Answer Fitness®: Practical Fitness Advice for Everyone

Will I Get Bulky Muscles from Judo? | Ask The Fitness Nerd

November 14, 2008 on 6:49 pm | By Matt | In Ask The Fitness Nerd | 6 Comments

Judo will not make you look fat. Exercise doesn’t necessarily equate to bulky muscles for women. The Fitness Nerd explains why.

Hi Fitness Nerd,

I started taking judo a couple of months ago because I really enjoy doing it rather than using it as a way to keep fit. While I don’t mind gaining a bit of muscle tone, I’m worried about bulking up as I’m a very small female who is a good weight and thick chunky muscles would just make me look fat. Is there anyway I can encourage my muscles to remain small but defined rather than grow big through diet? - Sophie

Sophie, you can relax. The chances of you “bulking up” and looking like a female version of Arnold Schwarzenegger are pretty slim. In fact, I’d say they are close to zero. There are three main reasons for this:

1. Women Don’t Have The Hormones for Huge Muscles

First, most women don’t have the hormonal environment necessary to put on massive amounts of muscle.  Adding muscle requires testosterone — and while women do have some testosterone — they typically don’t have enough to build the freaky muscles that you see on most bodybuilders — male or female. Yes, there are exceptions (and typically they involve the use of anabolic steroids or unusual male hormone levels in women ), but these are quite rare. So unless you have an atypical endocrine system for your gender or are on the testosterone patch, I wouldn’t sweat it for one minute.

2. Body Weight Training Doesn’t Maximize Muscle Mass

Second, judo is an activity that doesn’t involve the introduction of non-body-weight resistance. Building muscle requires consistently overloading the muscles with a progressive amount of weight during weight and resistance training.  This process of overloading the muscles is what builds muscle mass. With judo, you are basically training yourself against your own weight (or against someone else’s in some cases)– which more or less is fairly consistent. While this can certainly build strength, balance and co-ordination (and some muscle mass), it’s typically not enough to add lots of muscle. But again, even if you were pumping iron heavy daily, you’d probably be pretty pleased with the results. So maybe you should try it.

What it will do, is challenge a lot of stabilizer muscles that you might not normally use in your everyday activities, as well as burn some extra calories, which can help you strip off body fat. When people experience a “firming” of their muscles, it’s usually do primarily to a loss in body fat. You can have muscle, but if it’s wrapped in fat, it will seem soft and “jiggly.” Lose the fat, and suddely that lean, gorgeous muscle underneath starts to shine.

Continue reading Will I Get Bulky Muscles from Judo? | Ask The Fitness Nerd…

Sphere: Related Content

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Why Workout Routines for Toning Fail | Fitness Tips

July 30, 2008 on 8:24 pm | By Matt | In Fitness Tips & Guides | 19 Comments

If your fitness goal is to get a ‘toned body’, you’ve probably been doing all the wrong things with your workout routine. Learn what “toned” really means and how you can achieve it.

It’s almost impossible to pick up a fitness magazine and not find a reference to “toning your abs”, “toning your butt” or “toning your legs or thighs.”

But I’m going to let you in on one of the best kept secrets in fitness: There really is no such thing as “toning” or being “toned” — at least in the sense of what people normally associate with ”toned muscle” or a ”toned body.”  

There is a concept in anatomy and physiology called residual muscle contraction or tonus, but it refers to the continuous and partial contraction of a muscle to help stabilize posture and balance. It has nothing to do with the outward appearance of your body or whether you have tight glutes and washboard abs. You can be out of shape and struggle to climb a flight of stairs and still have muscle tonus.

So what’s the story? What is this “toning” that everyone is always talking about?

How the “Toned Body” Myth Got Started

At some point years ago, fitness writers, personal trainers and people who really ought to know better started using the term “toned” to describe individuals with high muscle mass to low body fat ratios. Instead of saying that an athlete, fitness model or highly-in-shape person was “lean and muscular” they started saying the person was “toned.”

Why this happened isn’t exactly clear. My theory is that the words “muscle” and “muscular” are scary and intimidating for some people, especially to many women who have been conditioned to run as fast as they can from the dreaded “M-Word.” The seemingly endless stream of articles online and in major fitness magazines instructing women how not to ”bulk up” and avoid become “muscular” via workout routines for “toning” is a major contributor to this myth.

So fitness writers and trainers started to use “toned” as a way of describing being muscular, without actually saying the word “muscular.” It seemed innocent enough, and it allowed them to not have to get into big, long, involved and uncomfortable discussions with their clients about why they should top obsessing on becoming too “bulky.”

You Can’t Diet or Treadmill Your Way to “Toned”

The problem is, to get a body that fits most people’s definition of “toned”, you have to weight train. And you generally have to go heavy. And you need to put on muscle mass. And you’ll have to drop your body fat ratio.  That’s the secret. Those four things. And it doesn’t matter whether you are a male or a female. It applies equally regardless of gender.

This may seem like an issue of semantics and a little thing, but it’s not. The problem is that “toned” has become a euphemism for “lean and muscular”, yet most people don’t realize that. They think “toned” is something you achieve by dieting, doing endless bouts of cardio and maybe occasionally doing some pilates or high-rep, low-weight resistance training.

So by obscuring what “toning” really means, we’ve doomed all kinds of people to pursuing toning workout routines that will likely never allow them to achieve their fitness, physique or body-shaping goals. They’ll continue to avoid any kind of serious weight training, go too light on the resistance, focus on high reps that only improve muscle endurance (not size or shape),  put way too much time and attention on ”functional” exercises and try to stair-step their way to a “toned” body.

And when it doesn’t work, they’ll go seek out the newest “30 Minute Body Toning Workout” and get right back on the hamster wheel again, only to be frustrated in three weeks when nothing has changed.  Maybe that’s how you sell fitness magazines and personal training sessions, but I’d prefer to think we’re in the business of helping people succeed, not just pushing services or content.

There’s A Whole ‘Lotta Toning Going On

So how pervasive is this term or concept of “toning?”

It’s probably one of the most frequently asked questions in the Diet and Fitness section of Yahoo Answers — especially among women (although I do see some men using it.) Typically, it will come in the form of a question like: “How can I get toned without becoming bulky?” or “Does anyone have any toning exercises that won’t make me put on muscle.”

Of course, if they hadn’t been sold the “myth of toning” and understood exactly what that term really meant, their questions would be absurd.

Continue reading Why Workout Routines for Toning Fail | Fitness Tips…

Sphere: Related Content

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!