Elevate Your Muscle Gains in Four-Week Fast Track: Liftoff

Embark on an epic muscle-building journey with Four-Week Fast Track: Liftoff, Tonal’s September challenge designed to take your gains to new heights. Using a novel approach to hypertrophy, the program workouts feature a variety of lifting techniques to stimulate muscle growth through multiple pathways, while keeping you excited and engaged. 

Choose from two tracks—Level I for intermediate lifters and Level II for advanced—and get ready to maximize lean gains. 

Four-Week Fast Track: Liftoff takes flight on Monday, September 1. Read on to learn more about Liftoff and discover which level is right for you. 

The Flight Path: Hybrid Hypertrophy

While old-school hypertrophy training focused on lifting in a narrow rep range, emerging research shows that similar results can be achieved through both low-rep and high-rep lifting. 

Four-Week Fast Track: Liftoff draws on these science-backed principles by incorporating different rep ranges and intensities within each workout. It’s a new technique for building muscle that you haven’t seen in any Tonal program before, according to Tonal performance manager Jenna Moore. “It could unlock a lot of potential gains you may have been leaving on the table, and open you up to different ways of training for hypertrophy,” she says. 

These hybrid hypertrophy workouts (two per week for Level I and three per week for Level II) start with a strength-hypertrophy block with low-rep, heavy-weight sets to build strength and improve muscle fiber recruitment, followed by a lighter, high-rep backoff set to rack up the volume. Burnout mode kicks in during the backoff sets to help you keep repping it out as fatigue mounts. 

The next block in each hybrid hypertrophy workout switches the focus to building muscle through maximizing time under tension with an emphasis on slow eccentrics and lifting at a controlled tempo. Finally, the workouts conclude with a metabolic stress block with higher reps and shorter rest periods. Expect to see Drop Sets and supersets in these final blocks to bring you closer to failure. “With hypertrophy, failure is always the goal,” says Moore. “That’s where the greatest gains live.”

Spanning a variety of rep ranges makes these sessions efficient and enjoyable while helping you avoid burning out. “You're able to recover quicker between the workouts because you're not training only one end of the spectrum,” says Moore. 

Since building muscle is the goal of every workout, you’ll see more dedicated rest time than you would in a program designed to burn fat. “When you’re going heavy, you need to take a moment for rest and recovery,” says Tonal coach Tanysha Renee. “Having that rest period built in helps you efficiently get those benefits.” 

Both tracks also include one or two days per week of isolation exercises to bring an extra pump to accessory muscles, including the triceps, biceps, and calves, while avoiding overtraining larger muscle groups. This type of training delivers aesthetic benefits as well as functional ones since strengthening these muscles can improve performance in compound lifts. 

Level I Breakdown

Led by Coaches Tim Landicho and Kristina Centenari, Four-Week Fast Track: Level I includes three workouts per week with an upper/lower/full split. 

Day 1: Upper-Body Hybrid Hypertrophy
Day 2: Lower-Body Hybrid Hypertrophy
Day 3: Full-Body Isolation

Following the same training style as the more advanced track but with slightly less volume and only three program days per week, Level I is an excellent option if you have a busy schedule or are used to fewer workouts per week. It’s also accessible to beginners, especially if you use Recovery Weights to lighten the load or add an additional rest day between workouts. 

DOWNLOAD A PRINTABLE LEVEL I CALENDAR

Level II Breakdown

Four-Week Fast Track: Level II features a five-day, bodybuilding split and is led by Coaches Kendall “Woody” Wood, Ackeem Emmons, Tanysha Renee, and Joe Rodonis. 

Day 1: Upper-Body Push Hybrid Hypertrophy (Chest, Shoulders, and Triceps)
Day 2: Lower-Body Hybrid Hypertrophy
Day 3: Upper-Body Pull Hybrid Hypertrophy (Back and Biceps)
Day 4: Lower-Body Isolation
Day 5: Upper-Body Isolation

In Level II, you’ll accumulate more total volume and more volume per muscle group thanks to the bodybuilder-style split. With two days devoted to upper-body hybrid hypertrophy plus two isolation days, you’ll have more opportunities to hit each muscle group. Coach Tanysha explains part of the challenge of this advanced program is maintaining your form and technique even as fatigue builds over the course of the week. 

DOWNLOAD A PRINTABLE LEVEL II CALENDAR

Bonus Core Sessions

Upgrade your core strength with four optional bonus workouts, one for each week of the program. These supplemental sessions follow a similar hybrid hypertrophy approach to training your abs and obliques, with blocks dedicated to strength-hypertrophy, mechanical tension, and metabolic stress. 

While you’ll hit your core throughout the main program workouts, Moore explains that this isolation work may make a big difference in all your workouts. “Sometimes lack of core strength is the limiting factor for increasing the weight in your bigger lifts because your core or your back starts to feel it,” she says. Add one in if you feel like you have some extra energy and want more of a challenge. 

Join the Flight Crew

Take on the program as a team in the Official Tonal Community on Facebook. Connect with fellow members to find accountability buddies and keep each other motivated. Tonal coaches will be checking in throughout the challenge to answer your questions and share tips and advice on making the most out of the program. 

Join the Challenge Group