Women's Gym Routine for Weight Loss and Toning – Greatest Physiques (2023)

This guide is designed for women to get you feeling sexy, confident and strong.

It gives you tools to sculpt a womanly figure, a shapely silhouette and a healthier outlook on life.

In the shortest time possible.

Built around cardio-weight circuits, this workout routine is challenging but rewarding. If you’re here and willing to put the work in, we guarantee results.

Get ready to look amazing and feel like a new person.

What does this program cover?

Goal: Muscle building
Aimed at: Beginner
Program duration: 4 weeks
Workout duration: 30-45 minutes
Equipment needed: Resistance machines, dumbbells, body weight

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Workout Plan for Women’s Weight Loss

The internet is chock-full of weight loss routines that promise a tighter butt, trim hips and strong, athletic legs.

But few use the right tools to get you there.

In this workout guide we take our collective knowledge of women’s physique coaching to craft a workouts series that guarantees results.

Here’s what you’ll achieve in as little as 4-6 weeks:

  • Lower body fat and a leaner, tighter body
  • Toned curves, not bulky or masculine muscle mass
  • Better fitness and conditoning
  • More confidence in your own ability

But before we start it’s important to cover some essential information.

This certainly isn’t a college course, but knowing some of the basics about proper training helps you take command of your own gym routine and make subtle changes to your own workouts as you progress.

Here’s what you need to know…

What does toning actually mean?

It’s easy to get a bit pedantic with the definition of ‘toning’.

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But understanding what it means will help you to approach your workouts more precisely.

Toning in the context of a workout goal refers to exercise that helps you shape your muscles. It implies having low enough body fat to be able to see the shape of a muscle, but then having enough firmness to see the shape of it.

Toning is basically the combination of fat loss and muscle building.

So how do you tone up?

Strength training.

Plain and simple.

It’s only by training your muscles directly that you can give them more shape.

Will you get huge, bulky muscles from strength training?

The short answer is no.

Female physiology doesn’t support the level of muscle mass that a male’s does.

Muscle mass is significantly correlated to testosterone levels. And women’s concentrations of this anabolic hormone are a measly 15 times lower than in your male counterparts.

Even with real hard training you’ll avoid bulk. Instead you’ll develop athleticism and tone that tells people it’s obvious you work out.

Using strength training to tone your muscles and drop body fat

The key to fat loss comes even before the hard slog in the gym.

In order to trigger your fat cells to release the fat inside, you have to achieve a regular calorie deficit.

For every day that you take in less calories from food than you burn off through physical activity and day-to-day tasks, you lose weight.

Even without exercise you’ll lose fat in a deficit.

The problem is though that you’ll also lose muscle mass too.

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And not only is that bad for your overall strength and health; it’s not great for your metabolic rate too.

Over time you’ll find it harder to keep losing weight and eventually you’ll pile it back on.

Strength training maintains muscle mass while dieting.

Lifting weights helps you shred body fat in a number of different ways.

  • More muscle means higher calorie burn – it’s not a huge difference, but being leaner means you burn more energy each day. This helps with weight loss by pushing you into a deficit.
  • It’s more fun than hours and hours of cardio – and research shows you’re more likely to stick to your plan if you enjoy it.
  • You can get a cardio effect from strength training – lifting weights in the right way still gets your heart rate and fitness up. But cardio doesn’t provide a strength effect.
  • You can pick which muscles you target – you can’t choose where you burn fat, but you can choose which muscles you enhance through toning exercises.

Weight loss and fat loss aren’t the same thing

You’re here because you want to ditch the excess weight, develop lean muscle and tighten up any problem areas.

When it comes to your specific goal though, it’s important that you know the differences between weight and fat loss. The way you program your diet and gym routine might differ dependent on what you’re after.

Weight refers to total mass.

When you step on your weighing scales at home it gives you a numerical measure of what makes you, you – your muscle mass, fat mass, bone, water and so on.

However, if you’re not an athletic woman and are overweight, losing total mass is still useful for your overall health.

Tools like body mass index (BMI) are useful for anyone who does not exercise regularly and carries too much weight. It gives you an indication of your overall health risk, as well as a target weight to aim for.

There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that correlates obesity with long-term health complications.

Note: we totally understand that BMI isn’t a relevant tool for active women who carry high levels of lean mass. But that’s not its target audience.

Losing weight doesn’t mean you’re losing fat.

Dropping mass on the scales doesn’t tell you can tellwhereweight loss is occurring.

It doesn’t tell you your body composition.

So if you lose weight without assessing composition it’s difficult to tell if you’ve lost fat, muscle or water… or a combination of them all.

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It’s important to make sure that as much of that weight decrease is coming from fat as possible. If you lose water you’ll just put it back on again when you take a drink.

And losing muscle mass is disastrous because a loss of muscle means a hell of a drop in metabolic rate.

Find out how you can speed up your metabolism and burn fat quicker: Best metabolism boosters for fast weight loss

Using a Gym Routine to Lose fat and Tone Up

When you’re planning to hit the gym to get leaner and shred your problem areas, you need the right exercise plan.

Chances are you want to ditch excess fat, but at the same time develop feminine curves and a shapely silhouette.

Here’s how you go about it…

Get leaner and build a killer booty with weights

Full-body workouts work great for calorie burning and toning. You can target all of your major muscles in every workout and even emphasize key, problem areas as well.

In this workout schedule we’ll put more work in for your lower body. That way we can help you develop a curvy booty and slimmer waist to accentuate your femininity.

Because toning is the combination of fat loss and muscle build, you also need to hit each muscle in a way that forces it to grow.

But remember – you won’t get bulky.

Choosing weights that are challenging and take you to a point of fatigue is the best way to spark the toning process off.

Use progressive overload to achieve your goals

Choosing weights that are challenging and promote a change in your physique is an absolute must.

No one ever built a sexy figure without putting the time and effort in.

But it’s also important that you don’t stick with those same weights week after week. Because eventually they’ll stop working for you.

You’ll become demotivated and chances are you’ll stop altogether.

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Progressive overload is a key principle for toning, fat loss and weight loss because it puts the body into a position that it’s unaccustomed to.

It forces it to get better!

Once you can consistently achieve your rep count, upping the weights just slightly will help to keep your body progressing.

Even if it’s not the weight, you can still achieve progressive overload in the following ways:

  • Decrease your rest time between sets
  • Add reps and sets to each exercise
  • Choose more challenging exercises

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Toning Workout Plan for Females

In this 4 week plan we use a mixture of large muscle group as well as more targeted isolation exercises to tone, lean and strengthen your body.

There’s a big emphasis on your legs, butt and abs.

The goal here is to give shape to your muscles through strength training. You’ll fire up your metabolism and skim that layer of fat away too.

You can throw in 2 or 3 cardio workouts per week into your program too if you want some added fitness and conditioning work in there too.

Even 20-30 minutes of jogging, cycling or swimming will help you burn more calories.

Based on 3 strength workouts per week and combined with a healthy diet, you’ll have your friends asking what your secret is.

“Have you been working out?”

“Hey, what program are you following, you look fire!”

This is your opportunity to make some big changes to how you look and feel.

Number Workout 1 Workout 2 Workout 3
1 DB Goblet squat DB deadlift DB Lateral lunge
2 Push-up (full position or on knees) DB flyes Reverse flyes
3 Lat pulldown Low pulley row High step-up
4 Lying leg curl DB Static squat DB Shoulder press
5 Triceps extension DB hammer curl Leg press
6 Leg extension Standing calf raise Bench dips
7 DB lateral raise Ab curl Side plank (hold for 30-60 seconds each side)

Choose weights that are challenging. Use a rep range of 8-15 for every exercise and aim to rest only 2 minutes or less between sets. Keeping your workouts short and intense is a great way of firing up your metabolism and losing excess at the same time as toning your muscles.

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