It’s all about you…
EXERCISE. NUTRITION.
SLEEP. HYDRATION. HAPPINESS.
If I had a pound for every time I heard the phrase, “I just need to tone up”, I’d be retired on a beach in Fiji right now. And due to my extreme wealth, eating my body weight in Fijian food (whatever that is) and drowning myself in cocktails 24/7, I’d be in no position to talk to you about toning up, as I would very much resemble the complete opposite of someone you could describe as “toned up”. Because if we’re gonna talk the talk, we should walk the walk, right?
But, as I sadly haven’t had this financial transaction, and this is just made-up nonsense, I feel I’m in a pretty good position to help you understand what toning up really means and how you can achieve it.
For most of us, a very common goal is to have lean, tight, toned muscles. I mean, who wouldn’t want that? However, there is a universal confusion about how we achieve this desired look.
Let’s say, for example, our arms were a little saggier than we may like, and we finally say, “Enough’s enough; I’m ready to say goodbye to these bingo wings once and for all”. We would probably get a set of the tiniest dumbbells we could find, as we don’t want to get too “bulky” and do hundreds of reps of arm exercises, as this is surely what will “tone” the arms.
Now, here’s the thing, and this may come as a bit of a shock to some of you, so brace yourself… YOU. CANNOT. TONE. A. MUSCLE. You can build muscle. But toning a muscle is not a thing. And what we also can’t do is target specific areas of your body to make them more toned.
That’s right, squats won’t tone the legs, curls won’t tone the arms, and crunches won’t tone the abs.
So what’s the answer? How do we tone up, then? The good news is, it’s actually pretty simple.
Nine times out of ten. In fact, more accurately, ten times out of ten, if we want to tone up, what we REALLY need is fat loss. If we lose body fat, we will be leaner and, therefore, have a toned appearance, aka “toned up”.
Combine this with a well-balanced resistance training programme, but NOT with light weights and hundreds of reps, with heavy enough weights to challenge your muscles between around 8 and 15 reps using a good, controlled technique, and voila, this is the recipe for toning up.
And don’t worry, you will NOT become too bulky.
Take this from someone who has committed for the best part of three decades to build muscle (jeez, I sound ancient), at times obsessed over it, and I am moderately muscular (and that’s being generous) – I’m certainly not bulky.
So, the weights help you maintain and maybe build some muscle, and the fat loss exposes your newly toned physique.
The answer to healthy fat loss is not to aggressively cut calories and starve yourself; it’s to eat conservatively in a calorie deficit, so here’s my favourite calculator to see how many calories you need to consume:
tdeecalculator.net