The Muscle Toning Myth II

Author: Roger Almeida | 09/06/2008 | Fat Loss, Fitness, Muscle Building

Everybody wanna be a bodybuilder, but don’t nobody wanna lift no heavy ass weight!”
-Ronnie Coleman, 8-time Mr. Olympia

Tommy wrote a good piece on the myth of toning. I wanted to write one myself since I once fell victim to this popular misnomer. There is considerable amount of ignorance surrounding this concept of toning. I don’t blame you. The fitness industry has standardized the word “toning” to be synonymous with spot reduction—yet another myth.

Spot reduction is the notion that if you work out a specific muscle, you will decrease the amount of fat only in that particular muscle, or “tone” that muscle. It sounds ridiculous, but the majority of people still believe this.

Let’s begin with toning. The real definition of muscle tone is the sustained partial contraction of your relaxed muscles. In other words, it is a measure of muscle functionality. Most people understand toning as changing the structure of a particular area in your body. There are only 4 ways I can think of that will accomplish this: gaining fat, losing fat, gaining muscle, losing muscle. Most people who tone mean they want to build muscle while losing fat.

Rule #1: You cannot alter the shape your muscle takes as you build more muscle. In other words, you cannot alter your genetic disposition. You can only change the perceived shape of your muscles by either losing or gaining body fat.

This brings us to Rule #2: You cannot lose body fat in one particular area in your body. Doing 500 crunches a day won’t get you a flat stomach and washboard abs unless you lose overall body fat of course. When you gain or lose fat, it tends to occur almost proportionally throughout your body. The reason I say almost is because not everyone is the same. Some have trouble losing fat in particular regions such as the chest, the abdominals, and the gluteus. It is simply due to a genetic selective pattern rather than spot reduction.

Guys who go to the gym and do crunches to lose their gut must understand that they have to lose overall body fat and it will tend to occur proportionately. Same thing goes for girls who go to the gym and want to lose fat under their arms or in their butt and thighs. While doing tricep extensions and thigh abductor exercises certainly don’t hurt, it’s not the only or most important thing that will give you a more “toned” look.

It’s better to think in terms of overall muscle growth and overall body fat loss. Muscle growth is crucial for those with this toning goal for 2 reasons. One is that having more muscle indirectly increases your basal metabolic rate. Some studies indicate that a pound of muscle burns about 50 calories a day while a pound of fat burns only 10. While these figures are questionable in other research studies, it’s still conventional wisdom that muscle burns more calories than fat.

Furthermore, other than having little impact on muscle development, light-weight and high-repetition toning work outs have only a minor impact on your post-workout metabolic rate compared to higher intensity workouts. This is simply because you will manipulate more hormone release. Higher intensity workouts will most likely also burn more calories for you directly. One reason is because higher intensity workouts are usually coupled with compound movements, which obviously take a greater toll on your body than simple isolation movements. What do you think burns more calories: 50 repetitions of light-weight bicep curls or 5 repetitions of heavy dead lifts? I’m willing to bet dead lifts would win. Another reason is that people who perform light-weight, high-repetition workouts usually don’t lift to failure, which is a crucial component to resistance training. You don’t pick up a random weight and decide to do 3 sets of 8 and stop at the 8^th repetition on every set. You pick the weight so that on every set, the 8^th repetition is almost impossible. This is just an example. Same thing goes for most other resistance training programs.

Here comes the I-don’t-wanna-lift-heavy-because-I-don’t-wanna-look-bulky posse. Listen, I’m just trying to help you achieve your goals faster. I’m just going to simply explain why lifting heavy weights is not necessarily going to give you a “bulky” look. First is testosterone (assuming mostly females are worried about this phenomenon). Testosterone is the most important muscle-building hormone in your body. Men have this abundantly and women don’t, so it is far easier for men to build muscle. Second, as Tommy mentioned before, it takes years of dedication to have that full-fledged, bodybuilder-type body you see in those fitness magazines. You might even offend some fitness models if you think you’re going to go to the gym and automatically get big if you lift heavy weights. It would be a dream come true if that were to happen.

So next time you go to the gym and decide you want to tone your arms and decide to do bicep curls and tricep extensions mindlessly for 30 minutes, think about how much faster you could achieve your goals if you has a proper weight training regimen.

First, high repetitions are really not as effective as heavy-weight, low-repetition workouts unless you do them correctly, which most people don’t. Repetitions should not go any higher than 15. Any higher and not enough muscle fibers are recruited to innervate increasing levels of anabolic hormones that will make your muscles develop. Also, higher repetition workouts mainly recruit your slow-twitch muscle fibers, which are great for your endurance, but not great for achieving hypertrophy.

Second compound exercises should really be your priority if you’re looking to make a real change in your physique. I’m not saying isolation exercises should be completed removed from your program. I’m saying you should think of them as a supplement to your main program for making minor tweaks. There are a number of reasons why compound exercises will benefit you more. I will discuss a couple. First, far more muscle fibers are recruited from compound exercises. This is obvious. But more muscle fibers being recruited means more hormone stimulation, which is a good thing. Second, you spend less time in the gym. You can pretty much have a full body workout and distress your central nervous system enough to achieve great results with 3 to 6 compound exercises. The same can’t be said for isolation exercises.

I hope I even somewhat enlightened some people regarding this toning and spot reduction myth. I’m not saying that everyone should be doing the same program. Certain programs work best for only certain people. But doing 20 repetitions of anything is certainly not going to give you the results you want.

By Roger Almeida