Answer Fitness®: Practical Fitness Advice for Everyone

Why Workout Routines for Toning Fail | Fitness Tips

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…

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

Weight Training Basics: The Four Principles of Weight Training

Learn the basics of weight training and start burning more fat, increase your strength and get more fit than ever before. 

The research is in: Including weight or resistance training into your weekly workout makes good health and fitness sense, regardless of your level of experience. 

You know the benefits of weight training, so now it’s just a matter of doing it.

But before you hit the weights, you should take a few minutes to understand the key principles to effective weight and resistance training.  Having knowledge of these tried-and-true rules of weight training will ensure that you make progress in the gym, no matter what your individual health and fitness goals may be.  

There is a lot of jargon thrown around by fitness trainers and gym-goers that you need to understand. Sometimes it can seem like a foreign language, but once it’s been explained in plain language (we like to call this “gumping things” at the office), it will make all of the sense in the world.

The Basics of Weight Training: What You Need to Know To Get Started

Okay, so you’re convinced you need to start including weight training in your workout routine.

Great. Now where do you begin?

Let’s start with the four basic principles of weight training:

• Overload: This just means you expose your muscles to more weight, resistance or stimulus than they are used to performing during your normal every day activities.  To do this, you need to lift an amount of weight that only allows you to complete the intended amount of repetitions. Remember, your overload weight will increase as you continue training and your body recovers and adapts. Which takes us to the next concept, progression.

• Progression: Progression means that you continually overload your muscle with more stimulus each time you weight train.  Since your muscles are constantly adapting, you will never get stronger without increasing the force they have to exert or the amount of work they do. Progression doesn’t necessarily always mean adding additional weight. You can overload the muscle progressively in a number of different ways, including performing more reps with the same weight, increasing the volume (total number) of sets performed, changing the tempo or pace of your repetitions to keep the muscle under tension for longer periods of time, or simply lifting more weight than last time. The key here is to always push your muscles harder than the last workout in some fashion.

• Specificity: Specificity is a fancy term for performing weight training with a specific and distinct goal in mind. So if your goal is to add additional muscle mass, your choice of exercises, repetitions, sets and weight used will be different than if you are training your muscles for endurance.  Know your goals before you start weight training, since it will impact how workout routine.

• Rest and Recovery: There is a common saying that muscle is built outside of the gym, not in it. Weight training stresses your muscles and requires that you allow yourself adequate rest and recovery time. Typically that will mean giving your muscles 48 hours to recover before training that same muscle or group of muscles again. Understand that recovery time is highly individual. Some advanced trainees need less recovery time than beginners. And the intensity of your weight training will in large part determine the length of rest that’s right for you.

Next up, we’ll learn about choosing the appropriate weight,  repetitions (reps),  and sets to meet your goals.

As always, you should consult your physician before undertaking any resistance, weight or cardio training program.

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

Principles of Weight Training | Fitness and Exercise Glossary

There are four basic principles of weight training:

1. Overload
2. Progression
3. Specificity
4. Rest and Recovery

These principles work together to ensure that a person meets their weight training goals.

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

Progression (Principles of Weight Training) | Fitness and Exercise Glossary

One of the four principals of weight training, progression is the act of gradually adding to the amount or type of stimulus applied to the muscle during each exercise.  

Without consistent progression in your workouts, you won’t overload your muscles sufficiently to promote optimum increases in hypertrophy (muscle size), strength and endurance. Progression can be achieved by continuously changing the stimulus applied to the muscle.

These changes can include progressively increasing the weight used during an exercise, the total amount of work performed (volume and reps), time that the muscle is under tension (tempo), frequency of training, and the introduction of additional exercises or variations on the exercise performed.

Also see: overload; principles of weight training

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