term calorie deficits. This approach eliminates chronic dieting, reduces hunger through proper nutrition, increases energy and strength, and allows the body to naturally maintain a lean, toned appearance without constant effort.

If you’re a woman trying to get toned and it’s not working, it’s probably because you’re avoiding the one thing that actually creates that look. Most women are told to do more cardio, eat less, and avoid lifting heavy and building muscles so that they don’t get bulky. And that sounds right. It feels safe and it’s exactly why nothing changes. You’re not feeling worse. You don’t look any better. You certainly don’t get to your goal. So in this video, I’m going to show you what actually determines how your body looks and how to get this lean, toned definition and look absolutely incredible without living in the gym or dieting forever. In fact, you’d be surprised at just how little you need to make this work. When it comes to making changes in your physique, we want to get to it here. There are only two things that we can actually change about your body, right?
If we look at your total body mass here, the only two things making that up that we can actually have any influence over are your muscle mass and your body fat mass. And there are two huge problems with this traditional female approach to getting in shape. Two sides of the same coin. One is that you’re scared of gaining muscle mass. Thinking that building muscle is going to get you bulky and have you looking like masculine or like a bodybuilder is so far from accurate. I cannot overemphasise what a mistake this is to be think like this. Being bulky is always, always a problem of too much body fat, not muscle. If you’re uncomfortable with the size of your body, it is always, always this that is the problem, not because you have too many gains. Gaining muscle for a guy is hard. We try so hard to put on muscle.
And if you do it well, it takes years and years of consistent, really hard, intense, intentional work, lifting as heavy as possible. Eating well, recovering. I’ve been training consistently for over 10 years. Well, if getting muscle as a guy is like driving a car, gaining muscle as a woman is like towing a semi-trailer behind you and you’re driving with a handbrake on. You are just in such a different hormonal state. You have so much less testosterone that if you do exactly the same process, put exactly the same amount of effort into your training and nutrition to build muscle. You’re going to be able to make changes, but the end result is just going to be significantly less muscle. You’re going to look like a woman who has shape. And you’re probably asking at this point, okay, well, why is it even important that we add muscle mass?
If the problem of being bigger than we want comes from body fat, then why don’t we just drop body fat? And you’re on the right track now, but this brings us to the next mistake that most women make, which is thinking that to get in their goal shape, all they need to do is reduce body weight. You can just eat less food, exercise more and lose weight. The problem is our goal is not just to be smaller. Our goal we say at the start is to look good, have definition, have shape, have proportion. If you want to just become a stick, that’s a different process and that’s not what I teach. You’re not going to feel good, you’re not going to be athletic. You’re just going to be a weaker, smaller version with the same shape. You can still be underweight and have no definition because there’s no muscle mass underneath.
You just become skinny fat. That’s not the goal. And unless you already have your goal body, I can guarantee that you have less muscle mass than you think. If you cut body fat down without gaining any muscle and got really lean, you’ll be shocked at how scrawny you are. And even if you’re okay being skinny without any shape, you just want it to be smaller. The other problem is that it is physiologically really tough to sustain a weight that’s too low. So people that try to just get smaller by reducing body weight end up very unhappy and ultimately unable to sustain it. Hunger drives up and it’s just not a fun place to be. It’s not healthy. You’re never going to stay there. So what we want is to get you to a place where you don’t actually have to put any conscious effort into maintaining the result.
Long term, your body’s just happy. The good thing is all of these goals intersect together, but what do we need to do to make it happen? Increase muscle mass. It is the most important part of this equation because it allows us to then reduce body fat down to a place where we lean. We’re still at a healthy body weight, so our body’s happy. And then not only do we look good, we have the defined glutes, the tight stomach, the proportion, feminine physique. We feel great. We’re stronger. We’re more athletic. We’ve got more energy. It’s a win, win, win, win, win. And so to make this all very simple, the number one mistake the most women make when trying to get in shape is not aggressively chasing muscle mass with everything they’ve got. Your Pilates theoretically can work. Your gym workouts can theoretically work all only in so far as they help you build muscle.
But if you’re scared of gaining muscle, then I can guarantee you are never going to work hard enough with enough intent and push up the intensity of what you’re doing enough to seriously actually gain muscle. So honestly, if you take nothing away from this video, I just want you to realise the importance of that because it will allow you to get all the results you ever want. If you from today decide that you’re going to gain muscle and when you lose body fat, lose just body fat, not body weight. Okay. So how do you do this? I said I’d show you how to do it in 40 minutes a week without chronic dieting. Once you understand what we’ve talked to now, the rest is really easy. The way we do the muscle part of this, you only need a handful of basic movements, one covering each of your basic planes of motion.
So what I do and what I teach all my clients is just to use six movements, train them each once a week, train that constantly as heavy as possible and just push for strength progress every week. That only needs to take a grand total of 40 minutes, spread over the week. If you want to see the exact movements that I use and hey can start from absolute beginner and work your way up to advance. They’re all in a guide that I made. You can download that for free right now. Link is in the description below. Grab your copy of that. And one quick note I want to make on body parts and exercise selection. Even if you want, let’s say your glutes to be way bigger and you don’t want a big bulky upper body, you do not need to over engineer this. The differences in size in different parts of your body comes down to genetics and fat distribution.
As a woman, you’re going to have a bigger ass because you have a higher body fat than a guy of the equivalent fitness level and you just store more fat there. You’re not going to have as big a shoulders and arms as a guy, again, because your muscles are going to be smaller. I learned my equivalent of this lesson when I finally started training legs consistently. Again, I wanted to have the male ideal physique and so I thought if I just trained my upper body, left my legs, then that would get me the proportion I wanted. What I didn’t realise was that there was so much muscle in my lower body. And when I finally started to develop it, my legs actually got leaner. My entire body got leaner. I looked way better overall, even though I didn’t care at all about the size of my legs.
And so if you want to look as good as possible, you just want to develop all your body’s muscles and the proportion and the relative size and the natural shape that looks really good as a woman is going to just develop. Just like for a guy, if we develop all our muscles to the greatest degree that we can, that’s what ends up looking the most masculine and good as a male. So these six exercises are selected because they develop your entire body’s musculature as efficiently as possible. If you want the best results and the fastest transformation, you just want to grow every muscle as much as you can. So that’s training and that’s honestly the core of all of this. That’s what’s going to signal your body to build muscle because it needs to do that in order to get stronger. The other parts of this equation is nutrition, giving your body the fuel that it needs to go and turn that training signal into muscle mass.
And again, you can overcomplicate nutrition all you want, but basically you just need to hit a protein target and that does not need to be a huge amount. If you like meat, fish, chicken, dairy, eggs, very easy to hit this target. 1.8 grammes per kilogramme of gold body weight per day. You can get most of it in one meal. For example, if you’re 60 kilo one, you want to hit 110 grammes a day. You could literally get 80 grammes of that at lunch from something like 300 grammes of lean meat plus some ski yoghourt or cheese or eggs. Done. You don’t have to think about nutrition for the rest of the day. Now, once we’ve covered this, the cool thing is A, you’re going to start to feel better and stronger every single week from training. B, now that you’re hitting your protein, your body’s suddenly a whole lot more satisfied and you find your hunger drops immediately.
Most people, when they start doing this, start losing weight because they’re no longer in this chronically underfed state where their body’s not getting enough protein, so it’s always hungry. So just fix these basics and life just gets so much easier. Again, remember, if you do this all right, your body’s on your side. We aiming to get to a point where there is no constant battle-ish day fighting against your body’s internal signals. If you’re really hungry, you’re either underweight or you’re not eating enough protein. That’s usually the cause. Hunger’s literally your warning signal, making sure you don’t undernourish your body. It’s not trying to make you fat. So this is what a lot of women don’t get right. Nowadays, there’s a lot more awareness of protein, so that’s usually okay. I think people are still over complicated. It can be done a lot easier if you do this strategy, but this part is still, again, kind of emphasised enough you need to try.
So then in terms of dropping body fat, the advice I want to give you here is really simple. I said before you can stop chronic dieting and that is really important. When it comes to knocking the body fat off, as I said, if you do this part right, all of it happens automatically, but there’s still a cheap we need to make from having higher body fat to having lower body fat. And this is like moving house. You are currently here in your big higher body fat percentage house, we want to just move you over to the slimmer one which has lower body fat. And once you get here, you don’t have to do anything to maintain it. It’s the same maintenance calories. Like you need to eat the same amount to maintain your weight, whether you have a higher amount of body fat or lower, provided you have a healthy body weight, which means enough muscle mass, and provided you’re not too lean, like I’m talking getting way leaner than this where you start to look gross anyway, then your body’s going to be very happy staying there and you don’t have to do anything different to what you were doing before.
You’ve just moved house to a leaner body composition. And because to get there, you started eating more protein and strength training, you’re actually going to feel way better. You’re going to be more satisfied and actually less inclined to want to overeat. You’ll also actually need to eat more every day because if you increase muscle mass, then your basal metabolic rate goes up. And so not only will you need to eat the same amount that you needed to eat to maintain your higher body fat percentage, but also you need to eat more because now more of your body weight is coming from muscle mass, which is metabolically expensive and requires more food on a daily basis. The way that we move house is just using calorie deficits. And so at some point you will want to diet, but it will be for distinct periods of time.
I would never do more than 12 weeks. I’d never try and lose more than half a kilo a week. You want to keep these short and intentional, get them done, and then just chill out at your new level of body fat. Again, this will mainly be limited by how much muscle you’ve built, because if you start cutting down now, you’re doing it well, but it starts to get difficult. It’s probably because you’re getting too small. You need to build more muscle to balance out the scales and keep yourself, again, in that healthy body weight range. With the body weight thing, it’s like if you try and drop too far, it’s like a rubber band. You start to get too far below the level that your body’s happy staying at and it will rebound back up by jacking up your hunger, making you food obsessed until you eat more and do that.
Again, not what we want. We want this to be easy. So the way we do that is by building muscle and then at a higher body weight, we can be leaner and have that nice defined look that we’re after. So that is the process. Hopefully that puts the beds and myths holding you back. And again, I think the takeaway is just that muscle is hard to build. So if you’re not trying as hard as possible right now from day zero, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. If you ever have too much muscle, then that’s an amazing problem to have because then you can just sit in your ass and not worry about this whole process. Unless you have some genetic freak or you start injecting yourself with steroids, that day is never going to arrive. If you have questions, there’s things you want me to dive deeper on here, happy to do more follow-up videos.
Just drop your questions in the comments below and I’ll endeavour to address them.