How Fitness Pro Paul Sklar Maximizes Muscle Gains On Tonal
Tonal teamed up with the personal trainer for a set of hypertrophy-driving, action-packed workouts.
Building muscle requires consistency and patience. But faster gains can actually be achieved with more strategic workouts. As a certified personal trainer with more than 30 years of experience, Paul Sklar knows how to get results fast. His new, extra-efficient workouts – meaning more work with less rest – are now available exclusively on Tonal.
“I don’t waste time when I work out,” Sklar says. “Everything I do is extremely efficient.” As a busy 52-year-old father of five, he aims to make the most out of every minute while training.
Sklar, a world-class duathlete who ran track and field in college, trains clients from the studio he co-owns in Charlotte, North Carolina. He also offers virtual training and shares fitness advice and workout tips online with his nearly two million Instagram followers.
Even with his extensive experience using a wide variety of workout equipment over the years, Sklar says nothing compares to Tonal. “I didn’t have an understanding of digital weight or how tough it could be,” he says, remembering the first time he tried Tonal, calling the experience “unbelievable.” Tonal’s adjustable resistance and automatic weight selection allows Sklar to consistently get in more efficient and effective workouts than he does with free weights alone.
“If I’m working with dumbbells and I’m having a bad day, the dumbbells aren’t going to adjust themselves,” he says. “If I’m having an off day or a great day on Tonal, Tonal will adjust [the weight] for me and I won’t have to think about it.”
Sklar adds that being able to turn on Tonal’s resistance with the touch of a button and the cable’s smooth movements also makes Tonal workouts easier on his joints. “I come off [of Tonal] feeling better than I do when I walk away from weights,” he says. This helps Sklar work out harder on Tonal and gain more muscle in less time.
Now, you can train like Sklar with two Custom by Tonal workouts he’s designed to help you build major muscle with no distractions.
Focusing on the chest, back, shoulders, and arms, All-Out Arm Assault is a targeted upper-body session that’ll get you a serious pump. Full-Body Fire Starter brings that same intensity to a total body workout, adding in heavy, lower body lifting to fire up your metabolism.
Who These Workouts Are For
With an emphasis on hypertrophy, these workouts are ideal for anyone looking to pack on maximum lean muscle without wasting time. Sklar programmed short rest periods between reps into both sessions to keep your heart rate elevated from start to finish. Maintaining this high level of intensity throughout the workouts helps you burn calories and fat as you lift, helping shift body composition.
“You’re going to be out of breath, but you’re not going to be thinking about it because you’ve got to move on to the next exercise,” says Sklar of these action-packed sessions.
As Custom by Tonal workouts, both All-Out Arm Assault and Full-Body Fire Starter allow you to work at your own pace, so they’re best for advanced lifters who want the convenience of a scientifically-backed, expert-designed workout with minimal coaching.
Why Behind the Workouts
The goal of these workouts is to get you shredded by lifting in a moderate rep range geared toward stimulating hypertrophy. Like all of Sklar’s workouts, these Custom by Tonal sessions are results-driven. “If you’re going to lift, you want to make sure you can actually see, visually, what you’re trying to accomplish,” he says.
Both workouts flow quickly from one exercise to the next. Short rest periods keep you engaged and ensure your heart rate remains elevated. “All of my resistance training programs are designed to have a cardiovascular benefit to them.”
All-Out Arm Assault kicks off with compound exercises (like bench presses and rows) targeting big muscles of the chest and back,then follows up with accessory moves to hit the biceps, triceps, and core. Working these larger muscles first ensures you have the energy to get the heaviest lifting completed before burning out your arms.
Full-Body Fire Starter follows a similar pattern, starting with compound lifts – such as deadlifts and Bulgarian split squats – for the lower-body before moving on to the chest, back, and shoulders. The workout closes with an accessory block that Sklar says will have your arms “feeling like spaghetti.”
Even if you’re one of the many lifters who typically skip leg day, Sklar says not to avoid Full-Body Fire Starter. “If you’re not working legs, you’re missing out on a gigantic metabolic component,” he says. “You burn a tremendous amount of calories when you do legs. It amps up your metabolism.”
The fitness expert programmed the workout to help you get the most out of your lower-body lifts. “Getting [legs] done first is going to make the workout more efficient,” says Sklar, explaining that these big lower-body moves require lots of energy. Once those are out of the way, your arms will still feel fresh for the upper-body exercises while your metabolism is firing.
To make both sessions even more effective, Sklar uses dynamic weight modes in several exercises. He calls Tonal’s dynamic weight modes “a game changer,” allowing you to get more out of every rep than you would exercising in a traditional gym.
You’ll also find Burnout mode in the accessory block of All-Out Arm Assault so you can keep repping it out to finish even as your biceps and triceps start to fatigue.
In Full-Body Fire Starter, Sklar adds Eccentric mode to the Bulgarian split squat. By loading the eccentric phase of a lift (which means adding weight while lowering), Sklar explains that you’re recruiting more muscle fibers to trigger even more hypertrophy. “You can’t get that anywhere else,” he says.
Fit These Workouts in Your Routine
With a solid dose of muscle-building volume plus a heart-pumping metabolic component, Sklar’s new workouts can work into your schedule whenever you’re looking for a challenge. For the best results, Sklar recommends doing each workout once or twice per week – and, if you really love these workouts, he suggests alternating them during the week with one day of rest in between. “It’s all encompassing,” he says, noting that you’ll work all major muscle groups in just two one-hour workouts.
However you decide to incorporate these workouts into your routine, Sklar promises that they’ll leave you feeling “out of breath and pumped up.”
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