How To Tone Your Muscles
Male or female, I guess it’s everyone’s dream to have tight, solid, toned physiques. If you’ve ever wanted to know how to tone your muscles to achieve such a body, then this article will explain just what you need to do.
But first…
It’s for your own good, and your success that I quickly explain to you that muscle toning, in and of itself, doesn’t exist, and is a physical impossibility. You can’t tone anything… not fat, not fat into muscle, and not muscle itself. And it’s important you know this before you waste your time and effort trying the garbage routines doled out in glossy magazines and so forth, and I’ll explain why.
The look you are trying to achieve, often described as the ‘toned’ look, is nothing more than low body fat, and maybe a little extra muscular development.
Let us take Bruce Lee for instance. Now, his body would be the ultimate ‘toned’ body. He could never be described as big, but what muscle he had, was absolutely visible; his body looked hard.
How to achieve the ‘muscle toning’ effect:
If you wish to achieve such a look, you’ll need to lose fat. This is the most important thing you need to do; the only thing. It doesn’t matter if you have huge amounts of muscle; you’ll never look ‘toned’ or ‘hard bodied’ unless you lose that fat.
Although in rare instances it can vary, the average person maintains their current body size by consuming around 15 – 20 calories per lb of body weight they carry. So, to work out your ‘calorie maintenance level’, you should weigh yourself in lbs, then multiply by 15.
Now, you need to consistently eat a set amount of less calories, every day. How much less? Until you start losing fat. For how long? Until you stop losing fat; then re-adjust. (When I say eating less every day, what I mean is, for the first week or two – or however long it works for you – if your maintenance level is 3,000 calories, you should shoot for maybe 2,500 or 2,000 calories daily.)
You can count calories as you go along, if you aren’t one for strict, set diet plans, but, you’ll make your life far easier if you stick to a set diet plan. You can pretty much eat anything you want to make those calories up, but, it’s important that you keep your protein levels fairly high – around 1 gram of protein per lb of body weight – and stay clear of simply carbs such as sugar, at all costs.
But that’s not all: It would be a very rare thing for an adult to be able to get body fat levels so low simply from cutting down the amount of calories they eat. Chances are, you’ll need to do some exercise, too.
Now, I can unequivocally state that, by performing high intensity weight lifting, you will lose fat like never before by forcing your metabolism into overdrive. High intensity simply means, maximal effort, and keeping you rest breaks in between sets and exercises short, and your overall session short.
Weight lifting not only helps to burn calories, but it puts your metabolism into a heightened state, giving it the opportunity to burn stored fat and consumed calories much quicker. Also, it’ll help you to retain muscle mass during your fat loss phase.
As a side note to weight training, you should know it’s impossible to lose fat and build muscle at the same time. Muscle building requires more calories than maintenance level, and fat loss requires less calories than maintenance; you can’t have both at the same time. It’s one or the other.
Alternatively, you can simply do high intensity cardio, such as rowing or cycling, for 15-30 minutes, several times a week, which is also an excellent way to get rid of fat quickly by burning calories and raising metabolism.
You will lose some muscle size whilst losing fat; it’s inevitable. However, if after completing your fat loss, you wish to gain more muscle, you can do so by partaking in a steady weight lifting regime aimed at building muscle mass – by eating slightly more calories than your maintenance level to produce steady muscle gains, whilst monitoring fat levels.
Obviously, you will put fat on by building muscle, but providing it’s kept to a minimal by counting the calories and being strict, you’ll find you can achieve a balance whereby you can keep what muscle mass you’ve just gained, and dropping whatever fat you’ve gained. It’s all about careful balancing and adjustment.
Throughout your dieting, you should always check your body fat levels with callipers. Forget what you are seeing on the scales, it’s what the callipers say about your levels of body fat that count!
So, good luck with this, I hope all goes well for you.
