Why Hypertrophy Training will get you the Toned Look you Want

When I was growing up, I played basketball and softball. Those are my two main sports. I actually thought that I was gonna go on and play basketball in college like not Do you want anything but probably like d3. That's really what I wanted to do. I actually ended up getting injured my junior year, I had to get surgery on my ankle. And so that kind of went out the window, I lost my AAU season there couldn't participate.

So that's why I actually originally went on to study athletic training because I figured if I can't be the athlete in college, I can work with the athletes and treat them and learn and learn that and still be in that environment. So I went to the University of Miami and like my freshman year, I really got into triathlons because I saw a ad on the bulletin board in my dorm room that was for the club team. And I was like, a few months into college, and I was like itching for something to do itching for some competition. There wasn't like a basketball, you know, wreck or anything like that happening at that time. So I was like, Oh, this is this seems challenging. Let me try this out. So I went to the first workout. And I just kind of, I was like, Wow, this, this is hard.

But I think I want to do it. And so that's what got me into triathlons in college, started to you know, just kind of fall in love with the sport, especially being in Miami and being able to train and go on bike rides throughout, you know, that atmosphere was awesome swim in the ocean there and things like that. And then when I got to grad school, I didn't have any more time to do to train for triathlons, I was actually working as a graduate assistant athletic trainer, and getting my master's. So I had like, virtually no time. And I was like, Okay, I need to just find a quick workout that still has a little bit of competition.

So I'm still like, excited to go to this everyday, right. And so that that's where I found CrossFit. So did that for a few years. And then coming back to what we were just talking about the recovery side of things, I basically kind of just burnt myself out from CrossFit. I wasn't I was in that type A, I wasn't recovering properly. I wasn't I was just, you know, going six days a week, I was thinking more was better. And I actually ended up getting injured, I injured my back. And so that forced me to stop that forced me to take a step back, which unfortunately happens with a lot of people, right, we just kind of run ourselves into the ground. And eventually our body's just like, I can't do this anymore. So something happens and so that for me, I had a lower back injury. And that was back in like 2018 Maybe and so from then on, I actually just kind of put put CrossFit on hold and started more.

So bodybuilding style training, so hypertrophy style training, getting more into the muscle building side of things. And that's really where I focus now is that style of training. So this really also started off like when I got injured, I kind of was you know, and as we a lot of us do, we get injured and we like kind of missing that piece of our every day, right, I was missing that. Missing that, you know community and CrossFit and I kind of got a little depressed and gained a little bit more weight than I probably wanted to. So eventually as I recovered, I wanted to I actually ended up hiring my own coach and went through my own transformation.

Got into bodybuilding style training and realize that like, you know, really focusing on periodized my training and focusing on going into height and hypertrophy phase for training that's where I actually saw the most changes in my body composition because I was able to build muscle and I realized that once I was building that muscle and then I eventually went through like a fat loss phase and kind of you know, took some body fat off that's where I saw my most quote unquote gains right and so that's something that a lot of people a lot of women don't realize they want to like you know lose body fat and they want to quote unquote get toned, right that that word toned, but they don't realize like if you don't have any muscle definition underneath the body fat, you're not going to look that way, right? Yes, you can lose lose weight, but you're not going to look how you really want to look unless you build some muscle