When we talk about toning, people generally always think about the mere fact of defining the muscles, something that is achieved by eliminating existing body fat until reaching a low fat percentage, combined with prior muscle hypertrophy.
The problem is that everyone thinks, starting from a very low initial base, that when we go to the gym for the first time (whether overweight or underweight) we can tone (create "clean" muscle or build muscle while losing fat), and this is not that simple.
Achieving muscle toning, as we can deduce from the previous two paragraphs, is composed of two totally opposing phases. One muscle hypertrophy phase in which we will increase our muscle mass and another fat loss phase.
Therefore, we could say that the action of toning as such does not exist. Except for beginners who start with some overweight, cases in which, during the first months at the gym, they are able to lose fat while gaining a little muscle mass, the rest of the people will have to do phases.
Depending on how rushed we are, we can do small phases that produce small changes over time, or large phases like bodybuilders do, it depends on each person's preferences.
Keys to achieving good muscle toning
When we go to a gym, generally if the trainer does not feel like explaining the complexity of the human body to new girls and boys who join the gym, they tend to offer their clients a series of toning routines, which usually consist of doing many exercises with little weight, at high repetitions and also complementing that training with cardiovascular exercise. As you can understand, this is not the right way, we could say that to tone our body we need to follow the steps I describe below:
- If we are overweight: if we start from an overweight or obesity situation, the first step is to go through a phase in which we eliminate a large part of our body fat. This phase should not consist of countless hours of cardiovascular exercise, but rather should be made up of intense and well-planned strength training exercises, accompanied by a hypocaloric diet. Cardiovascular exercise can help speed up this phase, but it is not strictly necessary in all cases.
- If we are thin: another case may be that we start from a situation where we are thin but have some flabbiness. In this case, we could say we have a weight below normal, but we do not have a muscular and toned figure, and also have some fat. In these cases, what we should do is start training strength and hypertrophy routines, trying to maintain a moderate caloric surplus. Since if we are beginners, we will not need a large caloric surplus to start seeing benefits, because the intensity of our training will not be very high until we properly control the exercise technique.
- For women: generally women think that by lifting a dumbbell over 5kg they will create the body of a real bodybuilder, and this is not the case. If our goal is to generate "muscle tone" and you just started going to the gym, we start from practically zero, so the work you should do is exactly the same: intense weight training followed by either a hypo- or hypercaloric diet, depending on whether you first need to do a fat-burning phase or directly start creating muscle mass.
- Don’t overdo cardiovascular exercise: if we overdo very intense and prolonged cardiovascular exercise, what we will achieve is to lose a large part of the muscle mass we need to look toned. Just apply logic: what kind of body does a marathon runner have? And a sprinter? Exactly, marathon runners usually have very lean and fibrous bodies but with little muscle mass, while sprinters generally have good muscle tone.
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