What Does It Really Mean to “tone” Your Muscles
The word “toning” is something of a joke in many fitness circles because the word is used when people mean other things. Sometimes it’s a code word for being lean, like when someone can promise you that a workout will tone your muscles instead of making you bulky. Other times it’s a money-making gambit, like when someone says you can do their toning exercises at home rather than buying dumbbells or a gym membership instead.
To the extent that the word means anything, we talked about it a bit when we discussed the fear of becoming unwieldy . Being “toned” usually means having a certain amount of musculature, but also the ability to see your body as feminine or thin.
What happens when you work a muscle?
When you ask your muscles to do something, they get better at it. While entire dissertations have been written about what exactly happens inside your muscle cells when you exercise, how we change our muscles when we lift weights basically falls into two categories:
- You make better use of that muscle (neuromuscular adaptation).
- The muscle becomes larger (hypertrophy)
Of the two, only the second (the muscle increases) has a visual impact. Both of these affect how strong you are, or in other words, what you can do with that muscle. Getting stronger and getting bigger go together: you can try to prioritize one of the two, but strength training will lead to bigger muscles as a side effect, and training big muscles is next to impossible without getting stronger.
Now, the human body is complex, so of course, not only two things happen. But these are the main ones. Other things that happen, albeit less noticeable:
- Your muscles contract better repeatedly (muscle endurance)
- You burn calories while exercising
These features are not exclusive to strength training. You burn calories and build endurance with cardio like running.
The last two points have no visible effect on your body. You can’t tell how good someone’s stamina is by looking at them. Theoretically , burning calories can lead to fat loss or even muscle loss, but it also depends on how many calories you consume. Exercise alone does not change the amount of fat in your body.
So, how do I get that “tight” look?
When we look at the visible changes we can make to our body through exercise, we can really only control two things:
- We can increase certain muscles through resistance training (such as weight lifting).
- We can consume fewer calories than we burn and also train with weights to preserve muscle; it makes us lose fat all over the body.
Note that you can target which muscles you want to increase, but there is no way to lose fat on a specific body part. The distribution of fat is not really under our control, so you can’t achieve a flat stomach or slender hips or anything like that. You can train your muscles to make them bigger and eat in a calorie deficit to shrink your whole body and see what happens.
To answer a few other questions that are discussed along with toning, you can’t build “long, lean muscle” on purpose. Lean body refers to the absence of fat, so if you want to look slim, you need to get rid of fat.
And you cannot control the length of the muscle: it is attached to your bones. How would it get longer? Sometimes people mean that they don’t want their muscles to look round or their biceps to have no peak, but that’s also out of our control. Your attachment points and the length of your tendons compared to the contractile part of your muscles is what you are born with.
What is a “toning” workout?
Based on what we know so far, you would expect that if you want your muscles to look leaner, you need to lift weights and watch your diet. (You would also be smart to do some cardio, which is good for your health and won’t kill your gains ).
So what’s up with all those “tonic” workouts then? Isn’t there a “toning” rep range? Don’t you need lighter weights for “toning” than for pumping up? What gives? Well, I hate to disappoint you, but this is all the bullshit people say to sell things .
Here’s the truth about rep range: anything around 15 reps is good enough to grow your muscles and make you stronger . Anything under 30 reps can still build your muscles if you take the lift to failure (i.e. by 30 reps your muscles are on fire and you literally can’t do another rep). Beyond that – or if you’re doing a high-rep set but dropping the dumbbells before you hit failure – you’re not doing much to increase your muscle size or strength. You are still working on stamina, but stamina won’t change the look of your body much.
What about your scales? Well, in order to reach your desired rep range, you need to lift a weight that is “heavy” for you . Maybe you’re new to this and five pounds is a really hard curl. Ideal! This is your “heavy” at the moment. As you get stronger, you will need heavier weights. (However, keep in mind that different exercises target different muscle groups. Someone who uses a five-pound weight for arm curls will need a heavier weight for goblet squats .)
If your muscle-building exercises don’t use weights, the same principles apply. If you find it difficult to do 10 air squats, then air squats will help you pump up the muscles in your legs and buttocks. But if you can do 50, you either need to add weight or find another exercise without equipment that is challenging enough.
“Tonic” workouts to avoid
If you are determined to tone yourself up, the muscle training you need to do is no different than what a person would do to get bulky. The difference is that pumping requires a lot of food (these muscles have to come from somewhere) and a lot of time. Even if you spend all your time in the gym, you won’t come out looking like the Hulk at the end of the year. This is bad news for those who want to look like the Hulk, and good news for those who don’t.
So you need to do regular strength training. With that in mind, let’s take a look at a couple of workouts that are marketed as “toning”:
HIIT workouts . True HIIT workouts improve your aerobic capacity (making you a faster runner, for example), but they don’t have much of a calorie-burning or muscle-building benefit. Many of the popular ones aren’t even real HIIT , they’re just circuit workouts.
Circuit training : Performing a series of different exercises with little to no rest and then repeating this series is called circuit training. It’s a mix of strength and cardio, making it a good choice if you don’t have time for two separate workouts. Crossfit WODs (workouts of the day) also fall into this category. You will probably get better results if you separate your strength and cardio components, but if you enjoy circuit training, it will do the job.
High rep exercises without weights or with light weights . Many band and weighted ankle exercises fall into this category. If they’re heavy enough to be considered strength training, great! But most are not, especially if you are no longer a beginner. At this point, they are simply training endurance without actually building muscle mass. If you like them or if stamina is important to you, enjoy. But they are not going to “tint” you at all.