What Is Toning?

The word Toning is to describe the state of your muscles.  In the context of toning your body, it refers to physical exercises with the goal of developing a physique with a large emphasis on musculature. 

So the term toning here implies leanness in the body (low levels of body fat), noticeable muscle presented, but not 0verly significant muscle size.  The less fat you have covering your muscles, the more “tone” and “definition” your body appear to be.

The more fat you have, the less “tone” or “definition” you’ll see.  So the key point to be toned is not just building muscle, but more importantly, is to work on it so that there isn’t too much fat covering your muscle.

There are two steps in toning up: 

1. Strengthening and developing your muscles, and also losing the fat overtop them at the same time.  That way your muscles are more visible and defined. 

2.  Conduct diet and exercise modifications.  Those can help you get fit and lean. 

Benefits of Toning Up

There are multiple benefits to tone up.  Your body can be benefited in the following areas:

• Stronger muscles. You'll strengthen your muscles which helps you perform better in daily activities and physical activities.  It reduces your risk of injury.

• Reduce body fat. You'll reduce your body fat during the process. 

• Muscle building, which burns fat. You'll build muscle, which helps with fat loss in the long-term. A pound of muscle can burn about 20-30 calories a day. A pound of fat burns about 5 calories a day. The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn all day.

• Stronger bones.  As you age, this is especially important as bones get weaker and more fragile.

• Overall benefits. You'll improve your appearance, flexibility, stability, and balance.

• Increase self-esteem. You'll increase your confidence and feel good about yourself.

How To Tone Up

Reduce Calories to Have Calories Deficit

Getting toned needs to lower your body fat.  In order to lower your body fat, you need to eat fewer calories.  Your body starts to burn body fat for energy when you eat fewer calories in with food and drinks than your body consumes.

You can find out your target calorie using an online calculator.  It provides estimated daily calories needed for you based on your age, body size, and gender. 

You can then subtract a few hundred calories intake each day to create the calorie deficit.  If every week you eat 3,000 to 7,000 calories fewer than you burn, you can lose 1 to 2 pounds of fat.

But you need to choose a realistic calorie intake target.  It should be at least  1,400 calories a day, recommended by the University of Michigan research.  If you eat less 1,400 calories daily, you can risk slowing your metabolism by eating too little. 

So you need to be careful with how many calories you cut.  Make sure don’t cut too much that it affects your metabolism.  If your metabolism slows down, it affects your body’s ability to burn fat. 

Eat Muscle-Building Foods

When you enter the state of calories deficit, make sure your body is not burning your muscle for the deficit energy.

Your diet needs to support muscle growth when you're in the process to tone. If you lose weight but don't maintain your muscles with adequate nutrition, you can become "skinny fat."  That means your weight seems healthy and you may even look thin, but you have actually too much body fat.

You need to have a healthy combination of nutrients in your meals.  You need complex carbohydrates, lean proteins, and unsaturated fats to have sufficient nutrients.  

In particular, you need lean protein.  Lean Protein is a rich source of amino acids, which is an important source for your body to build muscle tissue in order to gain weight. 

In addition, select whole grains over refined grains, and also include fruits and veggies in your meals.  As far as unsaturated fats, try to obtain healthy fats from such as avocados, fish, nuts and olive oil.

Train to Tone Up

Weight training is essential if you want to tone your body.  Its main purpose is to build muscle tissue, but at the same time, it boosts your metabolism.  It is easier to stay lean when you have a high metabolism.

Regular weight training keeps your muscle fibers to be lean, you look more fit that way.  Try to do weight training two or three times a week.  Do a full-body workout to build your muscles of your body.

Aerobic training is also necessary to tone up.   It increases the speed for your body to burn calorie and to achieve losing fat. For example, a 150-pound person burns 250 calories during a 30-minute high-impact aerobics class. 

Several 30-minute workouts weekly can add up to burn extra more than a thousand calories a week.  You can lose extra half of a pound of fat each week.

Three Common Myths Of Toning

1. Building muscle and bulking up are the same.

Fact:  As muscle tissues are denser than fat, getting a little bit more muscle to your body and actually makes you look leaner instead of bigger. 

To bulk up, you have to really do it hard. Bodybuilders spend hours and hours in the gym lifting extremely heavy weights.  And they have to eat specially designed meals to gain muscles. A normal workout and diet generally do not make you bulk up.

2: Lifting light weights won't help you get stronger.

Fact:  The real reason that you get stronger by lifting weight isn't about how much weight you lift.  Instead, it's more about you work your muscle to fatigue to the point that you can’t lift that weight anymore.

Research has proved that even lifting light weights, the effect adds up as much muscle as those lifting heavy weights.  However, it will take a lot more time to reach fatigue with light weights.  So it will take much longer with light weights than doing heavier weights. If you want to achieve the result faster with less time, it is a good idea to go with heavier weight lifting.

3. Certain forms of exercise are better to build long, lean muscles.

Fact:  We cannot lengthen our muscles in the sense of getting long, lean muscles, such as the appearance of a dancer.  Our muscles attach to our bones, and we cannot detach them, lengthen them and reattach them.

Muscles can be strengthened without being bigger.  You can develop muscular strength without increasing your muscle sizes.  Often improving posture and losing weight will do a lot to improve your appearance and will probably give you the look that you are hoping for. Losing weight involves burning more calories than you eat which means incorporating a sensible reduced calorie diet and increasing your physical activity.

There are exercises that are better than others to help increase your flexibility and your posture.  You can feel leaner with better body flexibility and posture. Those exercises are such as yoga, Pilates, dance and barre classes.

Why Many People Don’t Get Toned

There are many articles around about getting toned advising women to use light weights with a lot of repetitions.  They say that doing so can have you toned without looking too bulky or muscular.  It is, however, not correct information.

You need solid muscle mass to make your body look firm and fit. To achieve the kind of muscles, you need two things together:  Building muscle mass and losing body fat. 

Light weight lifting does not get you very far.  To build meaningful muscle, you need to challenge your muscle fibers.  It means you need to feel the hard work in your weight lifting.

So the “light weight for high reps” does not get to reduce the fat covering your muscles, it’s also does not provide the type of training stimulus needed to actually build muscle.

Another main reason that people don’t get toned is because you don’t get to tell your bodies where to shed fat.  You can’t just choose to get rid of the fat on your arms or your stomach.  Your body decides where the fat loss comes from.

What you can do is to take exercises that work all your major muscle groups.  This is the ultimate effective way to lose body fat.  The more muscles you use during exercise, the more calories (as well as fat) you get to burn.

The more muscle you build from exercise, the higher your metabolism you will have.  Higher metabolism help you burn more fat over time, whether you exercise or you rest.

Making It Work For You

Your exercise program should include larger muscle group movements such as those that involve legs, back and others that incorporate numerous muscle groups at the same time.  For example, bench presses burn more calories than isolated weight lifting like dumbbell biceps curls.

Those exercises that are excellent to achieve an elevated heart rate include but are not limited to: varieties of squats, bench step-ups, deadlifts, straight-leg deadlifts, any variety of lunges, etc.  Elevated heart rate alleviate the level of metabolism that help you burn calories.

You can also get creative and combine various movements.  You can do a repetition of the dumbbell shoulder press and then going smoothly into a repetition of the dumbbell biceps curls and then back and forth for a complete set of 20-30 total reps.  A combination of movements work better than keeping doing the same movement over and over.

As long as the resistance is large enough to make you feel muscle fatigue by no more than 15 repetitions, with very short rest periods, and make sure to have a solid nutritional program, you'll see your muscles tighten-up, lean, firm, and become more obvious after a period of time giving you that tone that you want.

Your personal trainer can help develop a set of customized designed exercises for you with your goals in mind so that you can have best performance with your body.