If I had a dollar for every time I heard somebody say to me that they just wanted to ‘tone their muscles’, I would be rolling in a pool of gold coins. Ha!
The truth of the matter is, ‘toning’ is merely a myth. A word created by the social media in order to sell their useless ab crunching, butt firming, fat burning systems, and the annoying thing? People eat that shit up!
What the media has told us today is that toning your body is to become leaner and more defined by lifting weights in a certain way – that is, with high reps and a lower weight. I mean, sure it could eventually work.. but the truth is, doing less reps with near to maximum weight does the exact same thing but in less time and guarantees better results. Mind blown? Let me continue.
The practice of ‘toning’ your body is to do things like dumbbell shoulder press with 1kg weights for 20+ reps which kicks into your lactate and aerobic energy systems, making the exercise more cardio than strength based. This means that.. yeah! you’re burning calories and as a result, will look leaner for it, but in the long run, it’s going to take you a hell of a lot longer to build up some muscle definition if you’re sticking to fairy weights. And if i’m not mistaken, the purpose of ‘toning’ is to look leaner and more defined, am I right? .. Think about it. 🙂
To be leaner, one has to stick to a clean and balanced diet as well as have a good balance between strength and cardio based exercise. Like I’ve said in previous posts, the best way to burn off those extra calories is to lift weights ’til fail because it causes your muscle fibres to tear, speeding up your metabolic rate and ultimately, continuing to burn off those calories at rest in order to repair your muscles for the next time!
This is not to say that spending 5 days of your week running on a treadmill won’t guarantee results (because you’ll have some killer pins!) but how about the rest of your body?
I’ve had countless conversations with girls telling me about how they want to lose all the weight they need to (by only doing cardio) before they start lifting weights because they don’t want to look bulky like me, which I find particularly amusing! 🙂
I try to encourage as many people to lift weights over cardio as I can. Why? Because if you want to look like all of those girls in the magazines with ‘toned’ bodies, the truth is that they all lift weights (and not the fairy weights I was talking about).
So basically, all I’m saying is screw what the media says you need to buy. Screw those weight loss tablets, meal replacement supplements and ab crunching systems.
Just lift.
xx Moneta.
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